Abstract: We present a non standard Euclidean vehicle
routing problem adding a level of clustering, and we revisit the use
of self-organizing maps as a tool which naturally handles such
problems. We present how they can be used as a main operator
into an evolutionary algorithm to address two conflicting
objectives of route length and distance from customers to bus stops
minimization and to deal with capacity constraints. We apply the
approach to a real-life case of combined clustering and vehicle
routing for the transportation of the 780 employees of an
enterprise. Basing upon a geographic information system we
discuss the influence of road infrastructures on the solutions
generated.
Abstract: The intelligent fuzzy input estimator is used to estimate
the input force of the rigid bar structural system in this study. The
fuzzy Kalman filter without the input term and the fuzzy weighting
recursive least square estimator are two main portions of this method.
The practicability and accuracy of the proposed method were verified
with numerical simulations from which the input forces of a rigid bar
structural system were estimated from the output responses. In order to
examine the accuracy of the proposed method, a rigid bar structural
system is subjected to periodic sinusoidal dynamic loading. The
excellent performance of this estimator is demonstrated by comparing
it with the use of difference weighting function and improper the
initial process noise covariance. The estimated results have a good
agreement with the true values in all cases tested.
Abstract: This paper presents dynamic voltage collapse prediction on an actual power system using support vector machines.
Dynamic voltage collapse prediction is first determined based on the PTSI calculated from information in dynamic simulation output. Simulations were carried out on a practical 87 bus test system by considering load increase as the contingency. The data collected from the time domain simulation is then used as input to the SVM in which support vector regression is used as a predictor to determine the
dynamic voltage collapse indices of the power system. To reduce training time and improve accuracy of the SVM, the Kernel function type and Kernel parameter are considered. To verify the
effectiveness of the proposed SVM method, its performance is compared with the multi layer perceptron neural network (MLPNN). Studies show that the SVM gives faster and more accurate results for dynamic voltage collapse prediction compared with the MLPNN.
Abstract: Saffron (Crocus sativus) is cultivated as spices,
medicinal and aromatic plant species. At autumn season, heavy
rainfall can cause flooding stress and inhibits growth of saffron. Thus
this research was conducted to study the effect of silver ion (as an
ethylene inhibitor) on growth of saffron under flooding conditions.
The corms of saffron were soaked with one concentration of nano
silver (0, 40, 80 or 120 ppm) and then planting under flooding stress
or non flooding stress conditions. Results showed that number of
roots, root length, root fresh and dry weight, leaves fresh and dry
weight were reduced by 10 day flooding stress. Soaking saffron
corms with 40 or 80 ppm concentration of nano silver rewarded the
effect of flooding stress on the root number, by increasing it.
Furthermore, 40 ppm of nano silver increased root length in stress.
Nano silver 80 ppm in flooding stress, increased leaves dry weight.
Abstract: Proteomics is one of the largest areas of research for
bioinformatics and medical science. An ambitious goal of proteomics
is to elucidate the structure, interactions and functions of all proteins
within cells and organisms. Predicting Protein-Protein Interaction
(PPI) is one of the crucial and decisive problems in current research.
Genomic data offer a great opportunity and at the same time a lot of
challenges for the identification of these interactions. Many methods
have already been proposed in this regard. In case of in-silico
identification, most of the methods require both positive and negative
examples of protein interaction and the perfection of these examples
are very much crucial for the final prediction accuracy. Positive
examples are relatively easy to obtain from well known databases. But
the generation of negative examples is not a trivial task. Current PPI
identification methods generate negative examples based on some
assumptions, which are likely to affect their prediction accuracy.
Hence, if more reliable negative examples are used, the PPI prediction
methods may achieve even more accuracy. Focusing on this issue, a
graph based negative example generation method is proposed, which
is simple and more accurate than the existing approaches. An
interaction graph of the protein sequences is created. The basic
assumption is that the longer the shortest path between two
protein-sequences in the interaction graph, the less is the possibility of
their interaction. A well established PPI detection algorithm is
employed with our negative examples and in most cases it increases
the accuracy more than 10% in comparison with the negative pair
selection method in that paper.
Abstract: In this paper, Optimum adaptive loading algorithms
are applied to multicarrier system with Space-Time Block Coding
(STBC) scheme associated with space-time processing based on
singular-value decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix over
Rayleigh fading channels. SVD method has been employed in
MIMO-OFDM system in order to overcome subchannel interference.
Chaw-s and Compello-s algorithms have been implemented to obtain
a bit and power allocation for each subcarrier assuming instantaneous
channel knowledge. The adaptive loaded SVD-STBC scheme is
capable of providing both full-rate and full-diversity for any number
of transmit antennas. The effectiveness of these techniques has
demonstrated through the simulation of an Adaptive loaded SVDSTBC
system, and the comparison shown that the proposed
algorithms ensure better performance in the case of MIMO.
Abstract: An n×n matrix is called an N1 0 -matrix if all principal minors are non-positive and each entry is non-positive. In this paper, we study the partial non-combinatorially symmetric N1 0 -matrix completion problems if the graph of its specified entries is a transitive tournament or a double cycle. In general, these digraphs do not have N1 0 -completion. Therefore, we have given sufficient conditions that guarantee the existence of the N1 0 -completion for these digraphs.
Abstract: The paper considers a novel modular and intrinsically safe redundant robotic system with biologically inspired actuators (pneumatic artificial muscles and rubber bellows actuators). Similarly to the biological systems, the stiffness of the internal parallel modules, representing 2 DOF joints in the serial robotic chains, is controlled by co-activation of opposing redundant actuator groups in the null-space of the module Jacobian, without influencing the actual robot position. The decoupled position/stiffness control allows the realization of variable joint stiffness according to different force-displacement relationships. The variable joint stiffness, as well as limited pneumatic muscle/bellows force ability, ensures internal system safety that is crucial for development of human-friendly robots intended for human-robot collaboration. The initial experiments with the system prototype demonstrate the capabilities of independently, simultaneously controlling both joint (Cartesian) motion and joint stiffness. The paper also presents the possible industrial applications of snake-like robots built using the new modules.
Abstract: An important step in three-dimensional reconstruction
and computer vision is camera calibration, whose objective is to
estimate the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera. In this
paper, two linear methods based on the different planes are given. In
both methods, the general plane is used to replace the calibration
object with very good precision. In the first method, after controlling
the camera to undergo five times- translation movements and taking
pictures of the orthogonal planes, a set of linear constraints of the
camera intrinsic parameters is then derived by means of homography
matrix. The second method is to get all camera parameters by taking
only one picture of a given radius circle. experiments on simulated
data and real images,indicate that our method is reasonable and is a
good supplement to camera calibration.
Abstract: In this paper, a robust watermarking algorithm using
the wavelet transform and edge detection is presented. The efficiency
of an image watermarking technique depends on the preservation of
visually significant information. This is attained by embedding the
watermark transparently with the maximum possible strength. The
watermark embedding process is carried over the subband
coefficients that lie on edges, where distortions are less noticeable,
with a subband level dependent strength. Also, the watermark is
embedded to selected coefficients around edges, using a different
scale factor for watermark strength, that are captured by a
morphological dilation operation. The experimental evaluation of the
proposed method shows very good results in terms of robustness and
transparency to various attacks such as median filtering, Gaussian
noise, JPEG compression and geometrical transformations.
Abstract: Trihalogenmethanes are the most significant byproducts of the reaction of disinfection agent with organic precursors naturally present in ground and surface waters.Their incidence negatively affects the quality of drinking water in relation to their nephrotoxic, hepatotoxic and genotoxic effects on human health. Taking into consideration the considerable volatility of monitored contaminants it could be assumed that their incidence in drinking water would depend on the distance of sampling from the area of disinfection. Based on the concentration of trihalogenmethanes determined with the help of gas chromatography with mass detector and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) such dependence has been proved as statistically significant. The acquired outcomes will be used for assessing the non-carcinogenic and genotoxic risks to consumers.
Abstract: This paper presents the results of a preventive maintenance application-based study and modeling of failure rates in breakers of electrical distribution systems. This is a critical issue in the reliability assessment of a system. In the analysis conducted in this paper, the impacts of failure rate variations caused by a preventive maintenance are examined. This is considered as a part of a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) application program. A number of load point reliability indices is derived using the mathematical model of the failure rate, which is established using the observed data in a distribution system.
Abstract: Following the laser ablation studies leading to a
theory of nuclei confinement by a Debye layer mechanism, we
present here numerical evaluations for the known stable nuclei where
the Coulomb repulsion is included as a rather minor component
especially for lager nuclei. In this research paper the required
physical conditions for the formation and stability of nuclei
particularly endothermic nuclei with mass number greater than to
which is an open astrophysical question have been investigated.
Using the Debye layer mechanism, nuclear surface energy, Fermi
energy and coulomb repulsion energy it is possible to find conditions
under which the process of nucleation is permitted in early universe.
Our numerical calculations indicate that about 200 second after the
big bang at temperature of about 100 KeV and subrelativistic region
with nucleon density nearly equal to normal nuclear density namely,
10cm all endothermic and exothermic nuclei have been
formed.
Abstract: A method based on the power series solution is proposed to solve the natural frequency of flapping vibration for the rotating inclined Euler beam with constant angular velocity. The vibration of the rotating beam is measured from the position of the corresponding steady state axial deformation. In this paper the governing equations for linear vibration of a rotating Euler beam are derived by the d'Alembert principle, the virtual work principle and the consistent linearization of the fully geometrically nonlinear beam theory in a rotating coordinate system. The governing equation for flapping vibration of the rotating inclined Euler beam is linear ordinary differential equation with variable coefficients and is solved by a power series with four independent coefficients. Substituting the power series solution into the corresponding boundary conditions at two end nodes of the rotating beam, a set of homogeneous equations can be obtained. The natural frequencies may be determined by solving the homogeneous equations using the bisection method. Numerical examples are studied to investigate the effect of inclination angle on the natural frequency of flapping vibration for rotating inclined Euler beams with different angular velocity and slenderness ratio.
Abstract: This paper introduces a new method called ARPDC (Advanced Robust Parallel Distributed Compensation) for automatic control of nonlinear systems. This method improves a quality of robust control by interpolating of robust and optimal controller. The weight of each controller is determined by an original criteria function for model validity and disturbance appreciation. ARPDC method is based on nonlinear Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems and Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) control scheme. The relaxed stability conditions of ARPDC control of nominal system have been derived. The advantages of presented method are demonstrated on the inverse pendulum benchmark problem. From comparison between three different controllers (robust, optimal and ARPDC) follows, that ARPDC control is almost optimal with the robustness close to the robust controller. The results indicate that ARPDC algorithm can be a good alternative not only for a robust control, but in some cases also to an adaptive control of nonlinear systems.
Abstract: A Matlab based software for logistic regression is developed to enhance the process of teaching quantitative topics and assist researchers with analyzing wide area of applications where categorical data is involved. The software offers an option of performing stepwise logistic regression to select the most significant predictors. The software includes a feature to detect influential observations in data, and investigates the effect of dropping or misclassifying an observation on a predictor variable. The input data may consist either as a set of individual responses (yes/no) with the predictor variables or as grouped records summarizing various categories for each unique set of predictor variables' values. Graphical displays are used to output various statistical results and to assess the goodness of fit of the logistic regression model. The software recognizes possible convergence constraints when present in data, and the user is notified accordingly.
Abstract: Among various HLM techniques, the Multivariate Hierarchical Linear Model (MHLM) is desirable to use, particularly when multivariate criterion variables are collected and the covariance structure has information valuable for data analysis. In order to reflect prior information or to obtain stable results when the sample size and the number of groups are not sufficiently large, the Bayes method has often been employed in hierarchical data analysis. In these cases, although the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is a rather powerful tool for parameter estimation, Procedures regarding MCMC have not been formulated for MHLM. For this reason, this research presents concrete procedures for parameter estimation through the use of the Gibbs samplers. Lastly, several future topics for the use of MCMC approach for HLM is discussed.
Abstract: This paper studies the application of a variety of
sawdust materials in the production of lightweight insulating bricks.
First, the mineralogical and chemical composition of clays was determined. Next, ceramic bricks were fabricated with different
quantities of materials (3–6 and 9 wt. % for sawdust, 65 wt. % for grey clay, 24–27 and 30 wt. % for yellow clay and 2 wt% of tuff).
These bricks were fired at 800 and 950 °C. The effect of adding this sawdust on the technological behaviour of the brick was assessed by
drying and firing shrinkage, water absorption, porosity, bulk density
and compressive strength. The results have shown that the optimum
sintering temperature is 950 °C. Below this temperature, at 950 °C,
increased open porosity was observed, which decreased the compressive strength of the bricks. Based on the results obtained, the
optimum amounts of waste were 9 wt. % sawdust of eucalyptus, 24 wt. % shaping moisture and 1.6 particle size diameter. These percentages produced bricks whose mechanical properties were
suitable for use as secondary raw materials in ceramic brick
production.
Abstract: Safety Health and Environment Code of Practice (SHE
COP) was developed to help road transportation operators to manage
its operation in a systematic and safe manner. A study was conducted
to determine the effectiveness of SHE COP implementation during
non-OPS period. The objective of the study is to evaluate the
implementations of SHE COP among bus operators during wee hour
operations. The data was collected by completing a set of checklist
after observing the activities during pre departure, during the trip, and
upon arrival. The results show that there are seven widely practiced
SHE COP elements. 22% of the buses have average speed exceeding
the maximum permissible speed on the highways (90 km/h), with
13% of the buses were travelling at the speed of more than 100 km/h.
The statistical analysis shows that there is only one significant
association which relates speeding with prior presence of
enforcement officers.
Abstract: Turbulent forced convection flow in a 2-dimensional channel over periodic grooves is numerically investigated. Finite volume method is used to study the effect of turbulence model. The range of Reynolds number varied from 10000 to 30000 for the ribheight to channel-height ratio (B/H) of 2. The downstream wall is heated by a uniform heat flux while the upstream wall is insulated. The investigation is analyzed with different types of nanoparticles such as SiO2, Al2O3, and ZnO, with water as a base fluid are used. The volume fraction is varied from 1% to 4% and the nanoparticle diameter is utilized between 20nm to 50nm. The results revealed 114% heat transfer enhancement compared to the water in a grooved channel by using SiO2 nanoparticle with volume fraction and nanoparticle diameter of 4% and 20nm respectively.