An overview of intelligent control systems in cement plants: shop floor to boardroom

This work has attempted to give a brief overview of the power and benefits of intelligent integrated management systems. ICSs monitor and cover the whole factory from shop floor to boardroom, giving all plant personnel appropriate information and control. The power of the ICS is the ability to recognize and consolidate a whole variety of various process, operational, and management and governmental factors that allow the decision makers in plants to make better or optimal decisions with regard to their production, profitability, and whatever other goals that are important to them. Some of the benefits to ICS are better-informed staff, improved operational control, and better decision making, all of which affect the bottom line of the business to some degree. This includes higher throughput, consistent quality, less down time, and other benefits, such as better training and fast detection of problems, which are not easy to qualify or quantify. In general, the end user cannot operate as efficiently without such systems.     

DUET: an agent-based personal communications network

The authors propose a network architecture that provides access to resources on different networks in a manner that is transparent to the user. They named this network distributed user-assistant for easy telecommunications (DUET). Personal agents manage resources for the users and allow each user to customize his/her communication services. This architecture is especially suitable to advanced personal communications integrating real-time voice and non-real-time messaging services     

BerlinTainment: an agent-based context-aware entertainment planning system

Service providers, especially in the mobile entertainment domain, are facing increasing competition. The ability to design, develop, and deploy unique context-aware entertainment services fast and easily as well as the capability to provide intuitive user interfaces becomes essential for market players. Furthermore, today's mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks accessible via various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all available devices. At the same time, service providers have to diversify their services in order to remain competitive and attract the various customer segments making up the mass market. We introduce an agent-based serviceware framework to assist service providers in developing innovative services, thus reducing the time to market of the respective applications. The realized serviceware framework offers personalization, location awareness, and the multi-access service platform, a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Thus, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of end devices to access an application server's mobile services in a multimodal, multilingual, and multimedia-based manner. We describe the utilization of the different modules of the service framework as well as the BerlinTainment application, an entertainment planning system based on the framework.     

An intelligent agent-based scheme for vertical handover management across heterogeneous networks

Advances in technology have enabled a proliferation of mobile devices and a broad spectrum of novel and outbreaking solutions for new applications and services. The increasing demand for all time and everywhere services requires the network operators to integrate different kinds of wireless and cellular networks. To enable this integration, it is important that users can roam freely across networks. As different technologies are involved in the current infrastructure, the problem of vertical handover needs to be addressed. To cope with the problem of seamless connectivity, several solutions have been presented. But most of them either lack intelligence or are not adaptable for reducing the packet loss and delay involved in the handover procedure. An intelligent technique is needed in order to perform the service continuity in the heterogeneous environment. This paper presents a cooperative agent based approach for the vertical handover using a knowledge plane. We propose to introduce the agents in the mobile nodes and access points to collect the necessary information from the environment. Based on this information, agents take a handover decision. A selection function is also introduced in this work which helps in choosing a best network from the available ones for handover. Finally, the proposed approach is validated with the help of simulations.     

Bottleneck starvation indicators for shop floor control[semiconductor manufacturing process]

A graphical tool for inventory and production control, currently in use at a major US semiconductor manufacturer, is presented. The tool supports a bottleneck starvation avoidance policy. Equations for calculating the bottleneck in a clean room manufacturing environment are presented. A new constraint which must be satisfied to ensure starvation avoidance is introduced. A technique for helping a manual decision process conform to this constraint is presented. Many graphs are given to illustrate the concepts     

I-WAP: an intelligent WAP site management system

The popularity regarding wireless communications is such that more and more WAP sites have been developed with wireless markup language (WML). Meanwhile, to translate hypertext markup language (HTML) pages into proper WML ones becomes imperative since it is difficult for WAP users to read most contents designed for PC users via their mobile phone screens. However, for those sites that have been maintained with hypertext markup language (HTML), considerable time and manpower costs will be incurred to rebuild them with WML. In this paper, we propose an intelligent WAP site management system to cope with these problems. With the help of the intelligent management system, the original contents of HTML Web sites can be automatically translated to proper WAP content in an efficient way. As a consequence, the costs associated with maintaining WAP sites could be significantly reduced. The management system also allows the system manager to define the relevance of numerals and keywords for removing unimportant or meaningless contents. The original contents will be reduced and reorganized to fit the size of mobile phone screens, thus reducing the communication cost and enhancing readability. Numerical results gained through various experiments have evinced the effective performance of the WAP management system.     

IDUTC: an intelligent decision-making system for urbantraffic-control applications

The design of systems for intelligent control of urban traffic is important in providing a safe environment for pedestrians and motorists. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) (learning systems) and expert systems (knowledge-based systems) have been extensively explored as approaches for decision-making. While the ANNs compute decisions by learning from successfully solved examples, the expert systems rely on a knowledge base developed by human reasoning for decision making. It is possible to integrate the learning abilities of an ANN and the knowledge-based decision-making ability of the expert system. This paper presents a real-time intelligent decision-making system, IDUTC, for urban traffic control applications. The system integrates a backpropagation-based ANN that can learn and adapt to the dynamically changing environment and a fuzzy expert system for decision-making. The performance of the proposed intelligent decision-making system is evaluated by mapping the adaptable traffic light control problem. The application is implemented using the ANN approach, the FES approach, and the proposed integrated system approach. The results of extensive simulations using the three approaches indicate that the integrated system provides better performance and leads to a more efficient implementation than the other two approaches     

Extensions of an integrated approach for multi-resource shop scheduling

In a previous work, we proposed an integrated approach for a rather general shop scheduling problem, with multiresource, flexibility, and nonlinear routings. In this paper, we want to overcome some of the limitations of the approach. In particular, an operation that needs several resources might not need all the resources during its entire processing time. Our first extension allows a resource to be released before the end of the operation. The second extension considers the fact that, for a given operation, one might have to prevent a set of incompatible resources to be chosen.     

Tax optimization in an agent-based model of real-time spectrum secondary market

The wireless communication industry is an essential sector boosting economic progress worldwide. The structure of the legacy wireless communication market, characterised by static licensing schemes, is moving towards real-time secondary spectrum markets. While the technological body of spectrum trading has been discussed in detail, from an economic perspectives there are still a lot of gaps in understanding how these transactions affect the economy of future communication standards. A challenging aspect of the real-time spectrum market deployment is the implementation of the appropriate tax system that impacts the market structure. With regards to this, we aim to build an agent-based model of the real-time secondary spectrum market in which various taxes including value-added tax, corporate tax, consumption tax and fixed tax, are employed. The relations between selected tax type rates and the hypothetical revenue of the national regulator is established using Laffer curves. The results of the analysis confirm the existence of a tax distortion, i.e. a system deviation from the efficient system functioning affected by the tax introduction. To measure the complexity of the tax strategies and the emergent tax distortion, an original approach based on Euclidean metrics defined over a vector space of the system performance indicators was proposed. This approach was later applied in parallel with the traditional Harberger’s triangle methodology. We found that the constrained optimisation with the tax distortion restrictions provide satisfactory results regarding the stability of the tax distortion measure. Therefore, we propose the application of the most effective corporate tax optimisation complemented by selected additional tax types.     

Development of an intelligent design tool for non-stoichiometric compound devices: an example

In this paper, we discuss the idea of intelligent design of thin film CIGS solar cell, and we focus on the methodology of material design. We first introduce the calculation of the neutral defect concentrations of non-stoichiometric CuInSe₂, CuGaSe₂ and ZnO under specific atomic chemical potential conditions, and predict the formation of the order defect compound using the concept of minimization of total free energy, which includes the configurational entropy. This calculation is the main procedure in the material design and the key to the device design and process design. We then calculate the carrier concentrations using multi-level defect statistics and mobilities of these materials of different constitutions. The functions of the intelligent design tool are demonstrated.     

Development of an eddy-current-type magnetic floor hinge

A magnetic floor hinge is suggested to use a magnetic damping characteristic obtained by the eddy-current effect. It has a superior advantages compared to the conventional hydraulic floor hinge. First, there exists no wear in the magnetic damper since the disk rotates between the magnets without contact. Second, the deviation of the damping torque is very small in varying seasons due to the low temperature dependence of the conductivity of the disk to which the magnetic damping torque is proportional. The analytical models obtained for the damping torque and the recovering torque are experimentally investigated. The cost optimal design is carried out using the analytical models while satisfying the performance requirements. The analytical results are compared with experimental results. Finally, a prototype of the magnetic floor hinge is built.     

一种指纹锁电量智能检测及充电装置的设计

随着科学技术与经济的快速发展,以及智能家居的不断升级,这种在打开方式上完全不同于机械锁的集指纹、密码与人脸识别于一体的智能锁逐渐得到了现代人们的青睐。文章论述了一种指纹锁电量智能检测及充电装置的设计,首先通过磁性触点机构的闭合来连通充电电路,接着利用电量检测芯片检测可充电电池的电量,然后将检测结果与低电压阈值比较判断是否需要智能充电,从而解决指纹锁长久稳定供电的问题。     

一种智能化排课算法的设计

针对遗传算法容易陷入早熟收敛,无法自适应具有NP难度的多种约束条件下的排课问题,提出了一种基于量子进化算法的智能化排课算法。对排课的冲突要素和约束条件进行定义,构建了排课模型。引入量子进化算法,基于班级、时间元集合的向量矩阵构造了量子染色体,基于软约束条件的最优解设计了适应度函数,基于量子进化算法的计算框架设计了排课算法。实验表明文中算法具有智能性,能够根据开课任务自动生成排课方案,而且排课的质量和效率都优于文中的对比算法。     

QL-STCT：一种SDN链路故障智能路由收敛方法

针对软件定义网络（SDN）链路故障发生时的路由收敛问题,提出了Q-Learning子拓扑收敛技术（QL-STCT）实现软件定义网络链路故障时的路由智能收敛。首先,选取网络中的部分节点作为枢纽节点,依据枢纽节点进行枢纽域的划分。然后,以枢纽域为单位构建区域特征,利用特征提出强化学习智能体探索策略来加快强化学习收敛。最后,通过强化学习构建子拓扑网络用于规划备用路径,并保证在周期窗口内备用路径的性能。实验仿真结果表明,所提方法能够有效提高链路故障网络的收敛速度与性能。     

iVoIP: an intelligent bandwidth management scheme for VoIP in WLANs

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been widely used by many mobile consumer devices in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLAN) due to its low cost and convenience. However, delays of all VoIP flows dramatically increase when network capacity is approached. Additionally, unfair traffic distribution between downlink and uplink flows in WLANs impacts the perceived VoIP quality. This paper proposes an intelligent bandwidth management scheme for VoIP services (iVoIP) that improves bandwidth utilization and provides fair downlink–uplink channel access. iVoIP is a cross-layer solution which includes two components: (1) iVoIP-Admission Control, which protects the quality of existing flows and increases the utilization of wireless network resources; (2) iVoIP-Fairness scheme, which balances the channel access opportunity between access point (AP) and wireless stations. iVoIP-Admission Control limits the number of VoIP flows based on an estimation of VoIP capacity. iVoIP-Fairness implements a contention window adaptation scheme at AP which uses stereotypes and considers several major quality of service parameters to balance the network access of downlink and uplink flows, respectively. Extensive simulations and real tests have been performed, demonstrating that iVoIP has both very good VoIP capacity estimation and admission control results. Additionally, iVoIP improves the downlink/uplink fairness level in terms of throughput, delay, loss, and VoIP quality.     

LiAS: a reflexive navigation architecture for an intelligent mobilerobot system

In this paper, a complete hierarchical navigation architecture fur applications in real industrial factory environments is presented. An offline global geometrical planner uses a rough CAD-model of the working environment to plan consecutive via-points which the robot must follow. The navigation between the via-points is performed by a two-level online navigation algorithm. It consists of an online planning module combined with a low-level fuzzy logic avoidance behavior which enables the robot to move to the next goal by only specifying its coordinates in even completely a priori unknown and unstructured factory environments. The system includes a docking motion, based on a dynamic guidance technique. A perception fusion module combines information of three different sensors for accurate modeling of the world. The presented navigation method was tested with the mobile robot Leuven Intelligent Autonomous System (LiAS) and it proved to be useful in real world applications     

一种智能车载终端系统设计

现有车载终端只能提供视频服务、网络服务等单一功能,且存在提供的网络服务不能区分不同用户,服务质量不高的问题。设计一种智能车载终端系统,该系统的硬件电路以主控模块为核心,利用大功率的路由模块提供无线网络共享,采用C语言编程实现了上网功能、连接功能、管理功能、查询功能,在无需其他基础设施的情况下即可实现无线网络共享服务、多媒体服务、GPS定位服务以及区分不同用户的功能。测试结果表明,该系统设计合理、使用方便快捷,同时具有功能多样化、无线共享能力强、数据传输速率高、服务质量高的优点。     

The robot as an intelligent interactive machine

The growth of interconnections between mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science, characterized by the term mechatronics, is most obvious for the field of robotics. These interconnections allow an ‘intelligent’ behaviour of a machine, depending on its ability to pick up information about its environment, and to process it in such a way that it reacts according to the situation. In our working environment most often an interaction with a human operator will be necessary or desirable. Subsequently, three robotic projects of the ETH will be presented where this man/machine interaction is, or will be, realized under various intentions and constraints: a table tennis playing robot, a mobile, sensor-supported manipulator, and a cooperating robot.