Simulation of water allocation and salt movement in the root zone

This paper is concerned with the simulation of the water allocation and salt movement in the root zone of a particular crop. A mathematical model of four ordinary differential equations is developed. The model performs water balance and salt balance in unsaturated and saturated regions of the root zone. It is a lumped input and lumped parameter conceptual model, which considers the average soil moisture and salt concentration in the root zone. The equations are solved numerically over the time period of the growing season. Precipitation and irrigation water are treated as inputs.The analyzed results indicate that, for the shallow water table case, the water table elevation has an important effect on the soil moisture depletion dynamics of the unsaturated zone. An appreciable amount of water from the saturated zone is transferred through capillary rise to the unsaturated zone particularly in the case of sandy loam soils. It was found that the water table elevation varies significantly during the growing season.The salt movement simulation indicates a salt concentration build up in the unsaturated zone during the growing season. Contours of equal crop yield reduction as a function of the unsaturated zone initial salt concentration and the irrigation water salt concentration are obtained.The model was tested with data from the Mashtul Pilot Area in Egypt and its performance was satisfactory.     

Minimising maximum response time

The minmax response time problem (mRTP) is a scheduling problem that has recently appeared in the literature and can be considered as a fair sequencing problem. This kind of problems appears in a wide range of real-world applications in mixed-model assembly lines, computer systems, periodic maintenance and others. The mRTP arises whenever products, clients or jobs need to be sequenced in such a way that the maximum time between the points at which they receive the necessary resources is minimised. The mRTP has been solved in the literature with a greedy heuristic. The objective of this paper is to improve the solution of this problem by means of exact and heuristic methods. We propose one mixed integer linear programming model, nine local search procedures and five metaheuristic algorithms. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to test them.     

Erratum to “A solution procedure for type E simple assembly line balancing problem”

The objective of SALBP-E is to minimize the product on the number of workstations by the cycle time. Recently Wei and Chao [Comput. Ind. Eng. 61 (2011) 824–830] have proposed an exact procedure for solving this problem. It is based on solving iteratively SALBP-2 by means of a MILP model. SALBP-E has not been much studied and hence the high interest of their work. However, the article has several errors that make its understanding harder and, moreover, impede the correct implementation of their procedure for solving SALBP-E. Therefore, it is important to correct them.     

Automatic normalization of short texts by combining statistical and rule-based techniques

Short texts are typically composed of small number of words, most of which are abbreviations, typos and other kinds of noise. This makes the noise to signal ratio relatively high for this specific category of text. A high proportion of noise in the data is undesirable for analysis procedures as well as machine learning applications. Text normalization techniques are used to reduce the noise and improve the quality of text for processing and analysis purposes. In this work, we propose a combination of statistical and rule-based techniques to normalize short texts. More specifically, we focus our attention on SMS messages. We base our normalization approach on a statistical machine translation system which translates from noisy data to clean data. This system is trained on a small manually annotated set. Then, we study several automatic methods to extract more general rules from the normalizations generated with the statistical machine translation system. We illustrate the proposed methodology by conducting some experiments with a SMS Haitian-Créole data collection. In order to evaluate the performance of our methodology we use several Haitian-Créole dictionaries, the well-known perplexity criteria and the achieved reduction of vocabulary.     

On passivity-based output feedback global stabilization of euler-lagrange systems

It is well known that in systems described by Euler-Lagrange equations the stability of the equilibria is determined by the potential energy function. Further, these equilibria are asymptotically stable if suitable damping is present in the system. These properties motivated the development of a passivity-based controller design methodology which aims at modifying the potential energy of the closed loop and the addition of the required dissipation. To achieve the latter objective measurement of the generalized velocities is typically required. Our main contribution in this paper is the proof that damping injection without velocity measurement is possible via the inclusion of a dynamic extension provided the system satisfies a dissipation propggation condition. This allows us to determine a class of Euler-Lagrange systems that can be globally asymptotically stabilized with dynamic output feedback. We illustrate this result with the problem of set-point control of elastic joints robots. Our research contributes, if modestly, to the development of a theory for stabilization of nonlinear systems with physical structures which effectively exploits its energy dissipation properties.     

Vector potential formulations and finite element trial functions

In field systems containing a divergenceless vector, the problem may be posed in terms of a vector potential for convenience. For the solution of the magnetic vector potential in three dimensional problems with current sources, there exist three standard variational formulations in the literature. While all these are known to give verifiable physical solutions, there is some question as to which is to be preferred. Indeed, one of them is invalid for infinite dimensional fields in that, without the finite element trial functions, it will not give unique solutions since it does not explicitly impose the divergence of the vector potential. In this paper, we look at the formulations in the light of the restrictions imposed by the finite element trial functions for tetrahedral elements and arrive at the curious result that that formulation which is totally invalid when the vector potential is unrestricted by trial functions, is in fact valid in finite element analysis and, at the same time, is the best. We further show that this formulation yields naturally non-divergent vector potential solutions, strictly as a result of the trial functions.     

Manipulator motion control in operational space using joint velocity inner loops

This paper addresses the operational space motion control—trajectory tracking—of robot manipulators endowed with joint velocity feedback inner loops. A general structure for model-based joint velocity controllers is proposed for the inner loop. The required joint velocity reference is provided by an outer loop inspired from the robot kinematic control approach. It is shown that above two-loops control schemes lead to a nice cascade structure for the corresponding closed-loop systems. A stability result adapted for analysis of this particular kind of systems is developed in the paper; sufficient conditions for global exponential stability of this class of cascade systems are obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed control approach is evaluated on a direct-drive mechanical arm, and compared with a typical control strategy based on inverse kinematics resolution for computation of the desired motion in joint space, and the use of the computed-torque technique. The experimental evidences show better performance of the proposed two-loops controller.     

Tactile sensors based on conductive polymers

This paper presents results from a selection of tactile sensors that have been designed and fabricated. These sensors are based on a common approach that consists in placing a sheet of piezoresistive material on the top of a set of electrodes. We use a thin film of conductive polymer as the piezoresistive material. Specifically, a conductive water-based ink of this polymer is deposited by spin-coating on a flexible plastic sheet, giving it a smooth, homogeneous and conducting thin film. The main interest in this procedure is that it is cheap and it allows the fabrication of flexible and low cost tactile sensors. In this work, we present results from sensors made using two technologies. Firstly, we have used a flexible printed circuit board (PCB) technology to fabricate the set of electrodes and addressing tracks. The result is a simple, flexible tactile sensor. In addition to these sensors on PCB, we have proposed, designed and fabricated sensors with screen-printing technology. In this case, the set of electrodes and addressing tracks are made by printing an ink based on silver nanoparticles. The exhaustive characterization provides us insights into the design of these tactile sensors.     

An HTTP/2 Push-Based Approach for Low-Latency Live Streaming with Super-Short Segments

Over the last years, streaming of multimedia content has become more prominent than ever. To meet increasing user requirements, the concept of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has recently been introduced. In HAS, video content is temporally divided into multiple segments, each encoded at several quality levels. A rate adaptation heuristic selects the quality level for every segment, allowing the client to take into account the observed available bandwidth and the buffer filling level when deciding the most appropriate quality level for every new video segment. Despite the ability of HAS to deal with changing network conditions, a low average quality and a large camera-to-display delay are often observed in live streaming scenarios. In the meantime, the HTTP/2 protocol was standardized in February 2015, providing new features which target a reduction of the page loading time in web browsing. In this paper, we propose a novel push-based approach for HAS, in which HTTP/2’s push feature is used to actively push segments from server to client. Using this approach with video segments with a sub-second duration, referred to as super-short segments, it is possible to reduce the startup time and end-to-end delay in HAS live streaming. Evaluation of the proposed approach, through emulation of a multi-client scenario with highly variable bandwidth and latency, shows that the startup time can be reduced with 31.2% compared to traditional solutions over HTTP/1.1 in mobile, high-latency networks. Furthermore, the end-to-end delay in live streaming scenarios can be reduced with 4 s, while providing the content at similar video quality.