Recovery of sensor embedded washing machines using a multi-kanban controlled disassembly line

Product recovery involves the recovery of materials and components from returned or end-of-life products. Disassembly, an element of product recovery, is the systematic separation of an assembly into its components, subassemblies or other groupings. Stricter environmental regulations together with dramatic decrease in natural resources and landfills have increased the importance of disassembly as all product recovery options require some level of disassembly. Due to changes made during the lifetime of a product by customers or service personnel, the number and the version of components prior to disassembly is unknown. Customers may also discriminate between and demand different versions of components. The existence of non-functional components further adds to the uncertainty associated with disassembly yield. Sensors implanted into products during their production can address this uncertainty by providing information on the number, condition and version of components prior to disassembly. In this study, we evaluate the impact of sensor embedded products (SEPs) on the various performance measures of a washing machine (WM) disassembly line controlled by a multi-kanban system, which takes into consideration the highly stochastic behavior of the line while managing material and kanban flows. First, separate design of experiments studies based on orthogonal arrays are performed for conventional products and SEPs. In order to observe the response of each experiment, detailed discrete event simulation (DES) models for both types of products are developed considering the precedence relationships among the components of a WM. Then, pair-wise t-tests are conducted to compare the two cases based on different performance measures. According to the results, SEPs provide significant reductions in all costs (viz., backorder, holding, disassembly, disposal, testing and transportation) while increasing revenue and profit.     

Numerical method using cubic B-spline for the heat and wave equation

In the present paper, the cubic B-splines method is considered for solving one-dimensional heat and wave equations. A typical finite difference approach had been used to discretize the time derivative while the cubic B-spline is applied as an interpolation function in the space dimension. The accuracy of the method for both equations is discussed. The efficiency of the method is illustrated by some test problems. The numerical results are found to be in good agreement with the exact solution.     

Fault tolerant machine learning for nanoscale cognitive radio

We introduce a machine learning-based classifier that identifies free radio channels for cognitive radio. The architecture is designed for nanoscale implementation, under nanoscale implementation constraints; we do not describe all physical details but believe future physical implementation to be feasible. The system uses analog computation and consists of cyclostationary feature extraction and a radial basis function network for classification. We describe a model for nanoscale faults in the system, and simulate experimental performance and fault tolerance in recognizing WLAN signals, under different levels of noise and computational errors. The system performs well under expected non-ideal manufacturing and operating conditions.     

A compensation cost analysis of service-aggregate transaction for DTNs clients

Clients from Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) might encounter overtime exceptions when they aggregate autonomic commercial web service references to form an all-or-nothing transaction. Such exceptions may cause extra overhead—“compensation cost” when aborting transactions. Regarding the delay-related characteristics of DTNs, this paper models the expected compensation cost (ECC) for the schedulings of commit-requests, presents a calculability analysis for quantitative ECC prediction, and explores the limitation of ECC’s probabilistic prediction accordingly. The analysis is based on the timed-2PC plus compensation (t2PC+) protocol and the multi-step price tag pattern, which is verified conditionally by simulation tests through randomly-chosen severely-fluctuant samplings of compensation cost and delays. The ultimate target of this work is to demonstrate the high complexity, and in particular, the uncertainty of ECC predictions due to the randomicity of DTNs’ delays.     

A systematic approach to improve multiple Lyapunov function stability and stabilization conditions for fuzzy systems

This paper presents a systematic approach for decreasing conservativeness in stability analysis and control design for Takagi-Sugeno (TS) systems. This approach is based on the idea of multiple Lyapunov functions together with simple techniques for introducing slack matrices. Unlike some previous approaches based on multiple Lyapunov functions, both the stability and the stabilization conditions are written as linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems. The proposed approach reduces the number of inequalities and guarantees extra degrees of freedom to the LMI problems. Numeric examples illustrate the effectiveness of this method.     

Geometrically non-linear behavior of structural systems with random material property: An asymptotic spectral stochastic approach

An asymptotic spectral stochastic approach is presented for computing the statistics of the equilibrium path in the post-bifurcation regime for structural systems with random material properties. The approach combines numerical implementation of Koiter’s asymptotic theory with a stochastic Galerkin scheme and collocation in stochastic space to quantify uncertainties in the parametric representation of the load–displacement relationship, specifically in the form of uncertain post-buckling slope, post-buckling curvature, and a family of stochastic displacement fields. Using the proposed method, post-buckling response statistics for two plane frames are obtained and shown to be in close agreement with those obtained from Monte Carlo simulation, provided a fine enough spectral representation is used to model the variability in the random dimension.     

Stability analysis of discrete-time switched systems: a switched homogeneous Lyapunov function method

This paper addresses the stability issue of discrete-time switched systems with guaranteed dwell-time. The approach of switched homogeneous Lyapunov function of higher order is formally proposed. By means of this approach, a necessary and sufficient condition is established to check the exponential stability of the considered system. With the observation that switching signal is actually arbitrary if the dwell time is one sample time, a necessary and sufficient condition is also presented to verify the exponential stability of switched systems under arbitrary switching signals. Using the augmented argument, a necessary and sufficient exponential stability criterion is given for discrete-time switched systems with delays. A numerical example is provided to show the advantages of the theoretical results.     

基于平行截面上轮廓之间重构问题的研究

研究了基于平行截面上两多边形轮廓重构的基本问题,给出了利用体积最大化作为度量标准来求得一个"较好"并且合法的重构的目标函数,然后得出:其中一个多边形轮廓在其所在的截面上沿着法向平移、在截面内平移和在截面内等比例缩放都不影响最大化体积后的结果。该结论对于三维实体的可视化和几何造型领域具有重要的实用价值。