Adaptive fault-tolerant control for a class of flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicles

In this paper, a novel adaptive fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme is proposed for a class of flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with unknown inertial and aerodynamic parameters and even input constraints. The fault model under consideration covers the case that all actuators suffer from unknown time-varying faults. In the controller design and stability analysis, we introduce new Lyapunov functions, some differentiable auxiliary functions, a bound estimation approach, and a Nussbaum function, which help us successfully circumvent the obstacle caused by the faults, input constraints, and flexible modes. In addition to higher reliability, the proposed scheme is able to ensure that all closed-loop signals are globally uniformly bounded and to steer the tracking errors of altitude and velocity into predefined arbitrarily small residual sets. As a result, the tracking accuracy can be designated in advance. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

An output formation consensus control for leader–follower networked multi-agent systems under communication constraints and switching topologies

In this paper, the formation consensus problem for a class of leader–follower networked multi-agent systems under communication constraints and switching topologies is investigated. A networked predictive control scheme is proposed to achieve stability and output formation consensus with the switching topology, capable of compensating for data loss and time delays in the network. By equating the whole closed-loop networked multi-agent system with the proposed control scheme to the corresponding switched system, the sufficient and necessary condition of output formation consensus and stability for agents is given. Finally, using three-degree-of-freedom air-bearing spacecraft simulators as the control objects, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to be able to actively compensate for the communication constraints through numerical simulations, and it is also verified to have a good control performance by further realizing the formation task of the simulators through practical experiments.     

A mathematical model for vehicle routing problem under endogenous uncertainty

In this study, a multistage stochastic programming (SP) model is presented for a variant of single-vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands from a dynamic viewpoint. It is assumed that the actual demand of a customer becomes known only when the customer is visited. This problem falls into the category of SP with endogenous uncertainty and hence, the scenario tree is decision-dependent. Therefore, nonanticipativity of decisions is ensured by conditional constraints making up a large portion of total constraints. Thus, a novel approach is proposed that considerably reduces the problem size without any effect on the solution space. Computational results on some test problems are reported.     

Heuristics for the multi-period orienteering problem with multiple time windows

We present the multi-period orienteering problem with multiple time windows (MuPOPTW), a new routing problem combining objective and constraints of the orienteering problem (OP) and team orienteering problem (TOP), constraints from standard vehicle routing problems, and original constraints from a real-world application. The problem itself comes from a real industrial case. Specific route duration constraints result in a route feasibility subproblem. We propose an exact algorithm for this subproblem, and we embed it in a variable neighborhood search method to solve the whole routing problem. We then provide experimental results for this method. We compare them to a commercial solver. We also adapt our method to standard benchmark OP and TOP instances, and provide comparative tables with state-of-the-art algorithms.     

Min-degree constrained minimum spanning tree problem: New formulation via Miller–Tucker–Zemlin constraints

Given an undirected network with positive edge costs and a positive integer $d>2$, the minimum-degree constrained minimum spanning tree problem is the problem of finding a spanning tree with minimum total cost such that each non-leaf node in the tree has a degree of at least $d$. This problem is new to the literature while the related problem with upper bound constraints on degrees is well studied. Mixed-integer programs proposed for either type of problem is composed, in general, of a tree-defining part and a degree-enforcing part. In our formulation of the minimum-degree constrained minimum spanning tree problem, the tree-defining part is based on the Miller–Tucker–Zemlin constraints while the only earlier paper available in the literature on this problem uses single and multi-commodity flow-based formulations that are well studied for the case of upper degree constraints. We propose a new set of constraints for the degree-enforcing part that lead to significantly better solution times than earlier approaches when used in conjunction with Miller–Tucker–Zemlin constraints.     

An effective heuristic for flexible job-shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities

Most production scheduling problems, including the standard flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP), assume that machines are continuously available. However, in most realistic situations, machines may become unavailable during certain periods due to preventive maintenance (PM). In this paper, a flexible job-shop scheduling problem with machine availability constraints is considered. Each machine is subject to preventive maintenance during the planning period and the starting times of maintenance activities are either flexible in a time window or fixed beforehand. Moreover, two cases of maintenance resource constraint are considered: sufficient maintenance resource available or only one maintenance resource available. To deal with this variant FJSP problem with maintenance activities, a filtered beam search (FBS) based heuristic algorithm is proposed. With a modified branching scheme, the machine availability constraint and maintenance resource constraint can be easily incorporated into the proposed algorithm. Simulation experiments are conducted on some representative problems. The results demonstrate that the proposed filtered beam search based heuristic algorithm is a viable and effective approach for the FJSP with maintenance activities.     

基于约束理论的订单履行系统设计与实现

现有对订单履行系统的研究存在2处不足：订单履行流程被分解为订单允诺和需求满足两方面,鲜有在同一系统框架下展开研究;订单履行实现涉及众多系统的信息,少有研究其体系架构。为解决上述问题,以按照约束理论构建的统一的订单履行流程为核心,以面向服务架构的Web服务集成技术为支撑,设计与实现了整合式的订单履行系统。该系统在某大型企业中获得成功的应用,验证了该流程及体系架构的可行性。     

Hybrid flexible flowshops with sequence-dependent setup times and machine availability constraints

One of the common assumptions in the field of scheduling is that machines are always available in the planning horizon. This may not be true in realistic problems since machines might be busy processing some jobs left from previous production horizon, breakdowns or preventive maintenance activities. Another common assumption is the consideration of setup times as a part of processing times, while in some industries, such as printed circuit board and automobile manufacturing, not only setups are an important factor but also setup magnitude of a job depends on its immediately preceding job on the same machine, known as sequence-dependent setup times. In this paper, we consider hybrid flexible flowshops with sequence-dependent setup times and machine availability constraints caused by preventive maintenance. The optimization criterion is the minimization of makespan. Since this problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, we propose three heuristics, based on SPT, LPT and Johnson rule and two metaheuristics based on genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. Computational experiments are performed to evaluate the efficiencies of the algorithms.     

Time-varying sliding mode control for a class of uncertain MIMO nonlinear system subject to control input constraint

To solve the regulator problem of a class of uncertain MIMO nonlinear systems subject to control input constraint, three types of time-varying sliding mode control laws are proposed. The sliding surfaces pass the initial value of the system at the initial time, and are shifted/rotated towards the predetermined ones. The controller parameters are optimized by genetic algorithm (GA). Lyapunov method is adopted to prove the stability and robustness to the parameter uncertainties and external disturbance. By me...