A model‐driven decision support system for product risk analysis

Abstract: The paper describes a model‐driven decision support system for risk analysis in product development, based on an European Commission‐funded project. The model can be used to simulate the life cycle of a large batch of products and track products in operation and service phases with consideration of design and manufacturing phases. This provides some useful benefits – in particular, being able to generate composite results when the product life is subject to unpredictable events, which makes the system's behaviour non‐linear. A case study is conducted through a domestic appliance in the field trial from a manufacturing company, and the results indicate that the model can enable developers or manufacturers to understand the behaviour and characteristics of products or systems in the future use and to predict the cost of any changes in the pattern of their life.     

Active time scheduling for rechargeable sensor networks

Recent progress in energy harvesting technologies made it possible to build sensor networks with rechargeable nodes which target an indefinitely long operation. In these networks, the goal of energy management is to allocate the available energy such that the important performance metrics, such as the number of detected threats, are maximized. As the harvested energy is not sufficient for continuous operation, the scheduling of the active and inactive time is one of the main components of energy management. The active time scheduling protocols need to maintain the energy equilibrium of the nodes, while considering the uncertainties of the energy income, which is strongly influenced by the weather, and the energy expenditures, which are dependent on the behavior of the targets. In this paper, we describe and experimentally compare three active time scheduling protocols: (a) static active time, (b) dynamic active time based on a multi-parameter heuristic and (c) utility-based uniform sensing. We show that protocols which take into consideration the probabilistic models of the energy income and expenditure and can dynamically adapt to changes in the environment, can provide a significant performance advantage.     

Evaluation of different disinfection calculation methods using CFD

Computational Fluid Dynamics combined with a particle tracking technique provides valuable information concerning residence times and contact times in chemical reactors. In drinking water treatment, for example an accurate estimation of the disinfection is important to predict the microbial safety. Ozone contactors are widely used for disinfection, but the complex geometry of the system causes suboptimal hydraulics and requires optimizations of the flow. This results in a lower ozone dosage, which may reduce the formation of unwanted disinfection-by-products and the consumption of energy. To that end disinfection needs to be calculated precisely, accounting for the complex hydraulics. Several calculation methods estimating the disinfection performance of ozone contactors were evaluated using Computational Fluid Dynamics. For an accurate disinfection prediction, the full distribution of ozone exposures (CT values) is needed, only a mean CT value or residence time distribution provides insufficient information for an accurate disinfection prediction. Adjustments to the geometry of the ozone contactor that reduce the short-circuit flows resulted in an increase in disinfection capacity, whereas the mean CT value remained the same. A sensitivity analysis with respect to the kinetics was conducted. The gain in disinfection capacity obtained by optimizing the hydraulics was significant for typical values used in practice.     

Two hybrid differential evolution algorithms for engineering design optimization

This paper presents two hybrid differential evolution algorithms for optimizing engineering design problems. One hybrid algorithm enhances a basic differential evolution algorithm with a local search operator, i.e., random walk with direction exploitation, to strengthen the exploitation ability, while the other adding a second metaheuristic, i.e., harmony search, to cooperate with the differential evolution algorithm so as to produce the desirable synergetic effect. For comparison, the differential evolution algorithm that the two hybrids are based on is also implemented. All algorithms incorporate a generalized method to handle discrete variables and Deb's parameterless penalty method for handling constraints. Fourteen engineering design problems selected from different engineering fields are used for testing. The test results show that: (i) both hybrid algorithms overall outperform the differential evolution algorithms; (ii) among the two hybrid algorithms, the cooperative hybrid overall outperforms the other hybrid with local search; and (iii) the performance of proposed hybrid algorithms can be further improved with some effort of tuning the relevant parameters.     

Mining Web navigation patterns with a path traversal graph

Understanding the navigational behaviour of website visitors is a significant factor of success in the emerging business models of electronic commerce and even mobile commerce. However, Web traversal patterns obtained by traditional Web usage mining approaches are ineffective for the content management of websites. They do not provide the big picture of the intentions of the visitors. The Web navigation patterns, termed throughout-surfing patterns (TSPs) as defined in this paper, are a superset of Web traversal patterns that effectively display the trends toward the next visited Web pages in a browsing session. TSPs are more expressive for understanding the purposes of website visitors. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of throughout-surfing patterns and then present an efficient method for mining the patterns. We propose a compact graph structure, termed a path traversal graph, to record information about the navigation paths of website visitors. The graph contains the frequent surfing paths that are required for mining TSPs. In addition, we devised a graph traverse algorithm based on the proposed graph structure to discover the TSPs. The experimental results show the proposed mining method is highly efficient to discover TSPs.     

Accelerating the kernel-method-based feature extraction procedure from the viewpoint of numerical approximation

The kernel method suffers from the following problem: the computational efficiency of the feature extraction procedure is inversely proportional to the size of the training sample set. In this paper, from a novel viewpoint, we propose a very simple and mathematically tractable method to produce the computationally efficient kernel-method-based feature extraction procedure. We first address the issue that how to make the feature extraction result of the reformulated kernel method well approximate that of the naïve kernel method. We identify these training samples that statistically contribute much to the feature extraction results and exploit them to reformulate the kernel method to produce the computationally efficient kernel-method-based feature extraction procedure. Indeed, the proposed method has the following basic idea: when one training sample has little effect on the feature extraction result and statistically has the high correlation with regard to all the training samples, the feature extraction term associated with this training sample can be removed from the feature extraction procedure. The proposed method has the following advantages: First, it proposes, for the first time, to improve the kernel method through formal and reasonable evaluation on the feature extraction term. Second, the proposed method improves the kernel method at a low extra cost and thus has a much more computationally efficient training phase than most of the previous improvements to the kernel method. The experimental comparison shows that the proposed method performs well in classification problems. This paper also intuitively shows the geometrical relation between the identified training samples and other training samples.     

室性早搏的多模板匹配自适应识别算法

为实现室性早搏的自动判别,提出一种基于多模板匹配的自适应识别算法。采用滤波提高数据信噪比,利用样本数据通过特定的自学习机制建立模板库,设计模板的压缩算法实现待测心搏与模板心搏宽度的对齐,采用模板队列匹配和模板库匹配相结合的匹配策略,设计自适应更新规则实时优化队列与库的结构,利用相关系数检测室早。使用MIT-BIH数据库进行测试,达到99.39%的灵敏度和98.79%的特异度。     

分布式视频编码虚拟依赖信道模型研究

视频信息固有的非平稳特性,如冲突区域等,使时域预测技术变得非常复杂.在分布式视频编码(DVC)中,由于解码端不能获取当前编码帧的信息,精确地对时域相关噪声进行建模变得更为困难.文中以虚拟依赖信道模型为切入点对如何降低时域相关噪声进行了研究.首先对DVC虚拟依赖信道进行了建模,并对影响边信息的主要因素进行了分析,分析结果表明在变换域中不同的频率子带对时域相关噪声的敏感度不同.在此基础上提出了一种新的基于小波变换域的虚拟依赖信道模型VCMDWT,基于分类编码的思想对较为平稳的LL子带进行Wyner-Ziv编码,对非平稳的高频子带进行SPIHT帧内编码.实验结果表明,与基于像素域的方法相比,所提出的VCMDWT模型能够得到更稳定的虚拟信道,提高DVC系统的率失真性能达到2.6dBs以上.     

An improved lossless data hiding scheme based on image VQ-index residual value coding

Copyright protection and information security have become serious problems due to the ever growing amount of digital data over the Internet. Reversible data hiding is a special type of data hiding technique that guarantees not only the secret data but also the cover media can be reconstructed without any distortion. Traditional schemes are based on spatial, discrete cosine transformation (DCT) and discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) domains. Recently, some vector quantization (VQ) based reversible data hiding schemes have been proposed. This paper proposes an improved reversible data hiding scheme based on VQ-index residual value coding. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms two recently proposed schemes, namely side-match vector quantization (SMVQ)-based data hiding and modified fast correlation vector quantization (MFCVQ)-based data hiding.     

An expert system using rough sets theory for aided conceptual design of ship’s engine room automation

More and more complicated conceptual design of ship’s engine room (CDSER) heavily depends on designers’ engineering knowledge and existing ship data. To achieve intelligent design at the initial ship design stage, many researchers have made much significant progress in this field, however, most of them only focused on how to find the similar constructed ships. At present, how to utilize these existing data remains an untouched topic. In order to make good use of the existing data and reduce the dependence on designers’ experience, a novel system named Expert System for Aided Conceptual Design of Ship’s Engine Room Automation (ESACD), is elaborated in this study. With the support of the constructed Ship Data Warehouse System, two core subsystems Configuration Selection Assistant (CSA) and Design Scheme Decision Assistant (DSDA) are included in ESACD. A promising approach integrating Fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM) and Rough Sets Theory (RST) to extract configuration rules from the stored data is adopted in CSA. According to engineers’ proposals, RST is utilized to reason knowledge in incomplete scheme information systems for getting design scheme rules in DSDA, which are useful suggestions for engineers to get better schemes at this stage. Finally, the validity and necessity of this interactive expert system are demonstrated through the CDSER of a new 50,000 DWT Handymax bulk carrier. It is proved that ESACD can efficiently facilitate rapid and intelligent design in CDSER, and reduce the cost of a new ship design.