A systematic literature review on intelligent automation: Aligning concepts from theory,practice, and future perspectives

With the recent developments in robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), academics and industrial practitioners are now pursuing robust and adaptive decision making (DM) in real-life engineering applications and automated business workflows and processes to accommodate context awareness, adaptation to environment and customisation. The emerging research via RPA, AI and soft computing offers sophisticated decision analysis methods, data-driven DM and scenario analysis with regard to the consideration of decision choices and provides benefits in numerous engineering applications. The emerging intelligent automation (IA) – the combination of RPA, AI and soft computing – can further transcend traditional DM to achieve unprecedented levels of operational efficiency, decision quality and system reliability. RPA allows an intelligent agent to eliminate operational errors and mimic manual routine decisions, including rule-based, well-structured and repetitive decisions involving enormous data, in a digital system, while AI has the cognitive capabilities to emulate the actions of human behaviour and process unstructured data via machine learning, natural language processing and image processing. Insights from IA drive new opportunities in providing automated DM processes, fault diagnosis, knowledge elicitation and solutions under complex decision environments with the presence of context-aware data, uncertainty and customer preferences. This sophisticated review attempts to deliver the relevant research directions and applications from the selected literature to the readers and address the key contributions of the selected literature, IA’s benefits, implementation considerations, challenges and potential IA applications to foster the relevant research development in the domain.     

A maximum self-esteem degree based feedback mechanism for group consensus reaching with the distributed linguistic trust propagation in social network

This paper focuses on consensus reaching process (CRP) under social network in which the trust relationship expressed by linguistic information. A new feedback mechanism in social network group decision making (SN-GDM) is proposed, which mainly consists of the following two aspects: (1) The propagation of distributed linguistic trust is investigated to study trust relation among experts; (2) A maximum self-esteem degree based feedback mechanism is developed to produce personalized advice for reaching higher group consensus. To do so, a novel linguistic trust propagation method is proposed to obtain the complete trust relationship among group. The self-esteem degree is used to define the extent that an individual makes concessions. Then, a maximum self-esteem degree based optimal feedback mechanism is built to produce personalized advice to help inconsistent experts make change of their opinion. Its novelty lies in the establishment of an optimization model with the nonlinear group self-esteem degree function as the objective function while group consensus threshold as the restrictions. Therefore, the inconsistent experts will reach a group consensus with the minimum loss of self-esteem degree, and then, it achieves the optimal balance between individual self-esteem and group consensus. Finally, a ranking process is applied to derive the appropriate consensus solution.     

氯盐干湿循环作用下混凝土力学性能与孔结构变化研究

为探究淡水区和氯盐环境下干湿循环对混凝土构件的影响差异,分别模拟了无氯盐和有氯盐作用的干湿循环环境,测试干湿循环前后混凝土的抗压强度、动弹模量、微观孔结构参数及孔径分布情况,比较了宏微观指标变化程度。结果表明,两种干湿循环作用均对混凝土抗压强度有少许增强作用,微观表现为孔隙率的减小;两种干湿循环均会降低混凝土的动弹模量,使混凝土内部出现损伤,微观表现为混凝土孔径分布情况变差,特别是大孔含量有增加。一般干湿循环会使混凝土抗渗性增强,氯盐干湿循环会降低混凝土抗渗性,微观表现为一般干湿循环后混凝土临界孔径减小,而氯盐干湿循环后,混凝土临界孔径增大。     

应对长江口咸潮入侵的临界流量经验模型研究

1994年以来,长江口咸潮入侵严重威胁当地供水安全,随着长江上游水库群陆续建成,有关部门提出了通过上游水库群压咸调度保障长江口地区供水安全的方案。为明确压咸调度的目标流量(即临界流量),基于统计分析的方法,采用多元回归分析和主成分分析方法,选取实测站点数据建立了盐度-潮差-入海流量的相关关系统计模型,研究了咸潮发生的机理;通过模型分析多次咸潮入侵数据,确定临界流量为一个变化值,潮差290～335 cm下的临界流量在9 390～21 633 m³/s之间。研究表明,当长江口咸潮入侵时,单独依靠长江上游水库调度压咸所需的流量大,响应时间长,压咸效果不明显。因此,实际压咸调度应通过流域整体调度与本地蓄淡避咸水库共同作用应对咸潮入侵。     

不完备系统多准则决策的云PDR方法

针对多准则决策问题的意义以及经典粗糙集方法在不完备系统方案排序问题中的不足,在前人基于概率优势关系(PDR)排序方法的基础上,结合云理论提出了基于云概率优势关系的不完备系统多准则决策方法,即云PDR排序法。将期望、熵、超熵等参数引入PDR方法,充分考虑了决策的模糊性、波动性和随机性,评价过程和结果更加客观全面。以煤炭资源型城市为例进行应用研究,获得其中各城市发展水平及其波动情况的排序,并通过与其他方法结果的比较验证了本文方法的优势与有效性。     

Effect of surface modification of metal hydride electrode on performance of MH/Ni batteries

A novel method was applied to the surface modification of the metal hydride(MH)electrode of MH/Ni batteries.Both sides of the electrode were plated with a thin silver film about 0.1μm thick using vacuum evaporation plating technology,and the effect of the electrode on the performance of MH/Ni batteries was examined.It is found that the surface modification can enhance the electrode conductivity and decrease the battery ohimic resistance.After surface modification,the discharge capacity at 5C(7.5A)is increased by 212 mA.h and the discharge voltage is increased by 0.11 V,the resistance of the batteries is also decreased by 32%.The batteries with modified electrode exhibit satisfactory durability.The remaining capacity of the modified batteries is 89%of the initial capacity even after 500 cycles.The inner pressure of the batteries during overcharging is lowered and the charging efficiency of the batteries is improved.     

Case‐based approach for supporting strategy decision making

The practice of strategy decision making proves that when the management board is strongly limited in its capacity to take rational actions, specifically in the context of great decision complexity and uncertainty, it is considered good practice to refer to experience through reasoning by analogy. In this paper, we would like to concentrate on supporting strategic decisions in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The complexity of analogy‐based reasoning has its roots in an attempt to solve new problems based on past cases from a different domain, while we will focus on case‐based approach for a single domain. Additionally, we have chosen case‐based reasoning as a suitable decision‐making paradigm because it is corresponds to managers’ decision‐making behaviour. We present the STRATEGOS case‐based reasoning system for supporting strategic decision making by SMEs management boards and then the system evaluation by the dozens of chief executive officers (CEOs) from SMEs is presented. The results of the survey are promising and show the remarkable correspondence of the proposed solution with expectations and strategic behaviour of CEOs.     

An integrated DEMATEL and Fuzzy ANP techniques for evaluation and selection of outsourcing provider for a telecommunication company

In recent years, strategy aspects related to core competency, risk analysis and organizational flexibility especially have been growing. This trend has led researchers and industries to become more interested in the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models for selecting outsourcing providers. The efficiency of decision-making mostly depends on the ability of decision-makers analyzing the complex cause and effect relationship between criteria and taking effective actions based on the analysis. Using an analytical method to select the most eligible outsourcing provider is significant for a company which desires to improve its competitiveness. In this study, a fuzzy integrated multi-criteria decision making method for evaluation and determination of an outsourcing provider for a telecommunication company is analyzed by using DEMATEL and Fuzzy ANP multi-criteria decision making techniques. First, DEMATEL method is used in order to put forward the interrelationship among the main criteria which are determined in the study for outsourcing selection process. Then, local weights of the sub-criteria and sub-subcriteria are calculated by Fuzzy ANP approach on the basis of cause-effect relationships that are exposed through DEMATEL method. The local weights are put into ANP supermatrix, and calculations are implemented to select out the most eligible outsourcing provider.     

一种基于多属性决策的DDoS防护措施遴选方法

DDoS攻击是网络中最大的威胁之一,选取合适的防护措施,能够更加有效地保护目标网络和目标系统.现有的评价方法对于防护措施选择的指导性不足.针对该问题,首先构建了面向DDoS攻击的防护措施遴选模型(DCSM).在此基础之上,提出基于多属性决策的DDoS防护措施遴选算法.以多属性决策方法综合考虑各方面评估指标;从攻防两方面,以基于历史攻击偏好的方法和熵权法计算重要性权重,消除了传统评价方法中人为指定权重带来的主观性影响.提出的方法为防护措施的选择提供了参考,并通过模拟实验验证了方法的适用性和有效性.     

Group decision making based on incomplete multiplicative and fuzzy preference relations

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the group decision making on incomplete multiplicative and fuzzy preference relations without the requirement of satisfying reciprocity property. This paper introduces a new characterization of the multiplicative consistency condition, based on which a method to estimate unknown preference values in an incomplete multiplicative preference relation is proposed. Apart from the multiplicative consistency property among three known preference values, the method proposed also takes the multiplicative consistency property among more than three values into account. In addition, two models for group decision making with incomplete multiplicative preference relations and incomplete fuzzy preference relations are presented, respectively. Some properties of the collective preference relation are further discussed. Numerical examples are provided to make a discussion and comparison with other similar methods.