Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an established control
technique in a wide range of process industries. The reason for
this success is its ability to handle multivariable systems and systems
having input, output or state constraints. Neverthless comparing to
PID controller, the implementation of the MPC in miniaturized
devices like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and microcontrollers
has historically been very small scale due to its complexity in
implementation and its computation time requirement. At the same
time, such embedded technologies have become an enabler for future
manufacturing enterprisers as well as a transformer of organizations
and markets. In this work, we take advantage of these recent advances
in this area in the deployment of one of the most studied and applied
control technique in the industrial engineering. In this paper, we
propose an efficient firmware for the implementation of constrained
MPC in the performed STM32 microcontroller using interior point
method. Indeed, performances study shows good execution speed
and low computational burden. These results encourage to develop
predictive control algorithms to be programmed in industrial standard
processes. The PID anti windup controller was also implemented in
the STM32 in order to make a performance comparison with the
MPC. The main features of the proposed constrained MPC framework
are illustrated through two examples.
Abstract: In the present era of aviation technology, autonomous navigation and control have emerged as a prime area of active research. Owing to the tremendous developments in the field, autonomous controls have led today’s engineers to claim that future of aerospace vehicle is unmanned. Development of guidance and navigation algorithms for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an extremely challenging task, which requires efforts to meet strict, and at times, conflicting goals of guidance and control. In this paper, aircraft altitude and heading controllers and an efficient algorithm for self-governing navigation using MATLAB® mapping toolbox is presented which also enables loitering of a fixed wing UAV over a specified area. For this purpose, a nonlinear mathematical model of a UAV is used. The nonlinear model is linearized around a stable trim point and decoupled for controller design. The linear controllers are tested on the nonlinear aircraft model and navigation algorithm is subsequently developed for for autonomous flight of the UAV. The results are presented for trajectory controllers and waypoint based navigation. Our investigation reveals that MATLAB® mapping toolbox can be exploited to successfully deliver an efficient algorithm for autonomous aerial navigation for a UAV.
Abstract: Basel III (or the Third Basel Accord) is a global
regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and
market liquidity risk agreed upon by the members of the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010-2011, and scheduled to
be introduced from 2013 until 2018. Basel III is a comprehensive set
of reform measures. These measures aim to; (1) improve the banking
sector-s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic
stress, whatever the source, (2) improve risk management and
governance, (3) strengthen banks- transparency and disclosures.
Similarly the reform target; (1) bank level or micro-prudential,
regulation, which will help raise the resilience of individual banking
institutions to periods of stress. (2) Macro-prudential regulations,
system wide risk that can build up across the banking sector as well
as the pro-cyclical implication of these risks over time. These two
approaches to supervision are complementary as greater resilience at
the individual bank level reduces the risk system wide shocks.
Macroeconomic impact of Basel III; OECD estimates that the
medium-term impact of Basel III implementation on GDP growth is
in the range -0,05 percent to -0,15 percent per year. On the other hand
economic output is mainly affected by an increase in bank lending
spreads as banks pass a rise in banking funding costs, due to higher
capital requirements, to their customers. Consequently the estimated
effects on GDP growth assume no active response from monetary
policy. Basel III impact on economic output could be offset by a
reduction (or delayed increase) in monetary policy rates by about 30
to 80 basis points. The aim of this paper is to create a framework
based on the recent regulations in order to prevent financial crises.
Thus the need to overcome the global financial crisis will contribute
to financial crises that may occur in the future periods. In the first
part of the paper, the effects of the global crisis on the banking
system examine the concept of financial regulations. In the second
part; especially in the financial regulations and Basel III are analyzed.
The last section in this paper explored the possible consequences of
the macroeconomic impacts of Basel III.
Abstract: From ancient times Turkic languages have been in
contact with numerous representatives of different language families.
The article discusses the Turkic - Indian language contact and were
shown promise and necessity of this trend for the Turkic linguistics, were given Turkic - Indian lexical parallels in the framework of the nostratic language's macro family. The research work has done on the base of lexical parallels (LP) -of Turkic (which belong to the Altaic family of languages) and Indian (including Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages).
Abstract: The present investigation is concerned with
sub-impacts taken placed when a rigid hemispherical-head block
transversely impacts against a beam at different locations. Dynamic
substructure technique for elastic-plastic impact is applied to solve
numerically this problem. The time history of impact force and energy
exchange between block and beam are obtained. The process of
sub-impacts is analyzed from the energy exchange point of view. The
results verify the influences of the impact location on impact duration,
the first sub-impact and energy exchange between the beam and the
block.
Abstract: Rapid process of urbanism development has increased
the demand for some infrastructures such as supplying potable water,
electricity network and transportation facilities and etc. Nonefficiency
of the existing system with parallel managements of urban
traffic management has increased the gap between supply and
demand of traffic facilities. A sustainable transport system requires
some activities more important than air pollution control, traffic or
fuel consumption reduction and the studies show that there is no
unique solution for solving complicated transportation problems and
solving such a problem needs a comprehensive, dynamic and reliable
mechanism. Sustainable transport management considers the effects
of transportation development on economic efficiency, environmental
issues, resources consumption, land use and social justice and helps
reduction of environmental effects, increase of transportation system
efficiency as well as improvement of social life and aims to enhance
efficiency, goods transportation, provide services with minimum
access problems that cannot be realized without reorganization of
strategies, policies and plans.
Abstract: This paper presents the use of a newly created network
structure known as a Self-Delaying Dynamic Network (SDN) to
create a high resolution image from a set of time stepped input
frames. These SDNs are non-recurrent temporal neural networks
which can process time sampled data. SDNs can store input data
for a lifecycle and feature dynamic logic based connections between
layers. Several low resolution images and one high resolution image
of a scene were presented to the SDN during training by a Genetic
Algorithm. The SDN was trained to process the input frames in order
to recreate the high resolution image. The trained SDN was then used
to enhance a number of unseen noisy image sets. The quality of high
resolution images produced by the SDN is compared to that of high
resolution images generated using Bi-Cubic interpolation. The SDN
produced images are superior in several ways to the images produced
using Bi-Cubic interpolation.
Abstract: Money laundering has been described by many as the lifeblood of crime and is a major threat to the economic and social well-being of societies. It has been recognized that the banking system has long been the central element of money laundering. This is in part due to the complexity and confidentiality of the banking system itself. It is generally accepted that effective anti-money laundering (AML) measures adopted by banks will make it tougher for criminals to get their "dirty money" into the financial system. In fact, for law enforcement agencies, banks are considered to be an important source of valuable information for the detection of money laundering. However, from the banks- perspective, the main reason for their existence is to make as much profits as possible. Hence their cultural and commercial interests are totally distinct from that of the law enforcement authorities. Undoubtedly, AML laws create a major dilemma for banks as they produce a significant shift in the way banks interact with their customers. Furthermore, the implementation of the laws not only creates significant compliance problems for banks, but also has the potential to adversely affect the operations of banks. As such, it is legitimate to ask whether these laws are effective in preventing money launderers from using banks, or whether they simply put an unreasonable burden on banks and their customers. This paper attempts to address these issues and analyze them against the background of the Malaysian AML laws. It must be said that effective coordination between AML regulator and the banking industry is vital to minimize problems faced by the banks and thereby to ensure effective implementation of the laws in combating money laundering.
Abstract: Multi-energy systems will enhance the system
reliability and power quality. This paper presents an integrated
approach for the design and operation of distributed energy resources
(DER) systems, based on energy hub modeling. A multi-objective
optimization model is developed by considering an integrated view of
electricity and natural gas network to analyze the optimal design and
operating condition of DER systems, by considering two conflicting
objectives, namely, minimization of total cost and the minimization
of environmental impact which is assessed in terms of CO2
emissions. The mathematical model considers energy demands of the
site, local climate data, and utility tariff structure, as well as technical
and financial characteristics of the candidate DER technologies. To
provide energy demands, energy systems including photovoltaic, and
co-generation systems, boiler, central power grid are considered. As
an illustrative example, a hotel in Iran demonstrates potential
applications of the proposed method. The results prove that
increasing the satisfaction degree of environmental objective leads to
increased total cost.
Abstract: The crystalline quality of the AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) structure grown on a 200 mm silicon substrate has been investigated using UV-visible micro- Raman scattering and photoluminescence (PL). The visible Raman scattering probes the whole nitride stack with the Si substrate and shows the presence of a small component of residual in-plane stress in the thick GaN buffer resulting from a wafer bowing, while the UV micro-Raman indicates a tensile interfacial stress induced at the top GaN/AlGaN/AlN layers. PL shows a good crystal quality GaN channel where the yellow band intensity is very low compared to that of the near-band-edge transition. The uniformity of this sample is shown by measurements from several points across the epiwafer.
Abstract: In this empirical research, how marketing managers evaluate their firms- performances and decide to make innovation is examined. They use some standards which are past performance of the firm, target performance of the firm, competitor performance, and average performance of the industry to compare and evaluate the firms- performances. It is hypothesized that marketing managers and owners of the firm compare the firms- current performance with these four standards at the same time to decide when to make innovation relating to any aspects of the firm, either management style or products. Relationship between the comparison of the firm-s performance with these standards and innovation are searched in the same regression model. The results of the regression analysis are discussed and some recommendations are made for future studies and applicants.
Abstract: Embedded systems need to respect stringent real
time constraints. Various hardware components included in such
systems such as cache memories exhibit variability and therefore
affect execution time. Indeed, a cache memory access from an
embedded microprocessor might result in a cache hit where the
data is available or a cache miss and the data need to be fetched
with an additional delay from an external memory. It is therefore
highly desirable to predict future memory accesses during
execution in order to appropriately prefetch data without incurring
delays. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of several artificial
neural networks for the prediction of instruction memory
addresses. Neural network have the potential to tackle the nonlinear
behavior observed in memory accesses during program
execution and their demonstrated numerous hardware
implementation emphasize this choice over traditional forecasting
techniques for their inclusion in embedded systems. However,
embedded applications execute millions of instructions and
therefore millions of addresses to be predicted. This very
challenging problem of neural network based prediction of large
time series is approached in this paper by evaluating various neural
network architectures based on the recurrent neural network
paradigm with pre-processing based on the Self Organizing Map
(SOM) classification technique.
Abstract: Echocardiography imaging is one of the most common diagnostic tests that are widely used for assessing the abnormalities of the regional heart ventricle function. The main goal of the image enhancement task in 2D-echocardiography (2DE) is to solve two major anatomical structure problems; speckle noise and low quality. Therefore, speckle noise reduction is one of the important steps that used as a pre-processing to reduce the distortion effects in 2DE image segmentation. In this paper, we present the common filters that based on some form of low-pass spatial smoothing filters such as Mean, Gaussian, and Median. The Laplacian filter was used as a high-pass sharpening filter. A comparative analysis was presented to test the effectiveness of these filters after being applied to original 2DE images of 4-chamber and 2-chamber views. Three statistical quantity measures: root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-ratio (PSNR) and signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) are used to evaluate the filter performance quantitatively on the output enhanced image.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to improve electromagnetic characteristics on grounding grid by applying the conductive concrete. The conductive concrete in this study is under an extra high voltage (EHV, 345kV) system located in a high-tech industrial park or science park. Instead of surrounding soil of grounding grid, the application of conductive concrete can reduce equipment damage and body damage caused by switching surges. The focus of the two cases on the EHV distribution system in a high-tech industrial park is presented to analyze four soil material styles. By comparing several soil material styles, the study results have shown that the conductive concrete can effectively reduce the negative damages caused by electromagnetic transient. The adoption of the style of grounding grid located 1.0 (m) underground and conductive concrete located from the ground surface to 1.25 (m) underground can obviously improve the electromagnetic characteristics so as to advance protective efficiency.
Abstract: The National Agricultural Biotechnology Information
Center (NABIC) plays a leading role in the biotechnology information
database for agricultural plants in Korea. Since 2002, we have
concentrated on functional genomics of major crops, building an
integrated biotechnology database for agro-biotech information that
focuses on bioinformatics of major agricultural resources such as rice,
Chinese cabbage, and microorganisms. In the NABIC,
integration-based biotechnology database provides useful information
through a user-friendly web interface that allows analysis of genome
infrastructure, multiple plants, microbial resources, and living
modified organisms.
Abstract: In modern human computer interaction systems
(HCI), emotion recognition is becoming an imperative characteristic.
The quest for effective and reliable emotion recognition in HCI has
resulted in a need for better face detection, feature extraction and
classification. In this paper we present results of feature space analysis
after briefly explaining our fully automatic vision based emotion
recognition method. We demonstrate the compactness of the feature
space and show how the 2d/3d based method achieves superior features
for the purpose of emotion classification. Also it is exposed that
through feature normalization a widely person independent feature
space is created. As a consequence, the classifier architecture has
only a minor influence on the classification result. This is particularly
elucidated with the help of confusion matrices. For this purpose
advanced classification algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines
and Artificial Neural Networks are employed, as well as the simple k-
Nearest Neighbor classifier.
Abstract: Falling has been one of the major concerns and threats
to the independence of the elderly in their daily lives. With the
worldwide significant growth of the aging population, it is essential
to have a promising solution of fall detection which is able to operate
at high accuracy in real-time and supports large scale implementation
using multiple cameras. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a
highly promising tool to be used as a hardware accelerator in many
emerging embedded vision based system. Thus, it is the main
objective of this paper to present an FPGA-based solution of visual
based fall detection to meet stringent real-time requirements with
high accuracy. The hardware architecture of visual based fall
detection which utilizes the pixel locality to reduce memory accesses
is proposed. By exploiting the parallel and pipeline architecture of
FPGA, our hardware implementation of visual based fall detection
using FGPA is able to achieve a performance of 60fps for a series of
video analytical functions at VGA resolutions (640x480). The results
of this work show that FPGA has great potentials and impacts in
enabling large scale vision system in the future healthcare industry
due to its flexibility and scalability.
Abstract: Energetic and structural results for ethanol-water mixtures as a function of the mole fraction were calculated using Monte Carlo methodology. Energy partitioning results obtained for equimolar water-ethanol mixture and ether organic liquids are compared. It has been shown that at xet=0.22 the RDFs for waterethanol and ethanol-ethanol interactions indicated strong hydrophobic interactions between ethanol molecules and the local structure of solution is less structured at this concentration as at ether ones. Results obtained for ethanol-water mixture as a function of concentration are in good agreement with the experimental data.
Abstract: Jordan exerts many efforts to nurture their academically gifted students in special schools since 2001. During
the past nine years of launching these schools, their learning and excellence environments were believed to be distinguished compared
to public schools. This study investigated the environments of gifted
students compared with other non-gifted, using a survey instrument
that measures the dimensions of family, peers, teachers, school- support, society, and resources –dimensions rooted deeply in supporting gifted education, learning, and achievement. A total
number of 109 were selected from excellence schools for
academically gifted students, and 119 non-gifted students were selected from public schools. Around 8.3% of the non-gifted students
reported that they “Never" received any support from their surrounding environments, 14.9% reported “Seldom" support, 23.7% reported “ Often" support, 26.0% reported “Frequent" support, and
32.8% reported “Very frequent" support. Where the gifted students reported more “Never" support than the non-gifted did with 11.3%,
“Seldom" support with 15.4%, “Often" support with 26.6%,
“Frequent" support with 29.0%, and reported “Very frequent" support less than the non-gifted students with 23.6%. Unexpectedly,
statistical differences were found between the two groups favoring
non-gifted students in perception of their surrounding environments
in specific dimensions, namely, school- support, teachers, and society. No statistical differences were found in the other dimensions
of the survey, namely, family, peers, and resources. As the
differences were found in teachers, school- support, and society, the
nurturing environments for the excellence schools need to be revised to adopt more creative teaching styles, rich school atmosphere and
infrastructures, interactive guiding for the students and their parents, promoting for the excellence environments, and re-build successful
identification models. Thus, families, schools, and society should
increase their cooperation, communication, and awareness of the
gifted supportive environments. However, more studies to investigate
other aspects of promoting academic giftedness and excellence are recommended.
Abstract: Housing is a basic human right. The provision of new
house shall be free from any defects, even for the defects that people
do normally considered as 'cosmetic defects'. This paper studies
about the building defects of newly completed house of 72 unit of
double-storey terraced located in Bangi, Selangor. The building
survey implemented using protocol 1 (visual inspection). As for new
house, the survey work is very stringent in determining the defects
condition and priority. Survey and reporting procedure is carried out
based on CSP1 Matrix that involved scoring system, photographs and
plan tagging. The analysis is done using Statistical Package for Social
Sciences (SPSS). The finding reveals that there are 2119 defects
recorded in 72 terraced houses. The cumulative score obtained was
27644 while the overall rating is 13.05. These results indicate that the
construction quality of the newly terraced houses is low and not up to
an acceptable standard as the new house should be.