Supramolecular Glyco‐nanoparticles Toward Immunological Applications

Glyco‐mimicking nanoparticles (glyco‐NPs) with Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) donor and acceptor groups formed via dynamic covalent bond of benzoboroxole and sugar from two complementary polymers are prepared. The glyco‐NPs are proved to be quite stable under physiological conditions but sensitive to pH. So the glyco‐NPs can be internalized by dendritic cells with integrity and nontoxicity and then dissociate within the acidic organelles. This particle dissociation is directly observed and visualized in vitro, for the first time via the FRET measurements and fluorescent microscopy. This feature makes controlled release of drug or protein by glyco‐NPs possible, i.e., when model antigen Ovalbumin is loaded in the glyco‐NPs, the released Ovalbumin in dendritic cells stimulates T cells more efficiently than the free Ovalbumin itself as a result of the enhanced antigen processing and presentation. Thus, the results enlighten a bright future of the glyco‐NPs in immunotherapy.     

低碳时变城配送车辆路径-发车调度集成优化

针对交通拥挤环境下日益增长的城市配送需求，通过分析时序依赖对成本和碳排放的影响，引入车辆在节点等待和离散调度策略，研究基于时序依赖的低碳城市配送车辆路径与离散调度问题。为求解该问题，设计基于遗传算法与局部搜索相结合的混合进化搜索算法对模型求解，用积极的局部搜索机制替代随机的变异操作，并通过可行解构造算法、变概率交叉和多种局部搜索策略来提高算法求解质量和求解效率。通过对比仿真实验对算法和模型的有效性进行了验证。     

Intelligent Information‐Centric Networking routing scheme under imprecise information

Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) has been accepted to overcome some weaknesses of the current Internet architecture, showing that “what is being exchanged” is more important than “who are exchanging information.” Given the inadequate considerations on Quality of Service (QoS) and energy saving in ICN routing, we propose in this paper a routing algorithm to enhance the two aspects. At first, on one hand, Cauchy distribution is used as a fuzzy model to evaluate users' QoS requirements, such as bandwidth, delay, and error rate; on the other hand, we formulate energy saving problem to evaluate the green quality of routing algorithm. Then, we design a link selection approach by considering QoS and energy saving, which belongs to a multi‐objective decision problem resolved by intelligent drops algorithm. Finally, we implement the proposed algorithm and compare it with the famous adaptive forwarding mechanism in terms of some significant metrics, and the experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm is more efficient.     

The potential of energy flexibility of space heating and cooling in Portugal

This study assesses the potential of energy flexibility of space heating and cooling for a typical household under different geographical conditions in Portugal. The proposed approach modifies the demand through the optimization of the thermostat settings using a genetic algorithm to reduce either operational costs or interaction with the grid. The results show that the used energy flexibility indicator expresses the available potential and that flexibility depends on several factors, namely: i) thermal inertia of the archetypical household; ii) the time of use electricity tariffs; iii) users’ comfort boundaries; and iv) the geographical location of the houses.     

The robust knapsack problem with queries

We consider robust knapsack problems where item weights are uncertain. We are allowed to query an item to find its exact weight,where the number of such queries is bounded by a given parameter Q. After these queries are made, we need to pack the items robustly, i.e., so that the choice of items is feasible for every remaining possible scenario of item weights.The central question that we consider is: Which items should be queried in order to gain maximum profit? We introduce the notion of query competitiveness for strict robustness to evaluate the quality of an algorithm for this problem, and obtain lower and upper bounds on this competitiveness for interval-based uncertainty. Similar to the study of online algorithms, we study the competitiveness under different frameworks, namely we analyze the worst-case query competitiveness for deterministic algorithms, the expected query competitiveness for randomized algorithms and the average case competitiveness for known distributions of the uncertain input data. We derive theoretical bounds for these different frameworks and evaluate them experimentally. We also extend this approach to Γ-restricted uncertainties introduced by Bertsimas and Sim.Furthermore, we present heuristic algorithms for the problem. In computational experiments considering both the interval-based and the Γ-restricted uncertainty, we evaluate their empirical performance. While the usage of a Γ-restricted uncertainty improves the nominal performance of a solution (as expected), we find that the query competitiveness gets worse.     

Ions motion algorithm for solving optimization problems

This paper proposes a novel optimization algorithm inspired by the ions motion in nature. In fact, the proposed algorithm mimics the attraction and repulsion of anions and cations to perform optimization. The proposed algorithm is designed in such a way to have the least tuning parameters, low computational complexity, fast convergence, and high local optima avoidance. The performance of this algorithm is benchmarked on 10 standard test functions and compared to four well-known algorithms in the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to show very competitive results and has merits in solving challenging optimization problems.     

A novel approach to adaptive relational association rule mining

The paper focuses on the adaptive relational association rule mining problem. Relational association rules represent a particular type of association rules which describe frequent relations that occur between the features characterizing the instances within a data set. We aim at re-mining an object set, previously mined, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. An adaptive relational association rule method, based on the discovery of interesting relational association rules, is proposed. This method, called ARARM (Adaptive Relational Association Rule Mining) adapts the set of rules that was established by mining the data before the feature set changed, preserving the completeness. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running the mining algorithm again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method's performance on several case studies are also reported. The obtained results highlight the efficiency of the ARARM method and confirm the potential of our proposal.     

Demand response for home energy management system

The optimization of energy consumption, with consequent cost reduction, is one of the main challenges for the present and future smart grid. Demand response (DR) program is expected to be vital in home energy management system (HEMS) which aims to schedule the operation of appliances to save energy costs by considering customer convenience as well as characteristics of electric appliances. The DR program is a challenging optimization problem especially when the formulations are non-convex or NP-hard problems. In order to solve this challenging optimization problem efficiently, an effective heuristic approach is proposed to achieve a near optimal solution with low computational costs. Different from previously proposed methods in literatures which are not suitable to be run in embedded devices such as a smart meter. The proposed algorithm can be implemented in an embedded device which has severe limitations on memory size and computational power, and can get an optimal value in real-time. Numerical studies were carried out with the data simulating practical scenarios are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

基于SVM的煤与瓦斯突出预测模型及应用

为有效预测矿井内煤与瓦斯突出的危险程度,对其影响因素做了分析与探讨,分别构建了基于粒子群优化算法以及遗传算法支持向量机的煤与瓦斯突出预测模型,并且通过实例对两种模型预测的准确性进行了验证。分别利用单项以及综合指标、BP神经网络以及PSO-SVM模型、GA-SVM模型,对寺河煤矿二号井的突出区域进行预测比较。结果表明,PSO-SVM的预测模型不仅可以在小样本数据中预测出煤与瓦斯突出程度的大小,而且综合预测结果更加精确,其在解决矿井内煤与瓦斯突出的小样本数据中显示出更加强大、通用的性能。     

Artificial bee colony based algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) for PV systems operating under partial shaded conditions

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm has several characteristics that make it more attractive than other bio-inspired methods. Particularly, it is simple, it uses fewer control parameters and its convergence is independent of the initial conditions. In this paper, a novel artificial bee colony based maximum power point tracking algorithm (MPPT) is proposed. The developed algorithm, does not allow only overcoming the common drawback of the conventional MPPT methods, but it gives a simple and a robust MPPT scheme. A co-simulation methodology, combining Matlab/Simulink™ and Cadence/Pspice™, is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and compare its performance, under dynamic weather conditions, with that of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based MPPT algorithm. Moreover, a laboratory setup has been realized and used to experimentally validate the proposed ABC-based MPPT algorithm. Simulation and experimental results have shown the satisfactory performance of the proposed approach.