An integrated approach for rating engineering characteristics’ final importance in product-service system development

Product-service system (PSS) approach has emerged as a competitive strategy to impel manufacturers to offer a set of product and services as a whole. A three-domain PSS conceptual design framework based on quality function deployment (QFD) is proposed in this research. QFD is a widely used design tool considering customer requirements (CRs). Since both product and services influence satisfaction of customer, they should be designed simultaneously. Identification of the critical parameters in these domains plays an important role. Engineering characteristics (ECs) in the functional domain include product-related ECs (P-ECs) and service-related ECs (S-ECs). ECs are identified by translating customer requirements (CRs) in the customer domain. Rating ECs’ importance has a great impact on achieving an optimal PSS planning. The rating problem should consider not only the requirements of customer, but also the requirements of manufacturer. From the requirements of customer, the analytic network process (ANP) approach is integrated in QFD to determine the initial importance weights of ECs considering the complex dependency relationships between and within CRs, P-ECs and S-ECs. In order to deal with the vagueness, uncertainty and diversity in decision-making, the fuzzy set theory and group decision-making technique are used in the super-matrix approach of ANP. From the requirements of manufacturer, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is applied to adjust the initial weights of ECs taking into account business competition and implementation difficulty. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed integrated approach for prioritizing ECs in PSS conceptual design.     

Full-order observer-based actuator fault detection and reduced-order observer-based fault reconstruction for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems

This paper considers observer-based actuator fault detection and reconstruction problems for uncertain nonlinear systems. Based on a kind of full-order observer which is robust to disturbances but sensitive to actuator faults, a single detection observer is constructed to produce a residual which can be used to alarm the occurrence of the actuator faults when at least one actuator fault occurs indeed. The full-order observer is adaptive one because an adaptation law which can adjust the Lipschitz constant of Lipschitz term is introduced. For this reason, the Lipschitz constant can be unknown in our design. After this, a kind of reduced-order observer is developed by choosing a special observer gain matrix. Based on the reduced-order observer, we provide a kind of unknown information estimating method which can be used to not only reconstruct the actuator faults but also estimate the disturbances of the system. In simulation, a real model of the seventh-order aircraft is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

Multi-step prediction error approach for controller performance monitoring

Performance monitoring of model predictive control (MPC) systems has received a great interest from both academia and industry. In recent years some novel approaches for multivariate control performance monitoring have been developed without the requirement of process models or interactor matrices. Among them the prediction error approach has been shown promising, but it is based on single-step prediction and may not be compatible with the MPC objective that is based on multi-step prediction. This paper develops a multi-step prediction error approach for performance monitoring of model predictive control systems, and demonstrates its application in a real industrial MPC performance monitoring and diagnosis problem.     

Dynamical combination of byte level and Sub-Packet level FEC in HARQ mechanism to reduce error recovery overhead on video streaming over wireless networks

Byte level Forward Error Correction (B-FEC) is efficient for recovery from uniform bit errors, but not suitable to handle recovery from burst bit errors. Conversely, Sub-Packet level Forward Error Correction (SP-FEC) can alleviate the problem of large encoding/decoding delay jitter in Packet level Forward Error Correction (P-FEC) to efficiently handle recovery from burst bit errors, but has large error recovery overhead as P-FEC for recovery from uniform bit errors. This paper proposes a dynamic combination of byte level and Sub-Packet level Forward Error Correction (BSP-FEC) in the Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) mechanism to reduce the error recovery overhead. BSP-FEC not only can solve the problems appearing in B-FEC and SP-FEC, but also can get the advantages of B-FEC and SP-FEC in the HARQ mechanism. BSP-FEC replaces the SP-FEC checksum with B-FEC and uses Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) when the network condition deteriorates. BSP-FEC not only utilizes an overhead cost model to dynamically decide the SP-FEC parameter and the B-FEC bit rate according to network conditions, but also utilizes a time constraint model to decide the ARQ retry limit. BSP-FEC dynamically adjusts the FEC redundancy to save bandwidth and improves the Decodable Frame Rate (DFR) and the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the delivered video streaming. Accordingly, BSP-FEC can improve multimedia communication performance to both avoid network congestion and shorten end-to-end delay by decreasing effective packet loss rate and packet recovery overhead. Because of the low packet recovery overhead, furthermore, BSP-FEC allows applications to transmit more application data in networks with limited bandwidth. Considering the compatibility, BSP-FEC is implemented in the application layer as the end-to-end protection method to protect packets from errors in wired/wireless networks. Numerical and simulation experimental results show that BSP-FEC obtains better recovery efficiency with the minimum error recovery overhead.     

Delay distribution based robust H∞ control of networked control systems with uncertainties

Network induced delay in networked control systems (NCS) is inherently non‐uniformly distributed and behaves with multifractal nature. However, such network characteristics have not been well considered in NCS analysis and synthesis. Making use of the information of the statistical distribution of NCS network induced delay, a delay distribution based stochastic model is adopted to link Quality‐of‐Control and network Quality‐of‐Service for NCS with uncertainties. From this model together with a tighter bounding technology for cross terms, H_∞ NCS analysis is carried out with significantly improved stability results. Furthermore, a memoryless H_∞ controller is designed to stabilize the NCS and to achieve the prescribed disturbance attenuation level. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Content-based image authentication: current status, issues, and challenges

With today’s global digital environment, the Internet is readily accessible anytime from everywhere, so does the digital image manipulation software; thus, digital data is easy to be tampered without notice. Under this circumstance, integrity verification has become an important issue in the digital world. The aim of this paper is to present an in-depth review and analysis on the methods of detecting image tampering. We introduce the notion of content-based image authentication and the features required to design an effective authentication scheme. We review major algorithms and frequently used security mechanisms found in the open literature. We also analyze and discuss the performance trade-offs and related security issues among existing technologies.     

信号处理系列课程实验体系建设

从加深对信号处理系列课程的理解并巩固掌握的目的出发,在分析信号处理系列课程配套实验课程的基础上,结合武汉大学国家电工电子实验教学示范中心教改项目,提出基于网络虚拟实验室的基础实验和基于FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array)的项目导向实验,这是两个层次分明又相互打通的信号处理系列课程实验体系,该实验体系在信号处理实验课程方面取得显著的效果。     

基于LDA模型的新闻话题的演化

新闻话题及演化的研究可以帮助人们快速了解和获取新闻内容。提出了一种挖掘新闻话题随时间变化的方法,通过话题抽取和话题关联实现话题的演化。首先应用LDA(Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model)对不同时间段的文集进行话题的自动抽取,话题数目在不同时间段是可变的;计算相邻时间段中任意两个话题的分布距离实现话题的关联。实验结果证明该方法不但可以描述同一个话题随时间的演化过程,还可以描述话题内容随时间的变化,反映了话题(或子话题)之间多对多的演化关系。     

Coordination of split deliveries in one-warehouse multi-retailer distribution systems

In this paper, we consider a distribution system where a warehouse is responsible for replenishing the inventories at multiple retailers by a fleet of vehicles of limited capacity. If a distribution policy of the system involves split deliveries, that is, the inventory of at least one retailer is replenished by using multiple vehicle routes, the coordination of the deliveries can further reduce the inventory cost of the retailer. We consider the coordination where two split deliveries are realized by direct shipping and multiple-stop shipping, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this kind of coordination was never studied in the literature but can find its application in inventory routing problems. This paper proposes and analyses a class of coordination policies for the split deliveries which can reduce the inventory costs of the retailers without increasing transportation costs. A non-linear programming model is established for formulating the class of polices. Because the optimal coordination policy corresponding to an optimal solution of the model may be hard to find and/or implement, two simple but effective coordination policies are proposed. The inventory cost savings realized by the two policies are evaluated analytically and algorithmically. Our theoretical analysis and computational experiments show that both policies are effective. Under certain conditions, they can save 50% of the inventory costs at the retailers without increasing transportation costs.     

A new heuristic algorithm for the operating room scheduling problem

Due to the great importance of operating rooms in hospitals, this paper studies an operating room scheduling problem with open scheduling strategy. According to this strategy, no time slot is reserved for a particular surgeon. The surgeons can use all available time slots. Based on Fei et al.’s model which is considered to be close to reality, we develop a heuristic algorithm to solve it. The idea of this heuristic algorithm is from dynamic programming by aggregating states to avoid the explosion of the number of states. The objective of this paper is to design an operating program to maximize the operating rooms’ use efficiency and minimize the overtime cost. Computational results show that our algorithm is efficient, especially for large size instances where our algorithm always finds feasible solutions while the algorithm of Fei et al. does not.