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.     

优化强化学习路径特征分类的脉象识别法

脉象识别是中医诊断的重要手段之一。长期以来,依据个人经验进行的脉诊制约了中医的推广与发展。因此,利用传感设备进行脉象识别的研究正在逐步展开。针对神经网络识别脉象的相关研究中,存在需要大量训练数据集,以及存在处理“黑箱”和时间花销较大等问题,在强化学习的框架下,提出了一种采用马尔可夫决策和蒙特卡罗搜索的脉象图分析法。首先依据中医理论对特定的脉象进行路径分类,然后在此基础上为不同的路径选择代表性特征,最终通过对代表性特征的阈值对比完成对脉象的识别。实验结果表明,所提方法可缩减训练时间和所需资源,并可保留完整的经验轨迹;且在提高脉象识别的准确率的同时,还可解决数据处理过程中的“黑箱”问题。     

Variable sorting based on fault tree structure adjustment for multi-valued decision diagrams

The dynamic fault tree does not have the ability of fault calculation when analyzing the reliability of the system, so it needs to be modeled and analyzed by means of multi-valued decision diagrams and so on. The dynamic fault tree is translated into a multi-valued decision diagram according to the ordering of variables of basic events which affects the size of the generated multi-valued decision diagram and the cost of traversal to get cut sequences. An adjustment method of the dynamic fault tree structure is proposed based on the importance degree of repeated events, dynamic gates and the locations of events of the dynamic fault tree. By taking the fact that the basic events at the same level are equally important into account, an improved dynamic variable ordering method and ordering generation algorithm for the multi-valued decision diagram are presented in this paper. The result analysis of an example shows that the improved dynamic variable ordering method can reduce the size of the multi-valued decision diagram and space and time complexity of the reliability calculation compared to the similar methods.     

博斯腾湖流域水资源管理决策支持系统设计与实现

为了提高博斯腾湖流域水资源管理水平,设计开发了针对该流域的水资源管理决策支持系统。系统基于Microsoft.NET平台,采用Visual Studio、SQL Server、ArcGIS工具集开发,在流域“地-云-空”一体化监测体系和系统架构的基础上,构建了地图要素管理、基本水文信息、流域生态流量等主要模块,实现了流域空间可视化查询、实时流量动态模拟、流域生态基流计算以及水资源管理配置等功能。结合博斯腾湖流域1956—2019年水文资料及目前数据获取情况,系统可为不同发展模式下水资源管理提供多方面参考信息和技术支撑,能有效提高水资源管理部门决策效率。     

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。     

动作识别中基于深度神经网络和GA合并算法的分类决策方法

针对人体动作识别中传统方法在分类决策方面存在问题和缺陷,提出了一种新颖的基于深度神经网络(DNN)和遗传算法(GA)合并算法的非线性分类决策方法。首先,提出的合并算法在整个训练集合上对特征提取器进行组合,进而组合成不同的两个独立网络;再利用DNN对两个独立网络进行初始化,进一步利用GA对两个网络进行合并。然后将网络的偏差和权重表示为每层网络间的一个矩阵;最后,利用DNN对网络的偏差和权重进行训练,并在合并过程中将矩阵中的每一行当作一个染色体。实验采用了标准MNIST数据集对提出算法的性能进行评估。评估结果显示实验过程中的交叉和突变操作增加了神经元节点,提高了识别性能,并且弱化了不相关和相关神经元节点。因此,提出算法的错误率更低,网络性能更优异。     

流计算模式下概率粗糙集三支决策的快速计算

概率粗糙集三支决策是不确定问题求解的一种重要理论,流计算模式是一种新型的动态内存计算形式,实施流计算模式下三支决策的快速动态计算是一项具有挑战性的新议题。本研究以流计算模式中的两个核心计算步骤即动态增量与动态减量作为研究对象,提出了一种流计算模式下概率粗糙集三支决策域的快速动态学习方法。首先对流计算模式中三支决策动态增量和动态减量的不同变化情况进行了数据建模。然后基于不同数据变化情况分别讨论了数据增量与数据减量时三支决策域的变化推理,并且基于上述理论给出了流计算模式下的三支决策动态增减学习算法。该算法能够以更低的时间复杂度获得与经典三支决策算法相同决策效果。最后通过八种UCI数据集的实验证明了流计算模式下三支决策动态增减学习算法在时间消耗上明显优于经典概率粗糙集三支决策算法,并且在不同阈值下具有稳定的决策效率。本研究表明了流计算模式下三支决策快速计算是可行的。     

考虑停车位不足的出发时刻选择问题

针对目的地停车位不足,出行者如何选择出发时刻的问题,在有限理性视野下综合考虑道路拥堵状况、出行者个人感知差异、目的地车位供给状况以及无法停入合法停车位后将受到惩罚等因素对出行者出发时刻选择的影响.依据前景理论设计实验,通过调查获取出行者出发时刻选择意向数据,构建出行者出发时刻选择模型.研究结果表明:停车位剩余状况影响出行者对出行结果的满意程度以及下一次出行决策.出行者出行结果满意度随着目的地剩余车位的减少而降低,当出行者的出行结果为满意时,出行者下一次出行由倾向于早到逐渐变为倾向于晚到.在车位不足,不能合法停车的情况下,不同的惩罚措施会影响到出行者下一次出发时刻的决策结果,惩罚越严重,出行者越倾向于早出发.