A Distributed State Estimator Utilizing Synchronized Phasor Measurements

With the creation of balancing authorities by the North American Reliability Council that span large portions of the North American interconnection, and stringent requirements for real time monitoring of power system evolution, faster and more accurate state estimation algorithms that can efficiently handle systems of very large sizes are needed in the present environment. This paper presents a distributed state estimation algorithm suitable for large-scale power systems. Synchronized phasor measurements are applied to aggregate the voltage phase angles of each decomposed subsystem in the distributed state estimation solution. The aggregated state estimation solution is obtained from the distributed solution using a sensitivity analysis based update at chosen boundary buses. Placement of synchronized phasor measurements in the decomposed subsystems is also investigated in this paper. Test results on the IEEE 118-bus test bed are provided     

The hot blow forming of AZ31 Mg sheet: Formability assessment and application development

The hot blow forming of magnesium sheet offers significant opportunity for forming complex, lightweight parts for automotive applications. This paper characterizes the elevated-temperature formability of AZ31 magnesium sheet materials and the effect of processing conditions on the performance of these materials. In addition, magnesium sheet application development at General Motors Corporation is reviewed.     

Simulation of Strength Distribution in Ground Ceramics by Incorporating Residual Stress Effect

Strength of ground ceramics may be affected by residual stress as well as surface flaws induced by grinding. Strength prediction for ground ceramics is convenient for mechanical design of ceramic components. In this article, a numerical procedure based on fracture mechanics was proposed to estimate strength distribution of ground ceramics by considering grinding-induced residual stress. Bending strength and residual stress of ground ceramics were measured for three grinding-conditions. By comparison of simulated results with experimental ones, it was revealed that strength characteristics in experiments were well simulated by using the proposed procedure.     

Study of thermal effects and self-heating phenomena in planar power SOI MOS transistors

Heat removal problems, thermal effects, and self-heating phenomena occurring during operation of planar power SOI MOS transistors are considered. Using device-technological simulating methods, the transistor characteristics and safe operation range were studied. It was shown that limitations of the safe operation range are mostly associated with structure self-heating rather than with the parasitic bipolar transistor.     

Robust Distributed Source Coding

We consider a distributed source coding system in which several observations must be encoded separately and communicated to the decoder by using limited transmission rate. We introduce a robust distributed coding scheme which flexibly trades off between system robustness and compression efficiency. The optimality of this coding scheme is proved for various special cases.     

Adaptive user modelling in intelligent telephone and email assistants

With the burgeoning complexity and capabilities of modern information appliances and services, user modelling is becoming an increasingly important research area. Simple user profiles already personalise many software products and consumer goods such as digital TV recorders and mobile phones. A user model should be easy to initialise, and it must adapt in the light of interaction with the user. In many cases, a large amount of training data is needed to generate a user model, and adaptation is equivalent to retraining the system. This paper briefly outlines the user modelling problem and work done at BTexact on an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) which incorporates a user profile. We go on to describe FILUM, a more flexible method of user modelling, and show its application to the telephone assistant and email assistant components of the IPA, with tests to illustrate its usefulness.     

Cooling and Solidification of Melted Drops in an Immiscible Cooling Medium

The cooling and solidification of melted drops during their movement in an immiscible cooling medium is widely employed for granulation in the chemical industry, and a study of these processes to provides a basis for the design of the granulation tower height and the temperature of the cooling medium is reported. A physical model of the cooling and solidification of the drop is established and the numerical calculation is performed. The influences of the key factors in the solidification, i.e., Bi number, drop diameter, temperature of the cooling medium, etc. are presented. The cooling and solidification during wax granulation in a water‐cooling tower and during urea granulation in an air‐cooling tower (spraying tower) are described in detail. Characteristics of the solidification and temperature distribution within the particle at different times are shown. The model and calculations can be used for structure design of the granulation tower and optimization of the operation parameters.     

Evaluation of ProKappa

ProKappa is an expert system tool kit developed by IntelliCorp in C using X-Windows for graphical interface. The SUN 3 or 4 version costs $9995/£7000 and $2595/£1800 for the interactive C environment.
This review covers ProKappa version 1.1, installed on a colour SUN SPARC Station 1 with the minimum recommended values of 12 Mb of memory and 30 Mb of swap space.
IntelliCorp can be contacted in the USA at 1975 El Camino Real West, Mountain View, CA 94040-2216 (+1 (415) 965-5500) and in the UK at 10 Jewry Street, Winchester, Hampshire SO23 8RZ (+44 (0)962 735348).     

Integration framework for intelligent manufacturing processes

In this article, we describe a new approach to applying distributed artificial intelligence techniques to manufacturing processes. The construction of intelligent systems is one of the most important techniques among artificial intelligence research. Our goal is to develop an integrated intelligent system for real time manufacturing processes. An integrated intelligent system is a large knowledge integration environment that consists of several symbolic reasoning systems (expert systems) and numerical computation packages. These software programs are controlled by a meta-system which manages the selection, operation and communication of these programs. A meta-system can be implemented in different language environments and applied to many disciplines. This new architecture can serve as a universal configuration to develop high performance intelligent systems for many complicated industrial applications in real world domains.To whom all correspondence should be addressed.