Hierarchical multi-reservoir optimization modeling for real-world complexity with application to the Three Gorges system

High dimensionality in real-world multi-reservoir systems greatly hinders the application and popularity of evolutionary algorithms, especially for systems with heterogeneous units. An efficient hierarchical optimization framework is presented for search space reduction, determining the best water distributions, not only between cascade reservoirs, but also among different types of hydropower units. The framework is applied to the Three Gorges Project (TGP) system and the results demonstrate that the difficulties of multi-reservoir optimization caused by high dimensionality can be effectively solved by the proposed hierarchical method. For the day studied, power output could be increased by 6.79 GWh using an optimal decision with the same amount of water actually used; while the same amount of power could be generated with 2.59 × 10⁷ m³ less water compared to the historical policy. The methodology proposed is general in that it can be used for other reservoir systems and other types of heterogeneous unit generators.     

An unsupervised approach to generating generic summaries of documents

We present an optimization-based unsupervised approach to automatic document summarization. In the proposed approach, text summarization is modeled as a Boolean programming problem. This model generally attempts to optimize three properties, namely, (1) relevance: summary should contain informative textual units that are relevant to the user; (2) redundancy: summaries should not contain multiple textual units that convey the same information; and (3) length: summary is bounded in length. The approach proposed in this paper is applicable to both tasks: single- and multi-document summarization. In both tasks, documents are split into sentences in preprocessing. We select some salient sentences from document(s) to generate a summary. Finally, the summary is generated by threading all the selected sentences in the order that they appear in the original document(s). We implemented our model on multi-document summarization task. When comparing our methods to several existing summarization methods on an open DUC2005 and DUC2007 data sets, we found that our method improves the summarization results significantly. This is because, first, when extracting summary sentences, this method not only focuses on the relevance scores of sentences to the whole sentence collection, but also the topic representative of sentences. Second, when generating a summary, this method also deals with the problem of repetition of information. The methods were evaluated using ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4 metrics. In this paper, we also demonstrate that the summarization result depends on the similarity measure. Results of the experiment showed that combination of symmetric and asymmetric similarity measures yields better result than their use separately.     

Study on maximum power point tracking of photovoltaic array in irregular shadow

Traditional maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods can hardly find global maximum power point (MPP) because output characteristics curve of photovoltaic (PV) array may have multi local maximum power points in irregular shadow, and thus easily fall into the local maximum power point. To address this drawback, Considering that sliding mode variable structure (SMVS) control strategy have such advantages as simple structure, fast response and strong robustness, and P&O method have the advantages of simple principle and convenient implementation, so a new algorithm combining SMVS control method and P&O method is proposed, besides, PI controller is applied to reduce system chattering caused by switching sliding surface. It is applied to MPPT control of PV array in irregular shadow to solve the problem of multi-peak optimization in partial shadow. In order to verity the rationality of the proposed algorithm, the experimental circuit is built, which achieves MPPT control by means of the proposed algorithm and P&O method. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional P&O algorithm, the proposed algorithm can fast track the global MPP, tracking speed increases by 60% and the relative error decreased by 20%. Moreover, the system becomes more stable near the MPP, the fluctuations of output power is greatly reduced, and thus make full use of solar energy.     

High birefringence photonic bandgap fiber with elliptical air holes

In this paper, we proposed a high birefringence photonic bandgap fiber (PBGF) with elliptical air holes in cladding and circular air hole in core. The forbidden gaps of the honeycomb structure are calculated when the circular air holes are deformed to the elliptical shape. And the birefringence of the PBGFs is investigated by using a full-vector finite element method (FEM) and the numerical results are presented.     

Investigation of performance variations due to the amplitude of group-delay ripple in chirped fiber Bragg gratings

We measure the system impacts due to the amplitude of group-delay (GD) ripple in single and cascaded chirped fiber Bragg gratings (CFBGs). Signals with smaller pulse width result in smaller performance variation at the same data rate. A 65-ps peak-to-peak GD ripple induces 0.9, 1.7, and 2.7 dB maximum penalties for 10, 20, and 40-Gb/s, respectively. We also find that cascading gratings with random ripple causes much less degradation than cascading gratings with the same ripple profile.     

MMR: A MultiMedia Router architecture to support hybrid workloads

During the past few years, multimedia traffic with quality of service (QoS) requirements has become of widespread use. Media servers are usually built as clusters of workstations connected by a high-performance interconnection network. However, these high-performance networks do not usually offer differentiated support for multimedia traffic. The MultiMedia Router (MMR) is a proposal to address the QoS issue in cluster networks within a compact architecture, while also integrating conventional best-effort traffic. This paper describes the main architectural features of the MMR, such as the use of a hybrid switching technique, credit-based flow control, or small input buffers. Also, the main design parameters are tuned by means of simulation. It can be seen how proper differentiation among the different traffic classes is achieved, while retaining a compact design with small buffers.     

HCI reality—an ‘Unreal Tournament’?

The cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in the human–computer interaction (HCI) community is often difficult, and can only be explained by investigating the different paradigms by which they operate. This study proposes a paradigm model for designers, engineers and scientists, using three barriers to separate the professions. We then report on an empirical study that attempted to validate the understand/transform world barrier in the paradigm model using an online questionnaire. We conclude that the used ‘Attitude About Reality’ scale was unsuitable for measuring this barrier, whereas information about the educational background of the participants was a good predictor for the self-reported profession (designer, engineer or scientist). Interestingly, among the three professions, engineers appear to be the cohesive element, since they often have dual backgrounds, whereas very few participants had dual science/design backgrounds. Engineers could, therefore, build a bridge between designers and scientists, and through their integrative role, could guide the HCI community to realizing its full potential.     

PUF-enhanced offline RFID security and privacy

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) based communication solutions have been widely used nowadays for mobile environments such as access control for secure system, ticketing systems for transportation, and sport events. These systems usually depend on readers that are not continuously connected to a secure backend system. Thus, the readers should be able to perform their duties even in offline mode, which generally requires the management by the readers of the susceptible data. The use of RFID may cause several security and privacy issues such as traceability of tag owner, malicious eavesdropping and cloning of tags. Besides, when a reader is compromised by an adversary, the solution to resolve these issues getting worse. In order to handle these issues, several RFID authentication protocols have been recently proposed; but almost none of them provide strong privacy for the tag owner. On the other hand, several frameworks have been proposed to analyze the security and privacy but none of them consider offline RFID system.Motivated by this need, in this paper, we first revisit Vaudenay's model, extend it by considering offline RFID system and introduce the notion of compromise reader attacks. Then, we propose an efficient RFID mutual authentication protocol. Our protocol is based on the use of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) which provide cost-efficient means to the fingerprint chips based on their physical properties. We prove that our protocol provides destructive privacy for tag owner even against reader attacks.     

A novel range-free localization based on regulated neighborhood distance for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Range-free localization methods are suitable for large scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks due to their less-demanding hardware requirements. Many existing connectivity- or hop-count-based range-free localization methods suffer from the hop-distance ambiguity problem where a node has a same distance estimation to all of its one-hop neighbors. In this paper, we define a new measure, called regulated neighborhood distance (RND), to address this problem by relating the proximity of two neighbors to their neighbor partitions. Furthermore, we propose a new RND-based range-free localization method, and compare our localization algorithm with peer classical algorithms in different network scenarios, which include grid deployment, random uniform deployment, non-uniform deployment and uniform deployment with a coverage hole. Simulation results show that ours can achieve better and reliable localization accuracy in these network scenarios.