Distinct element method analysis of a retaining wall using a steel frame and fill materials

A technique is developed to clearly establish the shear resistance of a cellular structure, retaining wall composed of a steel frame and fill materials with both continuous and discontinuous characteristics. To overcome the limitation of the existing analysis approach based on continuum mechanics, in which the shear behavior and interaction between the frames and fill material of this type of structure are difficult to describe, this paper introduces displacement incremental analysis into the distinct element method. The results obtained by using the proposed approach are compared with experimental results to verify its accuracy. The results show an internal friction angle of fill materials and overburdening load are major factor determining the shear resistance of a retaining wall with a cellular structure type. From the results of the parametric study on the shear behavior of this type of structure, this paper also proposes a shear resistance moment-shear displacement formula for designing a retaining wall with a cellular structure type.     

Mesh-free canonical tensor products for six-dimensional density matrix: computation of kinetic energy

The computation of a six-dimensional density matrix is the crucial step for the evaluation of kinetic energy in electronic structure calculations. For molecules with heavy nuclei, one has to consider a very refined mesh in order to deal with the nuclear cusps. This leads to high computational time and needs huge memory for the computation of the density matrix. To reduce the computational complexity and avoid discretization errors in the approximation, we use mesh-free canonical tensor products in electronic structure calculations. In this paper, we approximate the six-dimensional density matrix in an efficient way and then compute the kinetic energy. Accuracy is examined by comparing our computed kinetic energy with the exact computation of the kinetic energy.     

Investigation of the potential of asymptotic homogenization for elastic composites via a three-dimensional computational study

Asymptotic homogenization is employed assuming a sharp length scale separation between the periodic structure (fine scale) and the whole composite (coarse scale). A classical approach yields the linear elastic-type coarse scale model, where the effective elastic coefficients are computed solving fine scale periodic cell problems. We generalize the existing results by considering an arbitrary number of subphases and general periodic cell shapes. We focus on the stress jump conditions arising in the cell problems and explicitly compute the corresponding interface loads. The latter represent a key driving force to obtain nontrivial cell problems solutions whenever discontinuities of the coefficients between the host medium (matrix) and the subphases occur. The numerical simulations illustrate the geometrically induced anisotropy and foster the comparison between asymptotic homogenization and well established Eshelby based techniques. We show that the method can be routinely implemented in three dimensions and should be applied to hierarchical hard tissues whenever the precise shape and arrangement of the subphases cannot be ignored. Our numerical results are benchmarked exploiting the semi-analytical solution which holds for cylindrical aligned fibers.     

Virtual-Point-Based asymptotic tracking control of 4WS vehicles

This paper studies the lateral and longitudinal path tracking control of four-wheel steering vehicles. By the introduction of virtual points, a robust and adaptive path tracking control strategy is proposed to simultaneously counteract modeling uncertainties, unexpected disturbances, and coupling effects. An adaptive model-based feedforward adaptive term and the robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) feedback term can be used to yield an asymptotic tracking result, which improve the tracking performance and reduce the control effort. The stability of closed-loop system is analyzed using a Lyapunov-based method. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller under different driving conditions.     

An online fault tolerant actor-critic neuro-control for a class of nonlinear systems using neural network HJB approach

In this paper, we propose an actor-critic neuro-control for a class of continuous-time nonlinear systems under nonlinear abrupt faults, which is combined with an adaptive fault diagnosis observer (AFDO). Together with its estimation laws, an AFDO scheme, which estimates the faults in real time, is designed based on Lyapunov analysis. Then, based on the designed AFDO, a fault tolerant actor- critic control scheme is proposed where the critic neural network (NN) is used to approximate the value function and the actor NN updates the fault tolerant policy based on the approximated value function in the critic NN. The weight update laws for critic NN and actor NN are designed using the gradient descent method. By Lyapunov analysis, we prove the uniform ultimately boundedness (UUB) of all the states, their estimation errors, and NN weights of the fault tolerant system under the unpredictable faults. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical simulations.     

Stability Analysis of Networked Control Systems based on <Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis><Subscript>p</Subscript> Properties

To handle the communication constraint imposed by the serial communication channel in networked control systems (NCSs), we discuss a popular dynamic scheduling protocol called Maximum-Error-First (MEF) protocol. An important parameter in this protocol is the maximum allowable transmission interval (MATI), which indicates the communication cost for the task of control. To take as large MATI as possible under the constraint of guaranteeing stability is one formalization of the design requirement to consume as little communication resources as possible with the control performances ensured. A method to estimate this parameter based on the ? _p norm is suggested in this paper, which gives larger estimation than some methods do in the literature through simulation examples.     

Multiple-model Rao-Blackwellized particle probability hypothesis density filter for multitarget tracking

Multitarget tracking (MTT) is a frequent topic in visual surveillance systems. Although the multiple-model probability hypothesis density (MM-PHD) filter plays an important role in the MTT, both computerized intractability and imprecise estimate are still inevitable. To solve the problems, a novel filter is presented in this paper. Different from the previous work, the Rao-Blackwellized particle filtering algorithm is incorporated with the MM-PHD filter to reduce computational load, where the sequence Monte Carlo method is adopted to estimate the nonlinear state of targets, and the linear state is predicted using the Kalman filter with the information embedded in the estimated nonlinear state. With respect to tracking precision, we find that the reweighting scheme can be realized for the numberestimate of both undetected targets and false alarms. The result is useful in balancing the required particle number in order to stabilize target estimates during the surveillance period. The illustrative simulation is finally provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed filter.     

Move blocking strategy applied to re-entrant manufacturing line scheduling

Model predictive control (MPC)-based approach to fab-wide scheduling has been suggested to solve constraint-aware production optimization and in-process inventory level control simultaneously at each scheduling instance. However, application of this approach to real fab suffers from computational difficulties brought by the need to solve a huge optimization problem on-line as real fab scheduling problems are characterized by long cycle times, multiple product types, hundreds of machines/processing steps and re-entrant product flows. This study explores the use of an offset-blocking strategy combined with a modified recursive least square (RLS) estimation in the fab-wide scheduler, in order to alleviate the difficulty. The strategy is tested on a modified version of published case study called Intel Mini-Fab (IMF) problem. Despite its simplicity, the blocking strategy showed excellent performance in the face of realistic demand changes and plant/model mismatch.