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As the airline industry is ever expanding, companies are increasing their fleet sizes to obtain greater market shares. Moreover, as the airlines seek more growth, the complexity and size of the airline crew scheduling problem, which is one of the major planning problems in the industry, is also increasing. For this reason, companies dedicate resources to solve this problem, and lease software at great expense from external sources. Rigorous mathematical models and algorithms are used in solving these problems. This paper presents a survey of airline crew scheduling problems, and their proposed solutions from the literature. As a conclusion, prospective studies will be proposed and discussed with the aim of developing better solutions for airline crew scheduling problems in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text understanding and reasoning are among the core areas of artificial intelligence. Even a total solution to automatic text understanding and reasoning is still beyond the current techniques, thus it is time to build the stepping stones to solve a more straightforward problem set like question-answering (QA) without ambiguous utterances in the contexts or questions. The reported state-of-the-art approaches to this kind of problem are nearly all connectionist models based on neural networks. Significant progress has even been made in this direction. It is still hard for the pure connectionist models to handle logical reasoning. They generally suffer from the longstanding drawback of poor explainability and sensitivity to data noise and distribution. In this paper, we propose a complementary symbolic approach, GMR (Graph Matching based Reasoner) to QA — it automatically generates reasoning rules in the form of graphs from the training set and uses the generated rules to infer answers to the questions in the test set via graph matching. By employing this symbolic approach, 20 tasks in bAbI are solved with an average accuracy of 99.38%, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art for a real-life QA dataset WikiTableQuestions. After analyzing the accuracy of the basic evaluation indicators, we studied the generalization ability of the model in the paper, including the anti-noise ability, the convergence of the model, the stability of the model, the complexity of the algorithm, and the uncertainty of the parameters. Through comprehensive analysis and comparison, our model is stronger than the neural network model regarding anti-noise interference. Compared with the neural network model, our model performs very well in multi-tasking, and the stability of the model is quite high. The diversity of tasks did not reduce the stability of the model. We have conducted a comprehensive analysis and comparison of the parameter uncertainties. Our model can optimally select parameter configurations and will not cause a sharp drop in performance due to the parameter uncertainties. Finally, we describe the complexity of the GMR method and the optimal configuration of its parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imbalanced problem occurs when the size of one class, i.e. the minority class, is much lower than that of the other classes, i.e. the majority classes. Conventional data level methods are employed as the preprocessing approaches to balance the datasets before the classifier learning. Since the balanced data remains unchanged during the learning process, one pre-deleted sample would never be used to train the classifier, which may result in information loss. To solve this problem, this work presents an One-sided Dynamic Undersampling (ODU) technique which adopts all samples in the training process, and dynamically determines whether a majority sample should be used for the classifier learning. Thus, ODU can dynamically undersample the majority class to balance the dataset. To validate the effectiveness of ODU, we integrate it into No-Propagation neural networks to propose an ODU No-Propagation Neural Networks (ODUNPNN). ODUNPNN takes all training samples into consideration, and dynamically undersamples majority class after each iteration, i.e. ODUNPNN integrates undersampling approach into the classifier learning process. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world imbalance datasets demonstrate that ODUNPNN outperforms the NPNN-based algorithms, and results in comparative performance compared with LASVM-AL, EasyEnsemble, and DyS on real-world imbalance datasets. The contributions of this paper are: (1) ODUNPNN integrates undersampling approach into the classifier learning process. (2) ODUNPNN dynamically balances training data in each iteration. (3) ODU technique can be integrated into other classification learning machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population-based optimization algorithms have been successfully applied to hydrological forecasting recently owing to their powerful ability of global optimization. This paper investigates three algorithms, i.e. differential evolution (DE), artificial bee colony (ABC) and ant colony optimization (ACO), to determine the optimal one for forecasting downstream river flow. A hybrid neural network (HNN) model, which incorporates fuzzy pattern-recognition and a continuity equation into the artificial neural network, is proposed to forecast downstream river flow based on upstream river flows and areal precipitation. The optimization algorithm is employed to determine the premise parameters of the HNN model. Daily data from the Altamaha River basin of Georgia is applied in the forecasting analysis. Discussions on the forecasting performances, convergence speed and stability of various algorithms are presented. For completeness׳ sake, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is included as a benchmark case for the comparison of forecasting performances. Results show that the DE algorithm attains the best performance in generalization and forecasting. The forecasting accuracy of the DE algorithm is comparable to that of the PSO, and yet presents weak superiority over the ABC and ACO. The Diebold–Mariano (DM) test indicates that each pair of algorithms has no difference under the null hypothesis of equal forecasting accuracy. The DE and ACO algorithms are both favorable for searching parameters of the HNN model, including the recession coefficient and initial storage. Further analysis reveals the drawback of slow convergence and time-consumption of the ABC algorithm. The three algorithms present stability and reliability with respect to their control parameters on the whole. It can be concluded that the DE and ACO algorithms are considerably more adaptive in optimizing the forecasting problem for the HNN model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme learning machine (ELM), a simple single-hidden-layer feed-forward neural network with fast implementation, has been successfully applied in many fields. This paper proposes an ELM with a constructional structure (CS-ELM) for improving the performance of ELM in dealing with regression problems. In the CS-ELM, there are some partial input subnets (PISs). The first step in designing the PISs is to divide the data-attribute-space into several sub-spaces through using an improved extension clustering algorithm (IECA). The input data attributes in the same sub-space can build a PIS and the similar information of the data attributes is stored in the corresponding PIS. Additionally, a double parallel structure is applied in the CS-ELM, in which there is a special channel that directly connects the input layer neurons to the output layer neurons. In this regard, the proposed procedure can be called ELM with a data-attribute-space-oriented double parallel (DASODP) structure (DASODP–ELM). To test the validity of the proposed method, it is applied to 4 regression applications. The experimental results indicate that, compared with ELM, DASODP–ELM with less number of parameters can achieve higher regression precision in the generalization phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a hybrid intelligent tracking control approach is developed to address optimal tracking problems for a class of nonlinear discrete-time systems. The generalized value iteration algorithm is utilized to attain the admissible tracking control with off-line training, while the on-line near-optimal control method is established to enhance the control performance. It is emphasized that the value iteration performance is improved by introducing the acceleration factor. By collecting the input–output data of the unknown system plant, the model neural network is constructed to provide the partial derivative of the system state with respect to the control law as the approximate control matrix. A novel computational strategy is introduced to obtain the steady control of the reference trajectory. The critic and action neural networks are utilized to approximate the cost function and the tracking control, respectively. Considering approximation errors of neural networks, the stability analysis of the specific systems is provided via the Lyapunov approach. Finally, two numerical examples with industrial application backgrounds are involved for verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on developing the system for people flow recognition based on many video camera images. The project arose based on the real need — its application in the city malls to find the most visited places and support customers' campaigns. The potential application in other domains is possible (public buildings, airports). In contrast to the existing solutions, our approach involves on-edge image analysis to decrease the risk of data loss and the system cost. In the project, we design the whole processing pipeline composed of the component modules responsible for detecting, tracking, and reidentifying (shuffling) people. Our experimental platform enabled us to compare multiple method variants for each module. Based on extensive experimental research, the final solution uses the pretrained SSD method in the detection module. The centroid algorithm applied to displacement vectors combined with the Siamese network is the basis for the object tracking module. The best model to solve the reidentification task is the Resnet50. For the Market 1501 dataset, it achieved Rank-1 efficiency of 84.6%. The system gives a visualization of the main paths of people's movements in the form of a heat map and assigns the direction where people most often look. In the experimental study, we assessed the system's effectiveness and time efficiency, and the current results give a perspective for its commercialization in the nearest future. • Development of the whole processing pipeline of human flow and reidentification. • Research aiming at the choice of competitive component methods • Experimental tuning of methods to achieve the high efficiency and low processing time. • Extension of the centroids algorithm with displacement vectors. • Platform for easy testing various methods of detection and reidentification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]