Distributed receding horizon control of large-scale nonlinear systems: Handling communication delays and disturbances

This paper studies the robust distributed receding horizon control (DRHC) problem for large-scale continuous-time nonlinear systems subject to communication delays and external disturbances. A dual-mode robust DRHC strategy is designed to deal with the communication delays and the external disturbances simultaneously. The feasibility of the proposed DRHC and the stability of the closed-loop system are analyzed, and the sufficient conditions for ensuring the feasibility and stability are developed, respectively. We show that: (1) the feasibility is affected by the bounds of external disturbances, the sampling period and the bound of communication delays; (2) the stability is related to the bounds of external disturbances, the sampling period, the bound of communication delays and the minimum eigenvalues of the cooperation matrices; (3) the closed-loop system is stabilized into a robust invariant set under the proposed conditions. A simulation study is conducted to verify the theoretical results.     

Unscented Kalman filter with advanced adaptation of scaling parameter

The paper deals with state estimation of the nonlinear stochastic systems by means of the unscented Kalman filter with a focus on specification of the σ$\sigma$-points. Their position is influenced by two design parameters—the scaling parameter determining the spread of the σ$\sigma$-points and a covariance matrix decomposition determining rotation of the σ$\sigma$-points. In this paper, a choice of the scaling parameter is analyzed. It is shown that considering other values than the standard choice may lead to increased quality of the estimate, especially if the scaling parameter is adapted. Several different criteria for the adaptation are proposed and techniques to reduce computational costs of the adaptation are developed. The proposed algorithm of the unscented Kalman filter with advanced adaptation of the scaling parameter is illustrated in a numerical example.     

A 5 GHz LC-VCO frequency synthesizer for unlicensed band of WiMAX

This paper presents a low power and low phase noise CMOS integer-N frequency synthesizer based on the charge-pump Phase Locked Loop (PLL) topology. The frequency synthesizer can be used for IEEE 802.16 unlicensed band of WiMAX (World Interoperability for Microwave Access). The operation frequency of the proposed design is ranged from 5.13 to 5.22 GHz. The proposed Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO) achieves low power consumption and low phase noise. The high speed divider is implemented by an optimal extended true single phase clock (E-TSPC) prescaler. It can achieve higher operating frequency and lower power consumption. A new frequency divider is also proposed to eliminate the hardware overhead of the S counter in the conventional programmable divider. The proposed frequency synthesizer consists of a phase-frequency detector (PFD), a charge pump, a low-pass loop filter, a VCO, and a frequency divider. The simulated phase noise of the proposed VCO is −121.6 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the carrier frequency. The proposed frequency synthesizer consumes 13.1 mW. The chip with an area of 1.048 × 1.076 mm² is fabricated in a TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS 1P6M technology process.     

基于鲁棒一步集的Tube不变集鲁棒模型预测控制

针对一类干扰有界的输入和状态受约束线性离散系统,提出了一种基于鲁棒一步集的Tube不 变集鲁棒模型预测控制方法.首先采用多面体不变集离线设计方法得到基于多面体不变集序列的扩 展终端约束集;然后为了扩大鲁棒模型预测控制的初始状态允许区域,并提高系统的鲁棒性,在扩展终端约束集的基础上,通过引入鲁棒一步集并借助Tube不变集控制策略,设计了基于鲁棒一步集的鲁棒模型预测控制方法,并给出了算法的存在性和稳定性证明. 该方法不仅极大地扩大了初始状态允许区域,而且对有界干扰具有有效的抑制作用,使得受扰系统收敛到以原点为中心的最小鲁棒正不变集内.最后仿真验证了算法的有效性.     

Leveraging clustering approaches to solve the gray-sheep users problem in recommender systems

Recommender systems apply data mining and machine learning techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given item. This paper focuses on gray-sheep users problem responsible for the increased error rate in collaborative filtering based recommender systems. This paper makes the following contributions: we show that (1) the presence of gray-sheep users can affect the performance – accuracy and coverage – of the collaborative filtering based algorithms, depending on the data sparsity and distribution; (2) gray-sheep users can be identified using clustering algorithms in offline fashion, where the similarity threshold to isolate these users from the rest of community can be found empirically. We propose various improved centroid selection approaches and distance measures for the K-means clustering algorithm; (3) content-based profile of gray-sheep users can be used for making accurate recommendations. We offer a hybrid recommendation algorithm to make reliable recommendations for gray-sheep users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a formal solution for gray-sheep users problem. By extensive experimental results on two different datasets (MovieLens and community of movie fans in the FilmTrust website), we showed that the proposed approach reduces the recommendation error rate for the gray-sheep users while maintaining reasonable computational performance.     

结合矩阵分解的混合型社会化推荐算法

推荐系统是用来解决当今时代信息过载的重要工具。随着在线社交网络的出现和普及,一些基于网络推荐算法研究的出现,已经引起研究者的广泛关注。信任是社会网络中的重要信息之一,通常用来改进基于社交网络的推荐系统,然而,大多数信任感知的推荐系统忽略了用户有不同行为偏好在不同的兴趣域;本文不仅考虑了用户间特定域信任网络,并且结合推荐项目之间特征属性信息,提出了一种新型社会化推荐算法(H-PMF)。实验表明,H-PMF算法在评分误差和推荐精度上都取得了更好的效果。     

基于间歇测量的状态估计稳定性和精度研究*

针对分布式控制系统状态估计过程出现的测量值丢失问题,本文量化分析测量值丢失对估计稳定性和精度的影响。首先,根据随机测量模型重新推导带测量值丢失的卡尔曼滤波器,得到估计误差协方差迭代式。然后,将随机误差协方差迭代式建模为修正的黎卡提微分方程,提出了估计稳定性和精度分析方法。最后,列举不同的系统实例,证明临界包到达率的存在性,当测量值到达率大于临界值时,平均误差协方差从发散过渡到有界,进而得到估计精度与包达率之间的函数关系。     

TWILITE: A recommendation system for Twitter using a probabilistic model based on latent Dirichlet allocation

Twitter provides search services to help people find users to follow by recommending popular users or the friends of their friends. However, these services neither offer the most relevant users to follow nor provide a way to find the most interesting tweet messages for each user. Recently, collaborative filtering techniques for recommendations based on friend relationships in social networks have been widely investigated. However, since such techniques do not work well when friend relationships are not sufficient, we need to take advantage of as much other information as possible to improve the performance of recommendations.In this paper, we propose TWILITE, a recommendation system for Twitter using probabilistic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation which recommends top-K users to follow and top-K tweets to read for a user. Our model can capture the realistic process of posting tweet messages by generalizing an LDA model as well as the process of connecting to friends by utilizing matrix factorization. We next develop an inference algorithm based on the variational EM algorithm for learning model parameters. Based on the estimated model parameters, we also present effective personalized recommendation algorithms to find the users to follow as well as the interesting tweet messages to read. The performance study with real-life data sets confirms the effectiveness of the proposed model and the accuracy of our personalized recommendations.     

A robust optimization approach for pollution routing problem with pickup and delivery under uncertainty

Organizations have recently become interested in applying new approaches to reduce fuel consumptions, aiming at decreasing green house gases emission due to their harmful effects on environment and human health; however, the large difference between practical and theoretical experiments grows the concern about significant changes in the transportation environment, including fuel consumptions, carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions cost and vehicles velocity, that it encourages researchers to design a near-reality and robust pollution routing problem. This paper addresses a new time window pickup-delivery pollution routing problem (TWPDPRP) to deal with uncertain input data for the first time in the literature. For this purpose, a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach is presented under uncertainty by taking green house emissions into consideration. The objective of the model is to minimize not only the travel distance and number of available vehicles along with the capacity and aggregated route duration restrictions but also the amount of fuel consumptions and green house emissions along with their total costs. Moreover, a robust counterpart of the MILP is introduced by applying the recent robust optimization theory. Computational results for several test problems indicate the capability and suitability of the presented MILP model in saving costs and reducing green house gases concurrently for the TWPDPRP problem. Finally, both deterministic and robust mathematical programming are compared and contrasted by a number of nominal and realizations under these test problems to judge the robustness of the solution achieved by the presented robust optimization model.