ALBERT

Description: We present and study existing digital differential analyzer (DDA) algorithms for circle generation, including an improved two-step DDA algorithm which can be implemented solely in terms of elementary shifts, addition, and subtraction.

Description: Desorption and adsorption equilibrium moisture isotherms of Ziziphus spina-christi leaves were determined using the gravimetric-static method at 30, 40, and 50°C for water activity ranging from 0.057 to 0.898. At a given , the results show that the moisture content decreases with increasing temperature. A hysteresis effect was observed. The experimental data of sorption were fitted by eight models (GAB, BET, Henderson-Thompson, modified-Chung Pfost, Halsey, Oswin, Peleg, and Adam and Shove). After evaluating the models according to several criteria, the Peleg and Oswin models were found to be the most suitable for describing the sorption curves. The net isosteric heats of desorption and adsorption of Ziziphus spina-christi leaves were calculated by applying the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to the sorption isotherms and an expression for predicting these thermodynamic properties was given.

Description: Determination of optimal cutting parameters is one of the most important elements in any process planning of metal parts. In this paper, a new optimization technique, firefly algorithm, is used for determining the machining parameters in a multipass turning operation model. The objective considered is minimization of production cost under a set of machining constraints. The optimization is carried out using firefly algorithm. An application example is presented and solved to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.

Description: A Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) algorithm is proposed to fine-tune the baseline PI controller parameters of Alstom gasifier. The existing baseline PI controller is not able to meet the performance requirements of Alstom gasifier for sinusoidal pressure disturbance at 0% load. This is considered the major drawback of controller design. A best optimal solution for Alstom gasifier is obtained from a set of nondominated solutions using MOPSO algorithm. Performance of gasifier is investigated at all load conditions. The controller with optimized controller parameters meets all the performance requirements at 0%, 50%, and 100% load conditions. The investigations are also extended for variations in coal quality, which shows an improved stability of the gasifier over a wide range of coal quality variations.

Description: To identify neurological characteristics in accordance with anxiety under the interaction between emotion and attention, this study examines major ERP components when participants identify a target number by inhibiting task-irrelevant emotional face distractors. Experiments were conducted once per day at the same time for two days with 19 healthy adult men and women as required to study emotion-attention interaction. In this study, a variety of ERP components such as P100, N200, and P300 during experiment are significant. The amplitude and latency of the N200 component reflect both state and trait anxiety at all positions. This characteristic specially is prominently featured at Cz. Also, the latency of the late P300 component reflects the trait anxiety rather than state anxiety. The result of this study can help our understanding of the neurological responses related to anxiety during attentional control.

Description: The microstructure of porous materials used in heterogeneous catalysis determines the mass transport inside networks, which may vary over many length scales. The theoretical prediction of mass transport phenomena in porous materials, however, is incomplete and is still not completely understood. Therefore, experimental data for every specific porous system is needed. One possible experimental technique for characterizing the mass transport in such pore networks is pulse experiments. The general evaluation of experimental outcomes of these techniques follows the solution of Fick’s second law where an integral and effective diffusion coefficient is recognized. However, a detailed local understanding of diffusion and sorption processes remains a challenge. As there is lack of proved models covering different length scales, existing classical concepts need to be evaluated with respect to their ability to reflect local geometries on the nanometer level. In this study, DSMC (Direct Simulation Monte Carlo) models were used to investigate the impact of pore microstructures on the diffusion behaviour of gases. It can be understood as a virtual pulse experiment within a single pore or a combination of different pore geometries.

Description: Inventory management in retailers is difficult and complex decision making process which is related to the conflict criteria, also existence of cyclic changes and trend in demand is inevitable in many industries. In this paper, simulation modeling is considered as efficient tool for modeling of retailer multiproduct inventory system. For simulation model optimization, a novel multicriteria and robust surrogate model is designed based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM) method, design of experiments (DOE), and principal component analysis (PCA). This approach as a main contribution of this paper, provides a framework for robust multiple criteria decision making under uncertainty.

Description: This paper considers the problem of centralized spectrum allocations in wireless sensor networks towards the following goals: (1) maximizing fairness, (2) reflecting the priority among sensor data, and (3) avoiding unnecessary spectrum handoff. We cast this problem into a multiobjective mixed integer nonconvex nonlinear programming that is definitely difficult to solve at least globally without any aid of conversion or approximation. To tackle this intractability, we first convexify the original problem using arithmetic-geometric mean approximation and logarithmic change of the decision variables and then deploy weighted Chebyshev norm-based scalarization method in order to collapse the multiobjective problem into a single objective one. Finally, we apply simple rounding method in order to obtain approximate integer solutions. The results obtained from the numerical experiments show that, by adjusting the weight on each objective function, the proposed algorithm allocates spectrum bands fairly with well observing each sensor’s priority and reduced spectrum handoffs.

Description: The purpose of this study was to increase the quality of product by focusing on the machine efficiency improvement. The principle of the reliability centered maintenance (RCM) was applied to increase the machine reliability. The objective was to create preventive maintenance plan under reliability centered maintenance method and to reduce defects. The study target was set to reduce the Lead PPM for a test machine by simulating the proposed preventive maintenance plan. The simulation optimization approach based on evolutionary algorithms was employed for the preventive maintenance technique selection process to select the PM interval that gave the best total cost and Lead PPM values. The research methodology includes procedures such as following the priority of critical components in test machine, analyzing the damage and risk level by using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), calculating the suitable replacement period through reliability estimation, and optimizing the preventive maintenance plan. From the result of the study it is shown that the Lead PPM of test machine can be reduced. The cost of preventive maintenance, cost of good product, and cost of lost product were decreased.

Description: In the process of automatic design for printed circuit boards (PCBs), the phase following cell placement is routing. On the other hand, routing process is a notoriously difficult problem, and even the simplest routing problem which consists of a set of two-pin nets is known to be NP-complete. In this research, our routing region is first tessellated into a uniform array of square cells. The ultimate goal for a routing problem is to achieve complete automatic routing with minimal need for any manual intervention. Therefore, shortest path for all connections needs to be established. While classical Dijkstra’s algorithm guarantees to find shortest path for a single net, each routed net will form obstacles for later paths. This will add complexities to route later nets and make its routing longer than the optimal path or sometimes impossible to complete. Today’s sequential routing often applies heuristic method to further refine the solution. Through this process, all nets will be rerouted in different order to improve the quality of routing. Because of this, we are motivated to apply simulated annealing, one of the metaheuristic methods to our routing model to produce better candidates of sequence.

Description: Finite element method (FEM) based simulation has been carried out, and an analytic model of microcantilevers using piezoelectric excitations is proposed. The model is based on the type of the selected material and geometry of the structure. The investigations are carried out with rectangular microcantilevers using silicon as the substrate. The high frequency analytic signals are applied to the input piezoelectric electrodes, and the resultant signal generated at the output piezoelectric electrode is recorded and analyzed. The analysis of the results showed that the proposed system is capable of generating a low frequency signal. Two microcantilevers with different dimensional aspects are used, and the results verified the application of microcantilever array as a low frequency signal generator.

Description: The vorticity-velocity formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations allows purely kinematical problems to be decoupled from the pressure term, since the pressure is eliminated by applying the curl operator. The Vortex-In-Cell (VIC) method, which is based on the vorticity-velocity formulation, offers particle-mesh algorithms to numerically simulate flows past a solid body. The penalization method is used to enforce boundary conditions at a body surface with a decoupling between body boundaries and computational grids. Its main advantage is a highly efficient implementation for solid boundaries of arbitrary complexity on Cartesian grids. We present an efficient algorithm to numerically implement the vorticity-velocity-pressure formulation including a penalty term to simulate the pressure fields around a solid body. In vorticity-based methods, pressure field can be independently computed from the solution procedure for vorticity. This clearly simplifies the implementation and reduces the computational cost. Obtaining the pressure field at any fixed time represents the most challenging goal of this study. We validate the implementation by numerical simulations of an incompressible viscous flow around an impulsively started circular cylinder in a wide range of Reynolds numbers: Re , 550, 3000, and 9500.

Description: A height-balanced tree is a rooted binary tree in which, for every vertex , the difference in the heights of the subtrees rooted at the left and right child of (called the balance factor of ) is at most one. In this paper, we consider height-balanced trees in which the balance factor of every vertex beyond a level is . We prove that there are such trees and embed them into a generalized join of hypercubes.

Description: The study of free-surface and pressurized water flows in channels has many interesting application, one of the most important being the modeling of the phenomena in the area of natural water systems (rivers, estuaries) as well as in that of man-made systems (canals, pipes). For the development of major river engineering projects, such as flood prevention and flood control, there is an essential need to have an instrument that be able to model and predict the consequences of any possible phenomenon on the environment and in particular the new hydraulic characteristics of the system. The basic equations expressing hydraulic principles were formulated in the 19th century by Barre de Saint Venant and Valentin Joseph Boussinesq. The original hydraulic model of the Saint Venant equations is written in the form of a system of two partial differential equations and it is derived under the assumption that the flow is one-dimensional, the cross-sectional velocity is uniform, the streamline curvature is small and the pressure distribution is hydrostatic. The St. Venant equations must be solved with continuity equation at the same time. Until now no analytical solution for Saint Venant equations is presented. In this paper the Saint Venant equations and continuity equation are solved with homotopy perturbation method (HPM) and comparison by explicit forward finite difference method (FDM). For decreasing the present error between HPM and FDM, the st.venant equations and continuity equation are solved by HAM. The homotopy analysis method (HAM) contains the auxiliary parameter ħ that allows us to adjust and control the convergence region of solution series. The study has highlighted the efficiency and capability of HAM in solving Saint Venant equations and modeling of unsteady flow through the rectangular canal that is the goal of this paper and other kinds of canals.

Description: An UML profile describes lightweight extension mechanism to the UML by defining custom stereotypes, tagged values, and constraints. They are used to adapt UML metamodel to different platforms and domains. In this paper we present an UML profile for models supporting event driving simulation. In particular, we use the Arena simulation tool and we focus on the mining process domain. Profiles provide an easy way to obtain well-defined specifications, regulated by the Object Management Group (OMG). They can be used as a presimulation technique to obtain solid models for the mining industry. In this work we present a new profile to extend the UML metamodel; in particular we focus on the activity diagram. This extended model is applied to an industry problem involving loading and transportation of minerals in the field of mining process.

Description: Developing a suitable nonlinear model is the most challenging problem in the application of nonlinear model based controllers to distillation column. Hammerstein model consists of a nonlinear static element described by wavenet based nonlinear function, followed by a linear dynamic element described by the Output Error(OE) model was used in this study to represent the nonlinear dynamics of the distillation column. The model parameters were identified using iterative prediction-error minimization method. The model validation results proved that the Hammerstein model was capable of capturing the nonlinear dynamics of distillation column.

Description: A software framework is an architecture or infrastructure intended to enable the integration and interoperation of software components. Specialized types of software frameworks are those specifically intended to support the composition of models or other components within a simulation system. Such frameworks are intended to simplify the process of assembling a complex model or simulation system from simpler component models as well as to promote the reuse of the component models. Several different types of software frameworks for model composition have been designed and implemented; those types include common library, product line architecture, interoperability protocol, object model, formal, and integrative environment. The various framework types have different components, processes for composing models, and intended applications. In this survey the fundamental terms and concepts of software frameworks for model composition are presented, the different types of such frameworks are explained and compared, and important examples of each type are described.

Description: The dynamic analysis process was started after failure in some embankments during an earthquake. In this context, maximum displacement was reported at the crest based on interaction between structure and reservoir. This paper investigates the dynamic behavior of short embankment on soft soil. For this purpose, numerical analysis was carried out using ANSYS13 program based on finite-element method. Simulated models were vibrated by strong earthquake, so the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and duration were 0.65 g and 5.02 seconds, respectively. The comparison results were discussed in key points of plane strain analysis based on modulus ratio between saturated embankment and foundation. As concluded, the modulus ratio between 0.53 and 0.66 led to having a minimum value of horizontal displacement, relative displacement in vertical direction, and shear stress. Consequently, the shear stress was increased while the modulus ratio was decreased. Finally, to avoid more rigidity in the embankment on the soft soil, optimum modulus ratio was recommended at 0.66 in order to reduce the probabilistic of body cracks at the crest with respect to homogeneous behavior during an earthquake.

Description: The initial step towards a nondestructive technique that estimates grain orientation in an anisotropic weld is presented in this paper. The purpose is to aid future forward simulations of ultrasonic NDT of this kind of weld to achieve a better result. A forward model that consists of a weld model, a transmitter model, a receiver model, and a 2D ray tracing algorithm is introduced. An inversion based on a multiobjective genetic algorithm is also presented. Experiments are conducted for both P and SV waves in order to collect enough data used in the inversion. Calculation is conducted to fulfill the estimation with both the synthetic data and the experimental data. Concluding remarks are presented at the end of the paper.

Description: Hazardous material transportation is one of the main concerns due to the nature of hazardous materials and their incident impacts. In general, transport risk is a main attribute to develop mathematical models for hazardous material routing problem as well as network designing or improving road safety. This paper presents a chaotic-simulation based model to determine the high selected links to improve road network quality for hazardous material transportation, in which risk is considered as a chaotic variable over the network whereas a simulation technique has been applied to cover a wide range of selecting paths. A real road network, consists of fifty-nine nodes and eighty two-way edges, is used for running the mathematical model and checking validation. Due to the large amounts of hazardous material transported by trucks, the proposed methodology is focused on fuel transportation, and high selected list of edges (links) has been obtained to improve road safety. Sensitivity analysis revealed that using different seeds for generating transport risk has no significant effects on finding the most frequent paths and high selected edges.

Description: Interaction of a solitary wave and submerged breakwater is studied in a meshless, Lagrangian approach. For this purpose, a two-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code is developed. Furthermore, an extensive set of simulations is conducted. In the first step, the generated solitary wave is validated. Subsequently, the interaction of solitary wave and submerged breakwater is investigated thoroughly. Results of the interaction of solitary wave and a submerged breakwater are also shown to be in good agreement with published experimental studies. Afterwards, the effects of the inclination and length of breakwater as well as distance between two breakwaters are evaluated on damping ratio of breakwater.

Description: Fault diagnosis of a batch reactor gives the early detection of fault and minimizes the risk of thermal runaway. It provides superior performance and helps to improve safety and consistency. It has become more vital in this technical era. In this paper, support vector machine (SVM) is used to estimate the heat release () of the batch reactor both normal and faulty conditions. The signature of the residual, which is obtained from the difference between nominal and estimated faulty values, characterizes the different natures of faults occurring in the batch reactor. Appropriate statistical and geometric features are extracted from the residual signature and the total numbers of features are reduced using SVM attribute selection filter and principle component analysis (PCA) techniques. artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers like multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), and Bayes net are used to classify the different types of faults from the reduced features. It is observed from the result of the comparative study that the proposed method for fault diagnosis with limited number of features extracted from only one estimated parameter () shows that it is more efficient and fast for diagnosing the typical faults.

Description: Aspect-oriented modeling and simulation is a new approach which uses the separation of concerns principle to enhance the quality of models and simulation tools. It adopts the separation of concerns (SOC) principle. Thus, crosscutting concerns such as processes synchronization, steady state detection, and graphical animation could be separated from simulation functional modules. The capture of crosscutting concerns in a modular way is carried out to cope with complexity and to achieve the required engineering quality factors such as robustness, modularity, adaptability, and reusability. This paper provides a summary of aspect-oriented paradigm with its usage in simulation by illustrating the main crosscutting concerns that may infect simulation systems. A practical example is given with the use of the Japrosim discrete event simulation library.

Description: This paper presents the design of a SystemC transaction level modelling wrapping library that can be used for the assertion of system properties, protocol compliance, or fault injection. The library uses C++ virtual table hooks as a dynamic binary instrumentation technique to inline wrappers in the TLM2 transaction path. This technique can be applied after the elaboration phase and needs neither source code modifications nor recompilation of the top level SystemC modules. The proposed technique has been successfully applied to the robustness verification of the on-board boot software of the Instrument Control Unit of the Solar Orbiter’s Energetic Particle Detector.

Description: Experimental tests which match the application conditions might be used to properly evaluate materials for specific applications. High velocity impacts can be simulated using light-gas gun facilities, which come in different types and complexities. In this work different setups for a one-stage light-gas gun facility have been numerically analyzed in order to evaluate their suitability for testing materials and composites used as armor protection. A maximal barrel length of 6 m and a maximal reservoir pressure of a standard industrial gas bottle (20 MPa) were chosen as limitations. The numerical predictions show that it is not possible to accelerate the projectile directly to the desired velocity with nitrogen, helium, or hydrogen as propellant gas. When using a sabot corresponding to a higher bore diameter, the necessary velocity is achievable with helium and hydrogen gases.

Description: City intersection traffic signal control is an important method to improve the efficiency of road network and alleviate traffic congestion. This paper researches traffic signal fuzzy control method on a single intersection. A two-stage traffic signal control method based on traffic urgency degree is proposed according to two-stage fuzzy inference on single intersection. At the first stage, calculate traffic urgency degree for all red phases using traffic urgency evaluation module and select the red light phase with large traffic urgency as the next phase to switch. At the second stage, green delay of the current green phase is determined by fuzzy inference based on the amount of vehicles of current green phase and next green phase. The average vehicle delays are used to evaluate the performance of the fuzzy signal controller. Finally, comparisons have been made with pretimed controller and fuzzy logic controller without considering the urgency of red phase. Simulation results show the performance of our proposed method.

Description: It is well known that single equilibrium orientation point in matrix rotation is represented by two equilibrium points in quaternion. This fact would imply nonefficient control effort as well as problem in guaranteeing stability of the two equilibrium points in quaternion. This paper presents a solution to design quaternion-based spacecraft attitude control system whose saturation element is in its control law such that those problems are overcome. The proposed feature of methodology is the consideration on boundedness of solution in the control system design even in the presence of unknown external disturbance. The same methodology is also used to design cooperative spacecrafts attitude control system. Through the proposed method, the most relaxed information-state topology requirement is obtained, that is, the directed graph that contains a directed spanning tree. Some numerical simulations demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed feature of methodology.

Description: Extensive research has been devoted to the estimation of the parameters of frequently used distributions. However, little attention has been paid to estimation of parameters of Gamma/Gompertz distribution, which is often encountered in customer lifetime and mortality risks distribution literature. This distribution has three parameters. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for estimating the parameters of Gamma/Gompertz distribution based on maximum likelihood estimation method. Iterated local search (ILS) is proposed to maximize likelihood function. Finally, the proposed approach is computationally tested using some numerical examples and results are analyzed.

Description: Silicon nanowires are leading the CMOS era towards the downsizing limit and its nature will be effectively suppress the short channel effects. Accurate modeling of thermal noise in nanowires is crucial for RF applications of nano-CMOS emerging technologies. In this work, a perfect temperature-dependent model for silicon nanowires including the self-heating effects has been derived and its effects on device parameters have been observed. The power spectral density as a function of thermal resistance shows significant improvement as the channel length decreases. The effects of thermal noise including self-heating of the device are explored. Moreover, significant reduction in noise with respect to channel thermal resistance, gate length, and biasing is analyzed.

Description: A numerical investigation is made to study the thermal boundary layer for flow of incompressible Newtonian fluid over an exponentially stretching sheet with an exponentially moving free stream. The governing partial differential equations are transformed into self-similar ordinary differential equations using similarity transformations in exponential forms. Then those are solved numerically by shooting technique using Runge-Kutta method. The study reveals that the momentum boundary layer thickness for this flow is considerably smaller than the linear stagnation point flow past a linearly stretching sheet. The momentum and thermal boundary layer thicknesses reduce when the velocity ratio parameter increases. For the temperature distribution, in addition to the heat transfer from the sheet, the heat absorption at the sheet also occurs in certain situations and both heat transfer and absorption increase with the velocity ratio parameter and the Prandtl number. The temperature inside the boundary layer significantly decreases with higher values of velocity ratio parameter and the Prandtl number.

Description: Multiobjective optimization methods for routing in static wireless mesh networks (WMNs), with more than one QoS measure to be optimized, are highly challenging. To optimize the performance for a given end-to-end route in a static network, the most common metrics that need to be optimized or bounded are the path capacity and the end-to-end delay. In this work, we focus on combining desirable properties of these two metrics by minimizing a weighted metrics sum via a Dijkstra-based algorithm. The approach is directed towards fast convergence rather than optimality. It is shown that the resulting algorithm provides more satisfactory results than simple Dijkstra-based pruning algorithms in terms of simultaneously achieving high capacity and small delay. The effect of changing the weighting factor on the proposed algorithm performance is investigated.

Description: The goal of the present experimental work is to optimize the electrical discharge machining (EDM) parameters of aluminum alloy (Al 6351) matrix reinforced with 5 wt.% silicon carbide (SiC) and 10 wt.% boron carbide (B4C) particles fabricated through the stir casting route. Multiresponse optimization was carried out through grey relational analysis (GRA) with an objective to minimize the machining characteristics, namely electrode wear ratio (EWR), surface roughness (SR) and power consumption (PC). The optimal combination of input parameters is identified, which shows the significant enhancement in process characteristics. Contributions of each machining parameter to the responses are calculated using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The result shows that the pulse current contributes more (83.94%) to affecting the combined output responses.

Description: A very new technique, coupled fractional reduced differential transform, has been implemented to obtain the numerical approximate solution of (2 + 1)-dimensional coupled time fractional burger equations. The fractional derivatives are described in the Caputo sense. By using the present method we can solve many linear and nonlinear coupled fractional differential equations. The obtained results are compared with the exact solutions. Numerical solutions are presented graphically to show the reliability and efficiency of the method.

Description: This work focuses on the issues to deal with when approaching experimental testing of structures equipped with semiactive control (SA) systems. It starts from practical experience authors gained in a recent wide campaign on a large scale steel frame structure provided with a control system based on magnetorheological dampers. The latter are special devices able to achieve a wide range of physical behaviours using low-power electrical currents. Experimental activities involving the use of controllable devices require special attention in solving specific aspects that characterize each of the three phases of the SA control loop: acquisition, processing, and command. Most of them are uncommon to any other type of structural testing. This paper emphasizes the importance of the experimental assessment of SA systems and shows how many problematic issues likely to happen in real applications are also present when testing these systems experimentally. This paper highlights several problematic aspects and illustrates how they can be addressed in order to achieve a more realistic evaluation of the effectiveness of SA control solutions. Undesired and unavoidable effects like delays and control malfunction are also remarked. A discussion on the way to reduce their incidence is also offered.

Description: Numerical simulations are presented of the flow hydrodynamics and hypothetical contaminant dispersion patterns in Nador Lagoon, a shallow lagoon with a barrier island situated on the coast of Morocco. It is found that the natural circulation forced by the tidal flow in the lagoon is greatly affected by the development of an artificial inlet in the barrier island. The case study demonstrates the potential use of modern computational hydraulics as a tool integrated in the decision support system designed to manage a lagoon ecosystem.

Description: Wireless sensor network (WSN) is deployed to monitor certain physical quantities in a region. This monitoring problem could be stated as the problem of detecting a change in the parameters of a static or dynamic stochastic system. A moving window procedure is proposed to detect the systematic error, which occurs at an unknown time. It can detect the deviation in the mean of sensor measurements keeping variance as constant. The performance measures, such as the average run length (ARL) to detection delay and false alarms are computed for various window sizes. The performance comparison is done against traditional cumulative sum (CUSUM) method. The detection of change in mean using CUSUM is done with smaller delay compared to the proposed moving window detection procedure. In order to calculate CUSUM statistics, the number of measurements to keep in sensor memory increases with time. However, in the proposed moving window detection procedure, the number of stored measurements is limited by the size of the window. Therefore, it is advantageous to use the moving window procedure for change detection in sensor nodes that have very limited memory. A high probability of detection is achieved at the cost of larger window size and higher detection delay. However, we are able to achieve the maximum probability of detection even at a window size of 11.

Description: Histogram based multilevel thresholding approach is proposed using Brownian distribution (BD) guided firefly algorithm (FA). A bounded search technique is also presented to improve the optimization accuracy with lesser search iterations. Otsu’s between-class variance function is maximized to obtain optimal threshold level for gray scale images. The performances of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated by considering twelve benchmark images and are compared with the existing FA algorithms such as Lévy flight (LF) guided FA and random operator guided FA. The performance assessment comparison between the proposed and existing firefly algorithms is carried using prevailing parameters such as objective function, standard deviation, peak-to-signal ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) index, and search time of CPU. The results show that BD guided FA provides better objective function, PSNR, and SSIM, whereas LF based FA provides faster convergence with relatively lower CPU time.

Description: This paper defines a new procedure for optimising wind farm turbine placement by means of Monte Carlo simulation method. To verify the algorithm’s accuracy, an experimental wind farm was tested in a wind tunnel. On the basis of experimental measurements, the error on wind farm power output was less than 4%. The optimization maximises the energy production criterion; wind turbines’ ground positions were used as independent variables. Moreover, the mathematical model takes into account annual wind intensities and directions and wind turbine interaction. The optimization of a wind farm on a real site was carried out using measured wind data, dominant wind direction, and intensity data as inputs to run the Monte Carlo simulations. There were 30 turbines in the wind park, each rated at 20 kW. This choice was based on wind farm economics. The site was proportionally divided into 100 square cells, taking into account a minimum windward and crosswind distance between the turbines. The results highlight that the dominant wind intensity factor tends to overestimate the annual energy production by about 8%. Thus, the proposed method leads to a more precise annual energy evaluation and to a more optimal placement of the wind turbines.

Description: System modelling with a unified modelling language (UML) is an active research area for developing real-time system development. UML is widely used modelling language in software engineering community, to specify the requirement, and analyse the target system successfully. UML can be used to provide multiple views of the system under design with the help of a variety of structural and behavioural diagrams at an early stage. UML-RT (unified modelling language-real time) is a language used to build an unambiguous executable specification of a real-time system based on UML concepts. This paper presents a unified modeling approach for a newly proposed rate monotonic scheduling algorithm-shortest job first (RMA-SJF) for partitioned, semipartitioned and global scheduling strategies in multiprocessor architecture using UML-RT for different system loads. As a technical contribution, effective processor utilization of individual processors and success ratio are analyzed for various scheduling principles and compared with EDF and D_EDF to validate our proposal.

Description: In order to achieve high torque at low power with high efficiency, a new five-phase permanent magnet brushless DC (PMBLDC) motor design was analyzed and optimized. A similar three-phase motor having the same ratio (inner diameter () and length of the stator ()) is compared for maximum torque and torque ripple of the designed five-phase PMBLDC motor. Maxwell software was used to build finite element simulation model of the motor. The internal complicated magnetic field distribution and dynamic performance simulation were obtained in different positions. No load and load characteristics of the five-phase PMBLDC motor were simulated, and the power consumption of materials was computed. The conformity of the final simulation results indicates that this method can be used to provide a theoretical basis for further optimal design of this new type of motor with its drive so as to improve the starting torque and reduce torque ripple of the motor.

Description: We consider a multiple vacation queueing system in which a vacation following a busy period has a different distribution from a vacation that is taken without serving at least one customer. For ease of analysis it is assumed that the service times are exponentially distributed and the two vacation types are also exponentially distributed but with different means. The steady-state solution is obtained.

Description: Optimum control parameter setting in complex and stochastic type processes is one of the most challenging problems to the process engineers. As such, effective model development and determination of optimal operating conditions of electric discharge machining process (EDM) are reasonably difficult. In this apper, an easy to handle optimization procedure, weight-varying multiobjective simulated annealing, is proposed and is applied to optimize two conflicting type response parameters in EDM—material removal rate (MRR) and average surface roughness (Ra) simultaneously. A solution set is generated. The Pareto optimal front thus developed is further modeled. An inverse solution procedure is devised so that near-optimum process parameter settings can be determined for specific need based requirements of process engineers. The results are validated.

Description: This study presents the behavioral model of thermal temperature and power generation of a thermoelectric-solar hybrid energy system exposed to dynamic transient sources. In the development of thermoelectric-solar hybrid energy system, studies have focused on the regulation of both systems separately. In practice, a separate control system affects hardware pricing. In this study, an inverse dynamic analysis shaping technique based on exponential function is applied to a solar array (SA) to stabilize output voltage before this technique is combined with a thermoelectric module (TEM). This method can be used to estimate the maximum power point of the hybrid system by initially shaping the input voltage of SA. The behavior of the overall system can be estimated by controlling the behavior of SA, such that SA can follow the output voltage of TEM as the time constant of TEM is greater than that of SA. Moreover, by employing a continuous and differentiable function, the acquired output behavior of the hybrid system can be attained. Data showing the model is obtained from current experiments with predicted values of temperature, internal resistance, and current attributes of TEM. The simulation results show that the proposed input shaper can be used to trigger the output voltage of SA to follow the TEM behavior under transient conditions.

Description: This paper presents a novel harmonic identification algorithm of shunt active power filter for balanced and unbalanced three-phase systems based on the instantaneous power theory called instantaneous power theory with Fourier. Moreover, the optimal design of predictive current controller using an artificial intelligence technique called adaptive Tabu search is also proposed in the paper. These enhancements of the identification and current control parts are the aim of the good performance for shunt active power filter. The good results for harmonic mitigation using the proposed ideas in the paper are confirmed by the intensive simulation using SPS in SIMULINK. The simulation results show that the enhanced shunt active power filter can provide the minimum %THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) of source currents and unity power factor after compensation. In addition, the %THD also follows the IEEE Std.519-1992.

Description: A numerical investigation has been carried out to examine the periodic laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics in a three-dimensional isothermal wall square duct with 20° inline V-ribs. The computations are based on the finite volume method, and the SIMPLE algorithm has been implemented. The fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented for Reynolds numbers based on the hydraulic diameter of the square duct ranging from 100 to 2000. To generate main streamwise vortex flows through the tested section, V-ribs with an attack angle of 20° are mounted in tandem with inline arrangement, pointing downstream (V-Downstream) and pointing upstream (V-Upstream) placed on both the upper and lower walls. Effects of different blockage ratio (, BR) with a single pitch ratio (, PR) of 1 on heat transfer, pressure loss, and performance in the ribbed tube are studied. Apparently in each of the main vortex flows, streamwise twisted vortex flows can induce impinging flows on the walls of the interbaffle cavity leading to drastic increase in heat transfer rate over the square duct. In addition, the rise in the V-baffle height results in the increase in the Nusselt number and friction factor values. The computational results show that the optimum thermal enhancement factor is about 4.2 at and 0.15 for the V-Downstream and V-Upstream, respectively.

Description: In the initial phase of the research work, quasistatic compression tests were conducted on the expanded polystyrene (EPS) crushable foam for material characterisation at low strain rates ( s−1) to obtain the stress strain curves. The resulting stress strain curves are compared well with the ones found in the literature. Numerical analysis of compression tests was carried out to validate them against experimental results. Additionally gravity-driven drop tests were carried out using a long rod projectile with semispherical end that penetrated into the EPS foam block. Long rod projectile drop tests were simulated in LS-DYNA by using suggested parameter enhancements that were able to compute the material damage and failure response precisely. The material parameters adjustment for successful modelling has been reported.

Description: The polarization effects in hydrodynamics are studied. Hydrodynamic equation for the nonlinear wave is used along with the polarized nonlinear waves and seismic waves act as initial waves. The model is then solved by Fourier spectral and Runge-Kutta 4 methods, and the surface plot is drawn. The output demonstrates the inundation behaviors. Consequently, the polarized seismic waves along with the polarized nonlinear waves tend to generate dissimilar inundation which is more disastrous.

Description: Rainfall-runoff simulation in hydrology using artificial intelligence presents the nonlinear relationships using neural networks. In this study, a hybrid network presented as a feedforward modular neural network (FF-MNN) has been developed to predict the daily rainfall-runoff of the Roodan watershed at the southern part of Iran. This FF-MNN has three layers—input, hidden, and output. The hidden layer has two types of neural expert or module. Hydrometeorological data of the catchment were collected for 21 years. Heuristic method was used to develop the MNN for exploring daily flow generalization. Two training algorithms, namely, backpropagation with momentum and Levenberg-Marquardt, were used. Sigmoid and linear transfer functions were employed to explore the network’s optimum behavior. Cross-validation and predictive uncertainty assessments were carried out to protect overtiring and overparameterization, respectively. Results showed that the FF-MNN could satisfactorily predict stream flow during testing period. The Nash-Sutcliff coefficient, coefficient of determination, and root mean square error obtained using MNN during training and test periods were 0.85, 0.85, and 39.4 and 0.57, 0.58, and 32.2, respectively. The predictive uncertainties for both periods were 0.39 and 0.44, respectively. Generally, the study showed that the FF-MNN can give promising prediction for rainfall-runoff relations.

Description: The key for adopting the utilization-based schedulability test is to derive the utilization bound. Given the computation times, this paper proposes two utilization bound algorithms to derive interrelease times for nonpreemptive periodic tasks, using a new priority scheme, “Rate Monotonic Algorithm-Shortest Job First.” The obtained task set possesses the advantage of Rate Monotonic Algorithm and Shortest Job First priority scheme. Further, the task set is tested for schedulability, by first deriving a general schedulability condition from “problem window” analysis and, a necessary and sufficient schedulability condition for a task to be scheduled, at any release time are also derived. As a technical contribution, success ratio and effective processor utilization are analyzed for our proposed utilization bound algorithms on a uniprocessor architecture modeled using UML-RT.

Description: The issue of crack detection and its diagnosis has gained a wide spread of industrial interest. The crack/damage affects the industrial economic growth. So early crack detection is an important aspect in the point of view of any industrial growth. In this paper a design tool ANSYS is used to monitor various changes in vibrational characteristics of thin transverse cracks on a cantilever beam for detecting the crack position and depth and was compared using artificial intelligence techniques. The usage of neural networks is the key point of development in this paper. The three neural networks used are cascade forward back propagation (CFBP) network, feed forward back propagation (FFBP) network, and radial basis function (RBF) network. In the first phase of this paper theoretical analysis has been made and then the finite element analysis has been carried out using commercial software, ANSYS. In the second phase of this paper the neural networks are trained using the values obtained from a simulated model of the actual cantilever beam using ANSYS. At the last phase a comparative study has been made between the data obtained from neural network technique and finite element analysis.

Description: Physical design and synthesis are two key processes of quantum circuit design methodology. The physical design process itself decomposes into scheduling, mapping, routing, and placement. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed for mapping, routing, and scheduling in ion-trap technology in order to minimize latency of the circuit. The proposed model which is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model gives the optimal locations for gates and the best sequence of operations in terms of latency. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms the other schemes for the attempted benchmarks.

Description: Desorption and adsorption equilibrium moisture isotherms ofZiziphus spina-christileaves were determined using the gravimetric-static method at 30, 40, and 50°C for water activity(aw)ranging from 0.057 to 0.898. At a givenaw, the results show that the moisture content decreases with increasing temperature. A hysteresis effect was observed. The experimental data of sorption were fitted by eight models (GAB, BET, Henderson-Thompson, modified-Chung Pfost, Halsey, Oswin, Peleg, and Adam and Shove). After evaluating the models according to several criteria, the Peleg and Oswin models were found to be the most suitable for describing the sorption curves. The net isosteric heats of desorption and adsorption ofZiziphus spina-christileaves were calculated by applying the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to the sorption isotherms and an expression for predicting these thermodynamic properties was given.

Description: Histogram based multilevel thresholding approach is proposed using Brownian distribution (BD) guided firefly algorithm (FA). A bounded search technique is also presented to improve the optimization accuracy with lesser search iterations. Otsu’s between-class variance function is maximized to obtain optimal threshold level for gray scale images. The performances of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated by considering twelve benchmark images and are compared with the existing FA algorithms such as Lévy flight (LF) guided FA and random operator guided FA. The performance assessment comparison between the proposed and existing firefly algorithms is carried using prevailing parameters such as objective function, standard deviation, peak-to-signal ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) index, and search time of CPU. The results show that BD guided FA provides better objective function, PSNR, and SSIM, whereas LF based FA provides faster convergence with relatively lower CPU time.

Description: Numerical simulations are presented of the flow hydrodynamics and hypothetical contaminant dispersion patterns in Nador Lagoon, a shallow lagoon with a barrier island situated on the coast of Morocco. It is found that the natural circulation forced by the tidal flow in the lagoon is greatly affected by the development of an artificial inlet in the barrier island. The case study demonstrates the potential use of modern computational hydraulics as a tool integrated in the decision support system designed to manage a lagoon ecosystem.

Description: We consider a multiple vacation queueing system in which a vacation following a busy period has a different distribution from a vacation that is taken without serving at least one customer. For ease of analysis it is assumed that the service times are exponentially distributed and the two vacation types are also exponentially distributed but with different means. The steady-state solution is obtained.

Description: The initial step towards a nondestructive technique that estimates grain orientation in an anisotropic weld is presented in this paper. The purpose is to aid future forward simulations of ultrasonic NDT of this kind of weld to achieve a better result. A forward model that consists of a weld model, a transmitter model, a receiver model, and a 2D ray tracing algorithm is introduced. An inversion based on a multiobjective genetic algorithm is also presented. Experiments are conducted for both P and SV waves in order to collect enough data used in the inversion. Calculation is conducted to fulfill the estimation with both the synthetic data and the experimental data. Concluding remarks are presented at the end of the paper.

Description: The dynamic analysis process was started after failure in some embankments during an earthquake. In this context, maximum displacement was reported at the crest based on interaction between structure and reservoir. This paper investigates the dynamic behavior of short embankment on soft soil. For this purpose, numerical analysis was carried out using ANSYS13 program based on finite-element method. Simulated models were vibrated by strong earthquake, so the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and duration were 0.65 g and 5.02 seconds, respectively. The comparison results were discussed in key points of plane strain analysis based on modulus ratio between saturated embankment and foundation. As concluded, the modulus ratio between 0.53 and 0.66 led to having a minimum value of horizontal displacement, relative displacement in vertical direction, and shear stress. Consequently, the shear stress was increased while the modulus ratio was decreased. Finally, to avoid more rigidity in the embankment on the soft soil, optimum modulus ratio was recommended at 0.66 in order to reduce the probabilistic of body cracks at the crest with respect to homogeneous behavior during an earthquake.

Description: In order to achieve high torque at low power with high efficiency, a new five-phase permanent magnet brushless DC (PMBLDC) motor design was analyzed and optimized. A similar three-phase motor having the sameD/Lratio (inner diameter (D) and length of the stator (L)) is compared for maximum torque and torque ripple of the designed five-phase PMBLDC motor. Maxwell software was used to build finite element simulation model of the motor. The internal complicated magnetic field distribution and dynamic performance simulation were obtained in different positions. No load and load characteristics of the five-phase PMBLDC motor were simulated, and the power consumption of materials was computed. The conformity of the final simulation results indicates that this method can be used to provide a theoretical basis for further optimal design of this new type of motor with its drive so as to improve the starting torque and reduce torque ripple of the motor.

Description: System modelling with a unified modelling language (UML) is an active research area for developing real-time system development. UML is widely used modelling language in software engineering community, to specify the requirement, and analyse the target system successfully. UML can be used to provide multiple views of the system under design with the help of a variety of structural and behavioural diagrams at an early stage. UML-RT (unified modelling language-real time) is a language used to build an unambiguous executable specification of a real-time system based on UML concepts. This paper presents a unified modeling approach for a newly proposed rate monotonic scheduling algorithm-shortest job first (RMA-SJF) for partitioned, semipartitioned and global scheduling strategies in multiprocessor architecture using UML-RT for different system loads. As a technical contribution, effective processor utilization of individual processors and success ratio are analyzed for various scheduling principles and compared with EDF and D_EDF to validate our proposal.

Description: Extensive research has been devoted to the estimation of the parameters of frequently used distributions. However, little attention has been paid to estimation of parameters of Gamma/Gompertz distribution, which is often encountered in customer lifetime and mortality risks distribution literature. This distribution has three parameters. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for estimating the parameters of Gamma/Gompertz distribution based on maximum likelihood estimation method. Iterated local search (ILS) is proposed to maximize likelihood function. Finally, the proposed approach is computationally tested using some numerical examples and results are analyzed.

Description: This paper presents a novel harmonic identification algorithm of shunt active power filter for balanced and unbalanced three-phase systems based on the instantaneous power theory called instantaneous power theory with Fourier. Moreover, the optimal design of predictive current controller using an artificial intelligence technique called adaptive Tabu search is also proposed in the paper. These enhancements of the identification and current control parts are the aim of the good performance for shunt active power filter. The good results for harmonic mitigation using the proposed ideas in the paper are confirmed by the intensive simulation using SPS in SIMULINK. The simulation results show that the enhanced shunt active power filter can provide the minimum %THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) of source currents and unity power factor after compensation. In addition, the %THD also follows the IEEE Std.519-1992.

Description: Optimum control parameter setting in complex and stochastic type processes is one of the most challenging problems to the process engineers. As such, effective model development and determination of optimal operating conditions of electric discharge machining process (EDM) are reasonably difficult. In this apper, an easy to handle optimization procedure, weight-varying multiobjective simulated annealing, is proposed and is applied to optimize two conflicting type response parameters in EDM—material removal rate (MRR) and average surface roughness (Ra) simultaneously. A solution set is generated. The Pareto optimal front thus developed is further modeled. An inverse solution procedure is devised so that near-optimum process parameter settings can be determined for specific need based requirements of process engineers. The results are validated.

Description: Finite element method (FEM) based simulation has been carried out, and an analytic model of microcantilevers using piezoelectric excitations is proposed. The model is based on the type of the selected material and geometry of the structure. The investigations are carried out with rectangular microcantilevers using silicon as the substrate. The high frequency analytic signals are applied to the input piezoelectric electrodes, and the resultant signal generated at the output piezoelectric electrode is recorded and analyzed. The analysis of the results showed that the proposed system is capable of generating a low frequency signal. Two microcantilevers with different dimensional aspects are used, and the results verified the application of microcantilever array as a low frequency signal generator.

Description: This paper defines a new procedure for optimising wind farm turbine placement by means of Monte Carlo simulation method. To verify the algorithm’s accuracy, an experimental wind farm was tested in a wind tunnel. On the basis of experimental measurements, the error on wind farm power output was less than 4%. The optimization maximises the energy production criterion; wind turbines’ ground positions were used as independent variables. Moreover, the mathematical model takes into account annual wind intensities and directions and wind turbine interaction. The optimization of a wind farm on a real site was carried out using measured wind data, dominant wind direction, and intensity data as inputs to run the Monte Carlo simulations. There were 30 turbines in the wind park, each rated at 20 kW. This choice was based on wind farm economics. The site was proportionally divided into 100 square cells, taking into account a minimum windward and crosswind distance between the turbines. The results highlight that the dominant wind intensity factor tends to overestimate the annual energy production by about 8%. Thus, the proposed method leads to a more precise annual energy evaluation and to a more optimal placement of the wind turbines.

Description: This study presents the behavioral model of thermal temperature and power generation of a thermoelectric-solar hybrid energy system exposed to dynamic transient sources. In the development of thermoelectric-solar hybrid energy system, studies have focused on the regulation of both systems separately. In practice, a separate control system affects hardware pricing. In this study, an inverse dynamic analysis shaping technique based on exponential function is applied to a solar array (SA) to stabilize output voltage before this technique is combined with a thermoelectric module (TEM). This method can be used to estimate the maximum power point of the hybrid system by initially shaping the input voltage of SA. The behavior of the overall system can be estimated by controlling the behavior of SA, such that SA can follow the output voltage of TEM as the time constant of TEM is greater than that of SA. Moreover, by employing a continuous and differentiable function, the acquired output behavior of the hybrid system can be attained. Data showing the model is obtained from current experiments with predicted values of temperature, internal resistance, and current attributes of TEM. The simulation results show that the proposed input shaper can be used to trigger the output voltage of SA to follow the TEM behavior under transient conditions.

Description: Wireless sensor network (WSN) is deployed to monitor certain physical quantities in a region. This monitoring problem could be stated as the problem of detecting a change in the parameters of a static or dynamic stochastic system. A moving window procedure is proposed to detect the systematic error, which occurs at an unknown time. It can detect the deviation in the mean of sensor measurements keeping variance as constant. The performance measures, such as the average run length (ARL) to detection delay and false alarms are computed for various window sizes. The performance comparison is done against traditional cumulative sum (CUSUM) method. The detection of change in mean using CUSUM is done with smaller delay compared to the proposed moving window detection procedure. In order to calculate CUSUM statistics, the number of measurements to keep in sensor memory increases with time. However, in the proposed moving window detection procedure, the number of stored measurements is limited by the size of the window. Therefore, it is advantageous to use the moving window procedure for change detection in sensor nodes that have very limited memory. A high probability of detection is achieved at the cost of larger window size and higher detection delay. However, we are able to achieve the maximum probability of detection even at a window size of 11.

Description: The goal of the present experimental work is to optimize the electrical discharge machining (EDM) parameters of aluminum alloy (Al 6351) matrix reinforced with 5 wt.% silicon carbide (SiC) and 10 wt.% boron carbide (B4C) particles fabricated through the stir casting route. Multiresponse optimization was carried out through grey relational analysis (GRA) with an objective to minimize the machining characteristics, namely electrode wear ratio (EWR), surface roughness (SR) and power consumption (PC). The optimal combination of input parameters is identified, which shows the significant enhancement in process characteristics. Contributions of each machining parameter to the responses are calculated using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The result shows that the pulse current contributes more (83.94%) to affecting the combined output responses.

Description: The vorticity-velocity formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations allows purely kinematical problems to be decoupled from the pressure term, since the pressure is eliminated by applying the curl operator. The Vortex-In-Cell (VIC) method, which is based on the vorticity-velocity formulation, offers particle-mesh algorithms to numerically simulate flows past a solid body. The penalization method is used to enforce boundary conditions at a body surface with a decoupling between body boundaries and computational grids. Its main advantage is a highly efficient implementation for solid boundaries of arbitrary complexity on Cartesian grids. We present an efficient algorithm to numerically implement the vorticity-velocity-pressure formulation including a penalty term to simulate the pressure fields around a solid body. In vorticity-based methods, pressure field can be independently computed from the solution procedure for vorticity. This clearly simplifies the implementation and reduces the computational cost. Obtaining the pressure field at any fixed time represents the most challenging goal of this study. We validate the implementation by numerical simulations of an incompressible viscous flow around an impulsively started circular cylinder in a wide range of Reynolds numbers: Re=40, 550, 3000, and 9500.

Description: A very new technique, coupled fractional reduced differential transform, has been implemented to obtain the numerical approximate solution of (2 + 1)-dimensional coupled time fractional burger equations. The fractional derivatives are described in the Caputo sense. By using the present method we can solve many linear and nonlinear coupled fractional differential equations. The obtained results are compared with the exact solutions. Numerical solutions are presented graphically to show the reliability and efficiency of the method.

Description: A height-balanced tree is a rooted binary tree in which, for every vertexv, the difference in the heights of the subtrees rooted at the left and right child ofv(called the balance factor ofv) is at most one. In this paper, we consider height-balanced trees in which the balance factor of every vertex beyond a level is0. We prove that there are22t-1such trees and embed them into ageneralized join of hypercubes.

Description: This work focuses on the issues to deal with when approaching experimental testing of structures equipped with semiactive control (SA) systems. It starts from practical experience authors gained in a recent wide campaign on a large scale steel frame structure provided with a control system based on magnetorheological dampers. The latter are special devices able to achieve a wide range of physical behaviours using low-power electrical currents. Experimental activities involving the use of controllable devices require special attention in solving specific aspects that characterize each of the three phases of the SA control loop: acquisition, processing, and command. Most of them are uncommon to any other type of structural testing. This paper emphasizes the importance of the experimental assessment of SA systems and shows how many problematic issues likely to happen in real applications are also present when testing these systems experimentally. This paper highlights several problematic aspects and illustrates how they can be addressed in order to achieve a more realistic evaluation of the effectiveness of SA control solutions. Undesired and unavoidable effects like delays and control malfunction are also remarked. A discussion on the way to reduce their incidence is also offered.

Description: It is well known that single equilibrium orientation point in matrix rotation is represented by two equilibrium points in quaternion. This fact would imply nonefficient control effort as well as problem in guaranteeing stability of the two equilibrium points in quaternion. This paper presents a solution to design quaternion-based spacecraft attitude control system whose saturation element is in its control law such that those problems are overcome. The proposed feature of methodology is the consideration on boundedness of solution in the control system design even in the presence of unknown external disturbance. The same methodology is also used to design cooperative spacecrafts attitude control system. Through the proposed method, the most relaxed information-state topology requirement is obtained, that is, the directed graph that contains a directed spanning tree. Some numerical simulations demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed feature of methodology.

Description: Fault diagnosis of a batch reactor gives the early detection of fault and minimizes the risk of thermal runaway. It provides superior performance and helps to improve safety and consistency. It has become more vital in this technical era. In this paper, support vector machine (SVM) is used to estimate the heat release (Qr) of the batch reactor both normal and faulty conditions. The signature of the residual, which is obtained from the difference between nominal and estimated faultyQrvalues, characterizes the different natures of faults occurring in the batch reactor. Appropriate statistical and geometric features are extracted from the residual signature and the total numbers of features are reduced using SVM attribute selection filter and principle component analysis (PCA) techniques. artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers like multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), and Bayes net are used to classify the different types of faults from the reduced features. It is observed from the result of the comparative study that the proposed method for fault diagnosis with limited number of features extracted from only one estimated parameter (Qr) shows that it is more efficient and fast for diagnosing the typical faults.

Description: The study of free-surface and pressurized water flows in channels has many interesting application, one of the most important being the modeling of the phenomena in the area of natural water systems (rivers, estuaries) as well as in that of man-made systems (canals, pipes). For the development of major river engineering projects, such as flood prevention and flood control, there is an essential need to have an instrument that be able to model and predict the consequences of any possible phenomenon on the environment and in particular the new hydraulic characteristics of the system. The basic equations expressing hydraulic principles were formulated in the 19th century by Barre de Saint Venant and Valentin Joseph Boussinesq. The original hydraulic model of the Saint Venant equations is written in the form of a system of two partial differential equations and it is derived under the assumption that the flow is one-dimensional, the cross-sectional velocity is uniform, the streamline curvature is small and the pressure distribution is hydrostatic. The St. Venant equations must be solved with continuity equation at the same time. Until now no analytical solution for Saint Venant equations is presented. In this paper the Saint Venant equations and continuity equation are solved with homotopy perturbation method (HPM) and comparison by explicit forward finite difference method (FDM). For decreasing the present error between HPM and FDM, the st.venant equations and continuity equation are solved by HAM. The homotopy analysis method (HAM) contains the auxiliary parameterħthat allows us to adjust and control the convergence region of solution series. The study has highlighted the efficiency and capability of HAM in solving Saint Venant equations and modeling of unsteady flow through the rectangular canal that is the goal of this paper and other kinds of canals.

Description: Developing a suitable nonlinear model is the most challenging problem in the application of nonlinear model based controllers to distillation column. Hammerstein model consists of a nonlinear static element described by wavenet based nonlinear function, followed by a linear dynamic element described by the Output Error(OE) model was used in this study to represent the nonlinear dynamics of the distillation column. The model parameters were identified using iterative prediction-error minimization method. The model validation results proved that the Hammerstein model was capable of capturing the nonlinear dynamics of distillation column.

Description: A software framework is an architecture or infrastructure intended to enable the integration and interoperation of software components. Specialized types of software frameworks are those specifically intended to support the composition of models or other components within a simulation system. Such frameworks are intended to simplify the process of assembling a complex model or simulation system from simpler component models as well as to promote the reuse of the component models. Several different types of software frameworks for model composition have been designed and implemented; those types include common library, product line architecture, interoperability protocol, object model, formal, and integrative environment. The various framework types have different components, processes for composing models, and intended applications. In this survey the fundamental terms and concepts of software frameworks for model composition are presented, the different types of such frameworks are explained and compared, and important examples of each type are described.

Description: The key for adopting the utilization-based schedulability test is to derive the utilization bound. Given the computation times, this paper proposes two utilization bound algorithms to derive interrelease times for nonpreemptive periodic tasks, using a new priority scheme, “Rate Monotonic Algorithm-Shortest Job First.” The obtained task set possesses the advantage of Rate Monotonic Algorithm and Shortest Job First priority scheme. Further, the task set is tested for schedulability, by first deriving a general schedulability condition from “problem window” analysis and, a necessary and sufficient schedulability condition for a task to be scheduled, at any release time are also derived. As a technical contribution, success ratio and effective processor utilization are analyzed for our proposed utilization bound algorithms on a uniprocessor architecture modeled using UML-RT.

Description: A Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) algorithm is proposed to fine-tune the baseline PI controller parameters of Alstom gasifier. The existing baseline PI controller is not able to meet the performance requirements of Alstom gasifier for sinusoidal pressure disturbance at 0% load. This is considered the major drawback of controller design. A best optimal solution for Alstom gasifier is obtained from a set of nondominated solutions using MOPSO algorithm. Performance of gasifier is investigated at all load conditions. The controller with optimized controller parameters meets all the performance requirements at 0%, 50%, and 100% load conditions. The investigations are also extended for variations in coal quality, which shows an improved stability of the gasifier over a wide range of coal quality variations.

Description: Rainfall-runoff simulation in hydrology using artificial intelligence presents the nonlinear relationships using neural networks. In this study, a hybrid network presented as a feedforward modular neural network (FF-MNN) has been developed to predict the daily rainfall-runoff of the Roodan watershed at the southern part of Iran. This FF-MNN has three layers—input, hidden, and output. The hidden layer has two types of neural expert or module. Hydrometeorological data of the catchment were collected for 21 years. Heuristic method was used to develop the MNN for exploring daily flow generalization. Two training algorithms, namely, backpropagation with momentum and Levenberg-Marquardt, were used. Sigmoid and linear transfer functions were employed to explore the network’s optimum behavior. Cross-validation and predictive uncertainty assessments were carried out to protect overtiring and overparameterization, respectively. Results showed that the FF-MNN could satisfactorily predict stream flow during testing period. The Nash-Sutcliff coefficient, coefficient of determination, and root mean square error obtained using MNN during training and test periods were 0.85, 0.85, and 39.4 and 0.57, 0.58, and 32.2, respectively. The predictive uncertainties for both periods were 0.39 and 0.44, respectively. Generally, the study showed that the FF-MNN can give promising prediction for rainfall-runoff relations.

Description: An UML profile describes lightweight extension mechanism to the UML by defining custom stereotypes, tagged values, and constraints. They are used to adapt UML metamodel to different platforms and domains. In this paper we present an UML profile for models supporting event driving simulation. In particular, we use the Arena simulation tool and we focus on the mining process domain. Profiles provide an easy way to obtain well-defined specifications, regulated by the Object Management Group (OMG). They can be used as a presimulation technique to obtain solid models for the mining industry. In this work we present a new profile to extend the UML metamodel; in particular we focus on the activity diagram. This extended model is applied to an industry problem involving loading and transportation of minerals in the field of mining process.

Description: Physical design and synthesis are two key processes of quantum circuit design methodology. The physical design process itself decomposes into scheduling, mapping, routing, and placement. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed for mapping, routing, and scheduling in ion-trap technology in order to minimize latency of the circuit. The proposed model which is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model gives the optimal locations for gates and the best sequence of operations in terms of latency. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms the other schemes for the attempted benchmarks.

Description: The issue of crack detection and its diagnosis has gained a wide spread of industrial interest. The crack/damage affects the industrial economic growth. So early crack detection is an important aspect in the point of view of any industrial growth. In this paper a design tool ANSYS is used to monitor various changes in vibrational characteristics of thin transverse cracks on a cantilever beam for detecting the crack position and depth and was compared using artificial intelligence techniques. The usage of neural networks is the key point of development in this paper. The three neural networks used are cascade forward back propagation (CFBP) network, feed forward back propagation (FFBP) network, and radial basis function (RBF) network. In the first phase of this paper theoretical analysis has been made and then the finite element analysis has been carried out using commercial software, ANSYS. In the second phase of this paper the neural networks are trained using the values obtained from a simulated model of the actual cantilever beam using ANSYS. At the last phase a comparative study has been made between the data obtained from neural network technique and finite element analysis.

Description: A numerical investigation has been carried out to examine the periodic laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics in a three-dimensional isothermal wall square duct with 20° inline V-ribs. The computations are based on the finite volume method, and the SIMPLE algorithm has been implemented. The fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented for Reynolds numbers based on the hydraulic diameter of the square duct ranging from 100 to 2000. To generate main streamwise vortex flows through the tested section, V-ribs with an attack angle of 20° are mounted in tandem with inline arrangement, pointing downstream (V-Downstream) and pointing upstream (V-Upstream) placed on both the upper and lower walls. Effects of different blockage ratio (b/H, BR) with a single pitch ratio (P/H, PR) of 1 on heat transfer, pressure loss, and performance in the ribbed tube are studied. Apparently in each of the main vortex flows, streamwise twisted vortex flows can induce impinging flows on the walls of the interbaffle cavity leading to drastic increase in heat transfer rate over the square duct. In addition, the rise in the V-baffle height results in the increase in the Nusselt number and friction factor values. The computational results show that the optimum thermal enhancement factor is about 4.2 atBR=0.20and 0.15 for the V-Downstream and V-Upstream, respectively.

Description: In the initial phase of the research work, quasistatic compression tests were conducted on the expanded polystyrene (EPS) crushable foam for material characterisation at low strain rates (8.3×10-3~8.3×10-2 s−1) to obtain the stress strain curves. The resulting stress strain curves are compared well with the ones found in the literature. Numerical analysis of compression tests was carried out to validate them against experimental results. Additionally gravity-driven drop tests were carried out using a long rod projectile with semispherical end that penetrated into the EPS foam block. Long rod projectile drop tests were simulated in LS-DYNA by using suggested parameter enhancements that were able to compute the material damage and failure response precisely. The material parameters adjustment for successful modelling has been reported.

Description: We present and study existing digital differential analyzer (DDA) algorithms for circle generation, including an improved two-step DDA algorithm which can be implemented solely in terms of elementary shifts, addition, and subtraction.

Description: Silicon nanowires are leading the CMOS era towards the downsizing limit and its nature will be effectively suppress the short channel effects. Accurate modeling of thermal noise in nanowires is crucial for RF applications of nano-CMOS emerging technologies. In this work, a perfect temperature-dependent model for silicon nanowires including the self-heating effects has been derived and its effects on device parameters have been observed. The power spectral density as a function of thermal resistance shows significant improvement as the channel length decreases. The effects of thermal noise including self-heating of the device are explored. Moreover, significant reduction in noise with respect to channel thermal resistance, gate length, and biasing is analyzed.

Description: Determination of optimal cutting parameters is one of the most important elements in any process planning of metal parts. In this paper, a new optimization technique, firefly algorithm, is used for determining the machining parameters in a multipass turning operation model. The objective considered is minimization of production cost under a set of machining constraints. The optimization is carried out using firefly algorithm. An application example is presented and solved to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.

Description: A numerical investigation is made to study the thermal boundary layer for flow of incompressible Newtonian fluid over an exponentially stretching sheet with an exponentially moving free stream. The governing partial differential equations are transformed into self-similar ordinary differential equations using similarity transformations in exponential forms. Then those are solved numerically by shooting technique using Runge-Kutta method. The study reveals that the momentum boundary layer thickness for this flow is considerably smaller than the linear stagnation point flow past a linearly stretching sheet. The momentum and thermal boundary layer thicknesses reduce when the velocity ratio parameter increases. For the temperature distribution, in addition to the heat transfer from the sheet, the heat absorption at the sheet also occurs in certain situations and both heat transfer and absorption increase with the velocity ratio parameter and the Prandtl number. The temperature inside the boundary layer significantly decreases with higher values of velocity ratio parameter and the Prandtl number.

Description: Multiobjective optimization methods for routing in static wireless mesh networks (WMNs), with more than one QoS measure to be optimized, are highly challenging. To optimize the performance for a given end-to-end route in a static network, the most common metrics that need to be optimized or bounded are the path capacity and the end-to-end delay. In this work, we focus on combining desirable properties of these two metrics by minimizing a weighted metrics sum via a Dijkstra-based algorithm. The approach is directed towards fast convergence rather than optimality. It is shown that the resulting algorithm provides more satisfactory results than simple Dijkstra-based pruning algorithms in terms of simultaneously achieving high capacity and small delay. The effect of changing the weighting factor on the proposed algorithm performance is investigated.

Description: Hazardous material transportation is one of the main concerns due to the nature of hazardous materials and their incident impacts. In general, transport risk is a main attribute to develop mathematical models for hazardous material routing problem as well as network designing or improving road safety. This paper presents a chaotic-simulation based model to determine the high selected links to improve road network quality for hazardous material transportation, in which risk is considered as a chaotic variable over the network whereas a simulation technique has been applied to cover a wide range of selecting paths. A real road network, consists of fifty-nine nodes and eighty two-way edges, is used for running the mathematical model and checking validation. Due to the large amounts of hazardous material transported by trucks, the proposed methodology is focused on fuel transportation, and high selected list of edges (links) has been obtained to improve road safety. Sensitivity analysis revealed that using different seeds for generating transport risk has no significant effects on finding the most frequent paths and high selected edges.

Description: Interaction of a solitary wave and submerged breakwater is studied in a meshless, Lagrangian approach. For this purpose, a two-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code is developed. Furthermore, an extensive set of simulations is conducted. In the first step, the generated solitary wave is validated. Subsequently, the interaction of solitary wave and submerged breakwater is investigated thoroughly. Results of the interaction of solitary wave and a submerged breakwater are also shown to be in good agreement with published experimental studies. Afterwards, the effects of the inclination and length of breakwater as well as distance between two breakwaters are evaluated on damping ratio of breakwater.

Description: In the process of automatic design for printed circuit boards (PCBs), the phase following cell placement is routing. On the other hand, routing process is a notoriously difficult problem, and even the simplest routing problem which consists of a set of two-pin nets is known to be NP-complete. In this research, our routing region is first tessellated into a uniformNx×Nyarray of square cells. The ultimate goal for a routing problem is to achieve complete automatic routing with minimal need for any manual intervention. Therefore, shortest path for all connections needs to be established. While classical Dijkstra’s algorithm guarantees to find shortest path for a single net, each routed net will form obstacles for later paths. This will add complexities to route later nets and make its routing longer than the optimal path or sometimes impossible to complete. Today’s sequential routing often applies heuristic method to further refine the solution. Through this process, all nets will be rerouted in different order to improve the quality of routing. Because of this, we are motivated to apply simulated annealing, one of the metaheuristic methods to our routing model to produce better candidates of sequence.

Description: The microstructure of porous materials used in heterogeneous catalysis determines the mass transport inside networks, which may vary over many length scales. The theoretical prediction of mass transport phenomena in porous materials, however, is incomplete and is still not completely understood. Therefore, experimental data for every specific porous system is needed. One possible experimental technique for characterizing the mass transport in such pore networks is pulse experiments. The general evaluation of experimental outcomes of these techniques follows the solution of Fick’s second law where an integral and effective diffusion coefficient is recognized. However, a detailed local understanding of diffusion and sorption processes remains a challenge. As there is lack of proved models covering different length scales, existing classical concepts need to be evaluated with respect to their ability to reflect local geometries on the nanometer level. In this study, DSMC (Direct Simulation Monte Carlo) models were used to investigate the impact of pore microstructures on the diffusion behaviour of gases. It can be understood as a virtual pulse experiment within a single pore or a combination of different pore geometries.

Description: This paper presents the design of a SystemC transaction level modelling wrapping library that can be used for the assertion of system properties, protocol compliance, or fault injection. The library uses C++ virtual table hooks as a dynamic binary instrumentation technique to inline wrappers in the TLM2 transaction path. This technique can be applied after the elaboration phase and needs neither source code modifications nor recompilation of the top level SystemC modules. The proposed technique has been successfully applied to the robustness verification of the on-board boot software of the Instrument Control Unit of the Solar Orbiter’s Energetic Particle Detector.

Description: The purpose of this study was to increase the quality of product by focusing on the machine efficiency improvement. The principle of the reliability centered maintenance (RCM) was applied to increase the machine reliability. The objective was to create preventive maintenance plan under reliability centered maintenance method and to reduce defects. The study target was set to reduce the Lead PPM for a test machine by simulating the proposed preventive maintenance plan. The simulation optimization approach based on evolutionary algorithms was employed for the preventive maintenance technique selection process to select the PM interval that gave the best total cost and Lead PPM values. The research methodology includes procedures such as following the priority of critical components in test machine, analyzing the damage and risk level by using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), calculating the suitable replacement period through reliability estimation, and optimizing the preventive maintenance plan. From the result of the study it is shown that the Lead PPM of test machine can be reduced. The cost of preventive maintenance, cost of good product, and cost of lost product were decreased.

Description: This paper considers the problem of centralized spectrum allocations in wireless sensor networks towards the following goals: (1) maximizing fairness, (2) reflecting the priority among sensor data, and (3) avoiding unnecessary spectrum handoff. We cast this problem into a multiobjective mixed integer nonconvex nonlinear programming that is definitely difficult to solve at least globally without any aid of conversion or approximation. To tackle this intractability, we first convexify the original problem using arithmetic-geometric mean approximation and logarithmic change of the decision variables and then deploy weighted Chebyshev norm-based scalarization method in order to collapse the multiobjective problem into a single objective one. Finally, we apply simple rounding method in order to obtain approximate integer solutions. The results obtained from the numerical experiments show that, by adjusting the weight on each objective function, the proposed algorithm allocates spectrum bands fairly with well observing each sensor’s priority and reduced spectrum handoffs.

Description: Aspect-oriented modeling and simulation is a new approach which uses the separation of concerns principle to enhance the quality of models and simulation tools. It adopts the separation of concerns (SOC) principle. Thus, crosscutting concerns such as processes synchronization, steady state detection, and graphical animation could be separated from simulation functional modules. The capture of crosscutting concerns in a modular way is carried out to cope with complexity and to achieve the required engineering quality factors such as robustness, modularity, adaptability, and reusability. This paper provides a summary of aspect-oriented paradigm with its usage in simulation by illustrating the main crosscutting concerns that may infect simulation systems. A practical example is given with the use of the Japrosim discrete event simulation library.

Description: To identify neurological characteristics in accordance with anxiety under the interaction between emotion and attention, this study examines major ERP components when participants identify a target number by inhibiting task-irrelevant emotional face distractors. Experiments were conducted once per day at the same time for two days with 19 healthy adult men and women as required to study emotion-attention interaction. In this study, a variety of ERP components such as P100, N200, and P300 during experiment are significant. The amplitude and latency of the N200 component reflect both state and trait anxiety at all positions. This characteristic specially is prominently featured at Cz. Also, the latency of the late P300 component reflects the trait anxiety rather than state anxiety. The result of this study can help our understanding of the neurological responses related to anxiety during attentional control.

Description: Experimental tests which match the application conditions might be used to properly evaluate materials for specific applications. High velocity impacts can be simulated using light-gas gun facilities, which come in different types and complexities. In this work different setups for a one-stage light-gas gun facility have been numerically analyzed in order to evaluate their suitability for testing materials and composites used as armor protection. A maximal barrel length of 6 m and a maximal reservoir pressure of a standard industrial gas bottle (20 MPa) were chosen as limitations. The numerical predictions show that it is not possible to accelerate the projectile directly to the desired velocity with nitrogen, helium, or hydrogen as propellant gas. When using a sabot corresponding to a higher bore diameter, the necessary velocity is achievable with helium and hydrogen gases.

Description: Inventory management in retailers is difficult and complex decision making process which is related to the conflict criteria, also existence of cyclic changes and trend in demand is inevitable in many industries. In this paper, simulation modeling is considered as efficient tool for modeling of retailer multiproduct inventory system. For simulation model optimization, a novel multicriteria and robust surrogate model is designed based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM) method, design of experiments (DOE), and principal component analysis (PCA). This approach as a main contribution of this paper, provides a framework for robust multiple criteria decision making under uncertainty.