Statistical modeling and denoising Wigner–Ville distribution

Studying the properties of the Wigner–Ville distribution (wvd) and its smoothed versions such as smoothed pseudo-WVD (spwvd), we demonstrate that they have significantly non-Gaussian statistics. Also, we investigate the presence of two-dimensional heteroscedasticity in them for different signals based on employing Lagrange multiplier (LM) procedure. Therefore, we employ a heteroscedastic model called two-dimensional generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (2-D garch) for statistical modeling of these distributions. This modeling captures the characteristics of WVD and SPWVD, such as heavy tailed marginal distribution, and the dependencies among them. Since the performance of WVD and its smoothed versions degrade in the presence of additive noise, we design a novel Bayesian estimator for estimating the clean distributions based on garch modeling. Also, estimating the instantaneous frequency (if) curves of signals in presence of noise based on WVD and its smoothed versions is an interesting topic in the radar domain. So, we apply the denoised distributions for estimating the if. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of proposed method in denoising wvd and SPWVD and also performance improvement for if estimation in utilizing the denoised distributions.     

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis and health assessment using EEMD and the adjustment Mahalanobis–Taguchi system

For the timely identification of the potential faults of a rolling bearing and to observe its health condition intuitively and accurately, a novel fault diagnosis and health assessment model for a rolling bearing based on the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method and the adjustment Mahalanobis–Taguchi system (AMTS) method is proposed. The specific steps are as follows: First, the vibration signal of a rolling bearing is decomposed by EEMD, and the extracted features are used as the input vectors of AMTS. Then, the AMTS method, which is designed to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional Mahalanobis–Taguchi system and to extract the key features, is proposed for fault diagnosis. Finally, a type of HI concept is proposed according to the results of the fault diagnosis to accomplish the health assessment of a bearing in its life cycle. To validate the superiority of the developed method proposed approach, it is compared with other recent method and proposed methodology is successfully validated on a vibration data-set acquired from seeded defects and from an accelerated life test. The results show that this method represents the actual situation well and is able to accurately and effectively identify the fault type.     

An application to transient current signal based induction motor fault diagnosis of Fourier–Bessel expansion and simplified fuzzy ARTMAP

The start-up transient signals have been widely used for fault diagnosis of induction motor because they can reveal early defects in the development process, which are not easily detected with the signals in the steady state operation. However, transient signals are non-linear and contain multi components which need a suitable technique to process and identify the fault pattern. In this paper, the fault diagnosis problem of induction motor is conducted by a data driven framework where the Fourier–Bessel (FB) expansion is used as a tool to decompose transient current signal into series of single components. For each component, the statistical features in the time and the frequency domains are extracted to represent the characteristics of motor condition. The high dimensionality of the feature set is solved by generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) implementation to decrease the computational complexity of classification. In the meantime, with the aid of GDA, the separation of the feature clusters is increased, which enables the more classification accuracy to be achieved. Finally, the reduced dimensional features are used for classifier to perform the fault diagnosis results. The classifier used in this framework is the simplified fuzzy ARTMAP (SFAM) which belongs to a special class of neural networks (NNs) and provides a lower training time in comparison to other traditional NNs. The proposed framework is validated with transient current signals from an induction motor under different conditions including bowed rotor, broken rotor bar, eccentricity, faulty bearing, mass unbalance and phase unbalance. Additionally, this paper provides the comparative performance of (i) SFAM and support vector machine (SVM), (ii) SVM in the framework and SVM combined with wavelet transform in previous studies, (iii) the use of FB decomposition and Hilbert transform decomposition. The results show that the proposed diagnosis framework is capable of significantly improving the classification accuracy.     

An approach to fault diagnosis of reciprocating compressor valves using Teager–Kaiser energy operator and deep belief networks

This paper presents an approach to implement vibration, pressure, and current signals for fault diagnosis of the valves in reciprocating compressors. Due to the complexity of structure and motion of such compressor, the acquired vibration signal normally involves transient impacts and noise. This causes the useful information to be corrupted and difficulty in accurately diagnosing the faults with traditional methods. To reveal the fault patterns contained in this signal, the Teager–Kaiser energy operation (TKEO) is proposed to estimate the amplitude envelopes. In case of pressure and current, the random noise is removed by using a denoising method based on wavelet transform. Subsequently, statistical measures are extracted from all signals to represent the characteristics of the valve conditions. In order to classify the faults of compressor valves, a new type of learning architecture for deep generative model called deep belief networks (DBNs) is applied. DBN employs a hierarchical structure with multiple stacked restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) and works through a greedy layer-by-layer learning algorithm. In pattern recognition research areas, DBN has proved to be very effective and provided with high performance for binary values. However, for implementing DBN to fault diagnosis where most of signals are real-valued, RBM with Bernoulli hidden units and Gaussian visible units is considered in this study. The proposed approach is validated with the signals from a two-stage reciprocating air compressor under different valve conditions. To confirm the superiority of DBN in fault classification, its performance is compared with that of relevant vector machine and back propagation neuron networks. The achieved accuracy indicates that the proposed approach is highly reliable and applicable in fault diagnosis of industrial reciprocating machinery.     

Automatic heart sound detection in pediatric patients without electrocardiogram reference via pseudo-affine Wigner–Ville distribution and Haar wavelet lifting

Having in mind the availability of electronic stethoscopes, phonocardiograms (PCGs) have become popular for cardiovascular functionality monitoring and signal processing applications. Detection of fundamental heart sounds (HSs), S1s and S2s, is considered to be a crucial step in PCG analysis. Electrocardiogram (ECG), noted as a reference signal, is often synchronously recorded in order to simplify the S1/S2 detection process. Nevertheless, electronic stethoscopes are frequently used without additional ECG equipment. We propose a new algorithm for automatic fundamental HSs detection via: joint time-frequency representation based on pseudo affine Wigner–Ville distribution (PAWVD), Haar wavelet lifting scheme (Haar-LS), normalized average Shannon energy (NASE) and autocorrelation. The performance of the proposed algorithm was calculated on both normal (50) and pathological (75) PCG recordings, eight seconds long each, contributed by 125 different pediatric patients. The algorithm showed relatively high recall (90.41%) and precision (96.39%) rates of S1/S2 detection procedure in a variety of PCG signals, without ECG as a reference. Furthermore, it indicated the ability to overcome splitting within the S1/S2 heart sounds.     

An intelligent system for automated breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis using SVM based classifiers

In recent years, computational diagnostic tools and artificial intelligence techniques provide automated procedures for objective judgments by making use of quantitative measures and machine learning techniques. In this paper we propose a Support Vector Machines (SVMs) based classifier in comparison with Bayesian classifiers and Artificial Neural Networks for the prognosis and diagnosis of breast cancer disease. The paper provides the implementation details along with the corresponding results for all the assessed classifiers. Several comparative studies have been carried out concerning both the prognosis and diagnosis problem demonstrating the superiority of the proposed SVM algorithm in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy.     

Anomaly detection of cooling fan and fault classification of induction motor using Mahalanobis–Taguchi system

A health index, Mahalanobis distance (MD), is proposed to indicate the health condition of cooling fan and induction motor based on vibration signal. Anomaly detection and fault classification are accomplished by comparing MDs, which are calculated based on the feature data set extracted from the vibration signals under normal and abnormal conditions. Since MD is a non-negative and non-Gaussian distributed variable, Box–Cox transformation is used to convert the MDs into normal distributed variables, such that the properties of normal distribution can be employed to determine the ranges of MDs corresponding to different health conditions. Experimental data of cooling fan and induction motor are used to validate the proposed approach. The results show that the early stage failure of cooling fan caused by bearing generalized-roughness faults can be detected successfully, and the different unbalanced electrical faults of induction motor can be classified with a higher accuracy by Mahalanobis–Taguchi system. Such works could aid in the reliable operation of the machines, the reduction of the unexpected failures, and the improvement of the maintenance plan.     

Automated fault detection in power distribution networks using a hybrid fuzzy–genetic algorithm approach

This paper describes the development of an intelligent technique based on artificial intelligence for automatically detecting incidents on power distribution networks. A hybrid combination of fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms (GAs) has been applied to detect faults in these networks. The robust nature of a fuzzy controller allows it to model functions of arbitrary complexity, while the maximising capabilities of GAs allow optimisation of the fuzzy design parameters to achieve optimal performance. The hybrid approach used in this paper builds on these individual strengths and seeks to blend fuzzy set and GAs techniques to compensate for their inadequacies. The technique for fault detection is described and verified with experiments on a 33 kV test system containing 12 busbars, eight transformers and eight line sections. The results obtained from the test data file of 500 test cases contain only one undetected case (0.2%), 458 correctly detected cases (91.6%) of actual faults and 41 cases (8.2%) where the protection system components either had not operated or had malfunctioned but were correctly identified by the incident detection system.     

An expert system using rough sets theory for aided conceptual design of ship’s engine room automation

More and more complicated conceptual design of ship’s engine room (CDSER) heavily depends on designers’ engineering knowledge and existing ship data. To achieve intelligent design at the initial ship design stage, many researchers have made much significant progress in this field, however, most of them only focused on how to find the similar constructed ships. At present, how to utilize these existing data remains an untouched topic. In order to make good use of the existing data and reduce the dependence on designers’ experience, a novel system named Expert System for Aided Conceptual Design of Ship’s Engine Room Automation (ESACD), is elaborated in this study. With the support of the constructed Ship Data Warehouse System, two core subsystems Configuration Selection Assistant (CSA) and Design Scheme Decision Assistant (DSDA) are included in ESACD. A promising approach integrating Fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM) and Rough Sets Theory (RST) to extract configuration rules from the stored data is adopted in CSA. According to engineers’ proposals, RST is utilized to reason knowledge in incomplete scheme information systems for getting design scheme rules in DSDA, which are useful suggestions for engineers to get better schemes at this stage. Finally, the validity and necessity of this interactive expert system are demonstrated through the CDSER of a new 50,000 DWT Handymax bulk carrier. It is proved that ESACD can efficiently facilitate rapid and intelligent design in CDSER, and reduce the cost of a new ship design.     

An efficient diagnosis system for detection of Parkinson’s disease using fuzzy k-nearest neighbor approach

In this paper, we present an effective and efficient diagnosis system using fuzzy k-nearest neighbor (FKNN) for Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis. The proposed FKNN-based system is compared with the support vector machines (SVM) based approaches. In order to further improve the diagnosis accuracy for detection of PD, the principle component analysis was employed to construct the most discriminative new feature sets on which the optimal FKNN model was constructed. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been rigorously estimated on a PD data set in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Experimental results have demonstrated that the FKNN-based system greatly outperforms SVM-based approaches and other methods in the literature. The best classification accuracy (96.07%) obtained by the FKNN-based system using a 10-fold cross validation method can ensure a reliable diagnostic model for detection of PD. Promisingly, the proposed system might serve as a new candidate of powerful tools for diagnosing PD with excellent performance.     

Prediction and reduction of diesel engine emissions using a combined ANN–ACO method

In this study, the combination of artificial neural network (ANN) and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm has been utilized for modeling and reducing NO_x and soot emissions from a direct injection diesel engine. A feed-forward multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network is used to represent the relationship between the input parameters (i.e., engine speed, intake air temperature, rate of fuel mass injected, and power) on the one hand and the output parameters (i.e., NO_x and soot emissions) on the other hand. The ACO algorithm is employed to find the optimum air intake temperatures and the rates of fuel mass injected for different engine speeds and powers with the purpose of simultaneous reduction of NO_x and soot. The obtained results reveal that the ANN can appropriately model the exhaust NO_x and soot emissions with the correlation factors of 0.98, 0.96, respectively. Further, the employed ACO algorithm gives rise to 32% and 7% reduction in the NO_x and soot, respectively. The response time of the optimization process was obtained to be less than 4 min for the particular PC system used in the present work. The high accuracy and speed of the model show its potential for application in intelligent controlling systems of the diesel engines.     

Solving a fuzzy multi objective model of a production–distribution system using meta-heuristic based approaches

This paper studies a multi-objective production–distribution system. The objectives are to minimize total costs and maximize the reliability of transportations system. Each transportation system is assumed to be of unique reliability. In the real world, some parameters may be of vagueness; therefore, some tools such as fuzzy logic is applied to tackle with. The problem is formulated using a mixed integer programming model. Commercial software can optimally solve small sized instances. We propose two novel HEURISTICS called ranking genetic algorithm (RGA) and concessive variable neighborhood search (CVNS) in order to solve the large sized instances. RGA utilizes various crossover operators and compares their performances so that better crossover operators are used during the solution process. CVNS applies several neighborhood search structures with a novel learning procedure. The heuristics can recognize which neighborhood structure performs well and applies those more than the others. The results indicated that RGA is of higher performance.     

An index and approach for water extraction using Landsat–OLI data

The extraction of water distribution is extremely useful in research and planning activities, including those associated with water resources, environments, disasters, local climates, and other factors. Remote-sensing images with moderate resolution have been the main data source due to the vast distribution of water and the high cost, access difficulty, and massive size of high-resolution images. Although some water indices and methods for water extraction have been proposed, there is still a lack of these resources to easily, accurately, efficiently, and automatically extract water. This paper focused on some improvements that mainly used the most traditional but also the newest Operational Land Imager (OLI) images in Landsat 8. This study first analysed the variation features of previous water indices. Secondly, taking the city of Beijing and its surrounding area as the experimental site, a spectral curve analysis was performed and a new water index was proposed. This index was compared to three typical indices. Thirdly, a new approach was proposed to accurately and easily extract water. It included four major steps: background partitioning, thresholding and preliminary segmentation, noise removal by patch size, and local region growth. Next, the stricter and more effective stratified random sampling method was used to test the accuracy. Then, we tested the generality of the proposed water index and extraction method using nine typical test sites from around the world and tried to simplify the workflow. Finally, this paper discusses threshold optimization issues, such as automatic selection and reduction of the number of thresholds. The results show that the normalized water index (NDWI), modified normalized water index (MNDWI), and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) may fail in some situations due to the complex spectrum of the impervious surface class. Some shadow pixels were impossible to remove using only spectral analysis because both the digital number (DN) trends and values were similar to those of water. The proposed water index was easy and simple, but it corresponded better to water bodies. Additionally, it was more accurate and universal and showed greater potential for extracting water. This method relatively accurately and completely extracted various water bodies from plain city, plain country, and natural mountainous regions in many typical climate zones, eliminating interference caused by dark impervious surfaces, plants, sand, suspended sediments, snow, ice, bedrock, reservoir drawdown areas, shadows from mountains and buildings, mixed pixels, etc. The mean kappa coefficients were 0.988, 0.982, and 0.984 in plain city, plain country, and natural mountainous regions, respectively. This paper suggests that thresholds can be automatically determined by comparing the accuracy changes of different thresholds according to preselected sample and test points. Furthermore, the combined use of the maximum class square error method (also known as the Ostu algorithm) and the adaptive thresholding method exhibits great potential for automatic determination of thresholds in regions without many noises with higher water index values. In addition, water bodies could also be accurately extracted by setting these thresholds to fixed values based on the results at more test sites.     

A facile pressure drop measurement system and its applications to gas–liquid microflows

A system for measuring the pressure drop of a fluid in a microchannel was developed in this study with measurements ranging from 0 to 7 kPa and an accuracy of 1 Pa for constant pressure drop. This system utilizes commercial pressure sensors, self-made amplifiers and a vibration insulation platform to insure accuracy and reproducibility of the results. Pressure calibrations can be conveniently computed using the manufacturers’ datasheet. This measuring system was firstly tested with the pressure drop measurement of single-phase flow in microchannels and the results showed good agreement with theoretical computations. Oscillating pressure drops in the generation of bubbles in T-junction microchannel were studied using the pressure measurement system and their amplitude relatively to the change of working systems is carefully discussed with the comparison of theoretical models from literatures.     

An improved stability result for linear time-delay system using a new Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and extended reciprocally convex inequality

This paper is concerned with the stability analysis of a linear system with interval time-varying delay using an augmented Lyapunov–Krasovskii (LK) functional approach. A delay-dependent stability criterion is developed in LMI framework to estimate the maximum allowable bound of the time-delay within which the system remains asymptotically stable in the sense of Lyapunov. Conservatism in the proposed delay-dependent stability analysis is reduced by introducing a new LK functional along with the Wirtinger's inequality and extended reciprocally convex matrix inequality. Finally, two numerical examples and the load frequency control problem have been solved to validate the superiority of the proposed stability criterion compared to existing literature.     

An efficient two phase approach for solving reliability–redundancy allocation problem using artificial bee colony technique

The main goal of the present paper is to present a two phase approach for solving the reliability–redundancy allocation problems (RRAP) with nonlinear resource constraints. In the first phase of the proposed approach, an algorithm based on artificial bee colony (ABC) is developed to solve the allocation problem while in the second phase an improvement of the solution as obtained by this algorithm is made. Four benchmark problems in the reliability–redundancy allocation and two reliability optimization problems have been taken to demonstrate the approach and it is shown by comparison that the solutions by the new proposed approach are better than the solutions available in the literature.