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For nearly a decade, quality-related fault detection algorithms have been widely used in industrial systems. However, the majority of these detection strategies rely on static assumptions of the operating environment. In this paper, taking the time series of variables into consideration, a dynamic kernel entropy component regression (DKECR) framework is proposed to address the instability of quality-related fault detection due to the existing dynamic characteristics. Compared with the typical kernel entropy component analysis method, the proposed method constructs the relationship between process states and quality states to further interpret the direct effect on the product taken by the fault. In the proposed approach, process measurements are converted to a lower-dimensional subspace with a specific angular structure that is more comprehensive than traditional subspace approaches. In addition, the angular statistics and their relevant thresholds are exploited to enhance the quality-related fault detection performance. Finally, the proposed method will be compared with three methods by means of a numerical example and two industrial scenarios to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness. Note to Practitioners—This paper studies a quality-related fault detection problem for the dynamic nonlinear industrial system. Controlling and measuring the quality state is challenging for the high-level monitoring system of the manufacturing process due to the nonlinear dynamic feature in states. This paper proposes a new data-driven method based on the kernel entropy component analysis method to assess the correlation between the quality and fault in the industrial system, reducing unnecessary overhaul and maintenance. Based on the autoregressive moving average exogenous algorithm, the proposed method captures the dynamic interaction between the process states to decrease false alarms. In the experimental section, the DKECR method outperforms the compared approaches, which can provide stable fault detection results. Additionally, the unique angle structure of the proposed method can supply more information for engineers’ monitoring needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a UAV path planning problem for a team of cooperating heterogeneous vehicles composed of one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The UGVs are used as mobile actuators and scattered in a large area. To achieve multi-UGV communication and collaboration, the UAV, modeled as a Dubins vehicle, serves as a messenger to fly over the effective communication range of all UGVs to relay information. The curvature-constrained path planning of the messenger UAV is formulated as a Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Dynamic Neighborhood (DTSPDN) which is a complex optimization problem involving coupled variables and contains dynamic constraints. We design an effective memetic algorithm to find the shortest route that enables the messenger UAV to visit all moving UGVs. This algorithm combines the genetic algorithm procedure, two kinds of local search operators based on gradient search and uniform sampling respectively, and a gradient-based repair operator to repair the solutions violating dynamic constraints. During the evolutionary process, a special phenomenon may occur that changing some decision variables (i.e., visiting sequence and location) may not affect the evaluation function value, but may alter the feasible region of another decision variable (i.e., visiting time) due to the encounter constraint between the UAV and UGV. To track and utilize the change of the feasible region, a transformation procedure is proposed to change one solution to another with less visiting time by analyzing the encounter pattern between UAV and UGV. The computational results on random instances with different scales demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively generate better curvature-constrained tours to encounter all moving UGVs when compared to other four competitive algorithms in the literature. Note to Practitioners—This paper studies an emerging path planning problem for a UAV which is used to provide communication service for multiple moving UGVs. These UGVs are required to execute tasks (e.g., firefighting, search and rescue) within a large area. Due to their limited communication capabilities, they may be unable to obtain necessary information from other UGVs. The UAV serves as a messenger to fly over the effective communication range of all moving UGVs to relay information. We propose a novel memetic algorithm to efficiently search for the shortest tour that enables the messenger UAV to visit all moving UGVs. The memetic algorithm combines the parallel global search virtue of genetic algorithm with efficient local search procedure to improve the generated tour. A gradient-based repair procedure is also employed to make sure that the planned tour can guide the UAV to sequentially encounter each moving UGV. Simulations exhibit that the proposed approach can effectively generate high-quality tours for messenger UAV to rapidly visit all UGVs, which assists UGVs to achieve collaboration in large area. In future work, the proposed memetic algorithm will be extended to plan tours for multiple messenger UAVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an algorithmic framework, message passing is extremely powerful and has wide applications in the context of different disciplines including communications, coding theory, statistics, signal processing, artificial intelligence and combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a message-passing algorithm called min-sum belief propagation (BP) for the vertex-disjoint shortest $k$ -path problem ($k$ -VDSP) on weighted directed graphs, and derive the iterative message-passing update rules. As the main result of this paper, we prove that for a weighted directed graph $G$ of order $n$ , BP algorithm converges to the unique optimal solution of $k$ -VDSP on $G$ within $O(n^{2}w_{max})$ iterations, provided that the weight $w_{e}$ is nonnegative integral for each arc $e\in E(G)$ , where $w_{max}=\max \{w_{e}: e\in E(G)\}$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance where BP algorithm is proved correct for NP-hard problems. Additionally, we establish the extensions of $k$ -VDSP to the case of multiple sources or sinks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As pairwise ranking becomes broadly employed for elections, sports competitions, recommendation, information retrieval and so on, attackers have strong motivation and incentives to manipulate or disrupt the ranking list. They could inject malicious comparisons into the training data to fool the target ranking algorithm. Such a technique is called “poisoning attack” in regression and classification tasks. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we initiate the first systematic investigation of data poisoning attack on the pairwise ranking algorithms, which can be generally formalized as the dynamic and static games between the ranker and the attacker, and can be modeled as certain kinds of integer programming problems mathematically. To break the computational hurdle of the underlying integer programming problems, we reformulate them into the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems, which are computational tractable. Based on such DRO formulations, we propose two efficient poisoning attack algorithms and establish the associated theoretical guarantees including the existence of Nash equilibrium and the generalization ability bounds. The effectiveness of the suggested poisoning attack strategies is demonstrated by a series of toy simulations and several real data experiments. These experimental results show that the proposed methods can significantly reduce the performance of the ranker in the sense that the correlation between the true ranking list and the aggregated results with toxic data can be decreased dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subgraph queries are routinely used to search for entities in richly attributed graphs e.g., social networks and knowledge graphs. With little knowledge of underlying data, users often need to rewrite queries multiple times to reach desirable answers. Why-questions are studied to clarify missing or unexpected query results. This paper makes a first step to answer Why-questions for entity search in attributed graphs. We consider three common types of Why-questions: Why-not, Why, and Why-rank, which suggest query manipulations that are responsible for user-specified missing, unexpected, and undesirably ranked entities, respectively. (1) We approach a general query rewriting paradigm that suggests to identify desired entities that are specified by Why-questions. We introduce measures that characterize good query rewrites by incorporating both query editing cost and answer closeness. (2) While computing optimal query rewrites is intractable, we develop feasible algorithms, from approximation to fast heuristics, and provide query rewrites with (near) optimality guarantees whenever possible, for Why, Why-not and Why-rank questions. We further show that our results remain intact for Why questions that (1) request a single query rewrite to clarify multiple types of entities, and (2) variants such as Why-empty and Why-so-many, by providing the matching algorithms. Using real-world graphs, we experimentally verify that our algorithms are effective and feasible for large graphs. Our case study also verifies their application in e.g., knowledge exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Degeneracy is an important concept to measure the sparsity of a graph which has been widely used in many network analysis applications. Many network analysis algorithms, such as clique enumeration and truss decomposition, perform very well in graphs having small degeneracies. In this paper, we propose an I/O-efficient algorithm to compute the degeneracy of the massive graph that cannot be fully kept in the main memory. The proposed algorithm only uses $O(n)$ O (n) memory, where $n$ n denotes the number of nodes of the graph. We also develop an I/O-efficient algorithm to incrementally maintain the degeneracy on dynamic graphs. Extensive experiments show that our algorithms significantly outperform the state-of-the-art degeneracy computation algorithms in terms of both running time and I/O costs. The results also demonstrate high scalability of the proposed algorithms. For example, in a real-world web graph with 930 million nodes and 13.3 billion edges, the proposed algorithm takes only 633 seconds and uses less than 4.5GB memory to compute the degeneracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For vehicle-to-network communications, handover (HO) management enables vehicles to maintain the connection with the network while transiting through coverage areas of different base stations (BSs). However, the high mobility of vehicles means shorter connection periods with each BS that leads to frequent HOs, hence raises the necessity for optimal HO decision making for high quality infotainment services. Machine learning is capable of capturing underlying pattern via data driven methods to find optimal solutions to complex problems, and much learning-based HO optimization research has been conducted focusing on specific network setups. However, attention still needs to be paid to the actual deployment aspect and standardized datasets or simulation environments for evaluation. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based HO algorithm using the input parameters that are configurable in the existing measurement report of cellular networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the well-known network simulator ns-3 with its official LTE module. A realistic network setup in the city center of Glasgow (U.K.) is configured with vehicle trajectories generated by the routes mobility model using Google Maps Directions API. Evaluation results reveal that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the A3 RSRP baseline with an average of 25.72% packet loss reduction per HO, suggesting significant improvement in quality of service of phone call and video streaming, etc. The proposed algorithm also has a small implementation cost compared to some state-of-the-art and should be deployed by a software update to a local BS controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for communities in real-world networks to possess hierarchical and overlapping structures, which make community detection even more challenging. In this paper, by investigating consensus process of the classical DeGroot model in opinion dynamics, we propose a novel method based on the cumulative opinion distance (COD) to discover hierarchical and overlapping communities. It is shown that this method is different from those classical algorithms relying on static fitness metrics that depict the inhomogeneous connectivity across the network. The proposed method is validated from two aspects. First, by estimating the eigenvectors of adjacency matrices, we investigate the detectability limit of our algorithms on random networks, which together with the results concerning the convergence speed of consensus guarantees the performance of our method theoretically. Second, experiments on both large scale real-world networks and artificial benchmarks show that our method is very effective and competitive on hierarchical modular graphs. In particular, it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on overlapping community detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes an approximate optimal critic learning algorithm based on single neural network (NN) policy iteration (PI) aiming at solving for continuous-time (CT) 2-player zero-sum games (ZSGs). In fact, we have to face the problem that the errors will disturb the dynamics and in turn identifying dynamics will generate errors. In order to prevent the effect of errors, in this paper, a single NN-based online PI algorithm is developed for the CT system, which is disturbed nonlinear ZSG. With plenty of online data, the Hamilton–Jacobi–Isaacs equation can be solved without complete dynamics. Then by the least-squares method, we can obtain the NN weights. Moreover, in the process of dealing with the undisturbed system, we find the way that obtains NN weights in this paper is equal to the way that obtains the optimal solution by the Gauss–Newton method. Based on the convergence of the Gauss–Newton method, we can efficiently obtain the optimal controller for the undisturbed system by utilizing online data. After getting the controller of the undisturbed system, it is time to take disturbance into consideration, so that we design a robust control pair to overcome the disturbance. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm, we design a set of simulations. The results verify that we can solve the disturbed nonlinear ZSG by this algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous vehicles will generate data from the variety of sensors they employ to track the surrounding environment. This data is inherently valuable, as it gives algorithm designers the potential to leverage prior experience in order to improve driving performance over time. This paper uses the lens of autonomous racing to provide an example of how data from previous iterations of driving can be used to improve quantitative metrics of performance. Two complementary algorithms are demonstrated in this paper. The first algorithm uses iterative learning control (ILC) to simultaneously improve lateral and longitudinal tracking of the desired racing trajectory over multiple laps, while the second algorithm is focused on altering the trajectory itself using a search method. When driven experimentally at the limits of handling, the result is a reduction in lap time of nearly 1.4 seconds, a major improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an adaptive vehicle clustering algorithm based on fuzzy C-means algorithm, which aims at minimizing power consumption of the vehicles. Specifically, the proposed algorithm firstly dynamically allocates the computing resources of each virtual machine in the vehicle, according to the popularity of different virtualized network functions. The optimal clustering number to minimize the total energy consumption of vehicles is determined using the fuzzy C-means algorithm and the clustering head is selected based on vehicles moving direction, weighted mobility, and entropy. Simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed algorithm can decrease the power consumption of vehicles while satisfying the vehicle delay requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fast and precise dynamic phasor estimation algorithm using an adaptive improved second order Levenberg–Marquadt algorithm under stressed and off-nominal frequency circumstances is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm ventures a faster quasi-second-order method and in addition, the learning rate is also made adaptive to speed up the convergence. Moreover, the projected estimator essentially filters harmonics, estimates transients in a signal during faults and effectually performs in complex modulated setting which is found commonly in a power system with distributed energy resources. Outcomes reveal that the estimation errors and the convergence time of the proposed approach is way below the minimum requirement of the IEEE C37.118.1 standard. Besides, due to its reduced complexity, the estimator has been successfully implemented on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform and has been verified on a practical microgrid scenario including photo voltaic systems. The performance during testing indicates that the proposed technique has potential ability to perform under stressed conditions conforming the accuracy and speed of response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many big data applications produce a massive amount of high-dimensional, real-time, and evolving streaming data. Clustering such data streams with both effectiveness and efficiency are critical for these applications. Although there are well-known data stream clustering algorithms that are based on the popular online-offline framework, these algorithms still face some major challenges. Several critical questions are still not answer satisfactorily: How to perform dimensionality reduction effectively and efficiently in the online dynamic environment? How to enable the clustering algorithm to achieve complete real-time online processing? How to make algorithm parameters learn in a self-supervised or self-adaptive manner to cope with high-speed evolving streams? In this paper, we focus on tackling these challenges by proposing a fully online data stream clustering algorithm (called ESA-Stream) that can learn parameters online dynamically in a self-adaptive manner, speedup dimensionality reduction, and cluster data streams effectively and efficiently in an online and dynamic environment. Experiments on a wide range of synthetic and real-world data streams show that ESA-Stream outperforms state-of-the-art baselines considerably in both effectiveness and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temperature rising is an unavoidable effect on VLSI and has always been a critical issue in any system-on-chip – especially when targeting compute-intensive applications. This effect increases the delay in hardware accelerators, resulting in timing errors due to unsustainable clock frequency, whose impact must be carefully evaluated on design time to measure the performance degradation of the hardware accelerator. Further, a hardware operating at a higher temperature accelerates device aging, which incurs in more timing errors. This issue is usually addressed with the inclusion of timing guardbands that compensate for the deleterious effects of temperature, ensuring the hardware accelerator works within a reliable zone, i.e., without any timing errors caused by temperature effects at runtime. However, guardbands directly result in considerable performance and efficiency losses because the circuit will be clocked at a frequency lower than its full potential. Accelerators on edge devices often dismiss such guardbands to explore the full potential of the designed circuits, posing an enormous design challenge as this approach requires a careful evaluation of the impact of timing errors on the quality of the target applications. Many algorithms, such as in multimedia and machine learning applications, are capable of tolerating hardware errors. Yet, these algorithms have a dynamic behavior (i.e., closed-loop) where a timing error can be propagated, affecting subsequent steps. Measuring the degradation-induced errors in these applications is very challenging given that an accurate gate-level simulation to investigate degradation-induced timing errors needs to be coupled dynamically with a system-level simulator to unveil how induced errors in the underlying hardware ultimately impact the algorithm execution in the hardware accelerator. This is the first work to achieve this goal. State-of-the-art works have studied accelerators under timing-errors when removing (or narrowing) guardbands. However, their approach was suitable only for open-loop hardware accelerators which are entirely agnostic of complex interactions of the algorithms. Unlike prior work, this paper investigates temperature- and aging-induced timing-errors in the joint accelerator-algorithm interactions and their runtime impacts. Our framework investigates aging effects across the different layers starting from transistor physics all the way up to the algorithm layer. The hardware accelerator employed as a case study in this work is the sum of absolute differences (SAD), which is the most compute-intensive accelerator on commercial video encoder for mobile applications. Our results demonstrate the runtime behavior impacts of three advanced block-matching algorithms of the video encoder in a joint operation by a SAD accelerator under timing-errors induced by temperature and aging effects considering a 14nm FinFET technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the optimal arrangement problem in a connected- $(r,s)$ -out-of- $(m,n)$ :F lattice system. This problem aims to find a component arrangement to maximize system reliability under the assumption that the component reliabilities are given. Although existing studies developed a few algorithms for finding the optimal arrangement of connected- $(r,s)$ -out-of- $(m,n)$ :F lattice systems, these existing algorithms can only find the optimal arrangement in the special cases. In this paper, we develop an improved algorithm for efficiently finding the optimal arrangement of general connected- $(r,s)$ -out-of- $(m,n)$ :F lattice systems. It is based on the branch-and-bound method. First, we derive three conditions for pruning a branch based on the existing conditions for the optimal arrangement. The conditions can reduce the number of candidates for the optimal arrangement. Moreover, we improve the algorithm by incorporating the derived conditions as given by Omura et al. In the improved algorithm, we compute the system reliability efficiently by memorizing the specific values and then utilizing them. The result of the numerical experiment shows the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the algorithm proposed by Omura et al. in terms of the computation time. The result shows that the proposed algorithm can find the optimal arrangement whereas the algorithm proposed by Nakamura et al. cannot find. The optimal arrangement and its system reliability, which the proposed algorithm provides can also be used to evaluate the quality of solutions obtained by (meta) heuristic algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the sub-channels and power allocation issue in the multi-carrier NOMA communication system. To maximize the sum rate of the system, we design a fast dynamic resource allocation (FDRA) algorithm. The algorithm can quickly identify the interference nodes with poor channel conditions, and reduces the search complexity of the algorithm. By jointly optimizing sub-carrier and power resource allocation, the proposed scheme can take full advantage of the channel capacity, and maximize the system performance while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) of each user. Simulation results show that when compared with the joint resource allocation (JRA) algorithm and the genetic algorithm (GA), the FDRA algorithm can achieve the best performance on the complexity and the sum rate of the system. Thus, the proposed algorithm can provide a fast and efficient resource allocation scheme for the downlink multi-carrier NOMA systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new algorithm, named Householder Dice (HD), for simulating dynamics on dense random matrix ensembles with rotational invariance. Examples include the Gaussian ensemble, the Haar-distributed random orthogonal ensemble, and their complex-valued counterparts. A “direct” approach to the simulation, where one first generates a dense $n \times n$ matrix from the ensemble, requires at least $\mathcal {O}(n^{2})$ resource in space and time. The HD algorithm overcomes this $\mathcal {O}(n^{2})$ bottleneck by using the principle of deferred decisions: rather than fixing the entire random matrix in advance, it lets the randomness unfold with the dynamics. At the heart of this matrix-free algorithm is an adaptive and recursive construction of (random) Householder reflectors. These orthogonal transformations exploit the group symmetry of the matrix ensembles, while simultaneously maintaining the statistical correlations induced by the dynamics. The memory and computation costs of the HD algorithm are $\mathcal {O}(nT)$ and $\mathcal {O}(nT^{2})$ , respectively, with $T$ being the number of iterations. When $T \ll n$ , which is nearly always the case in practice, the new algorithm leads to significant reductions in runtime and memory footprint. Numerical results demonstrate the promise of the HD algorithm as a new computational tool in the study of high-dimensional random systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing becomes a promising technology to mitigate the latency of various cloud services. In addition, network function virtualization (NFV) has been shown a great potential in reducing the operational cost of cloud services while enhancing the flexibility of virtual network function deployments, by implementing dedicated hardware network functions as pieces of software in generic servers. Recently, the GPU acceleration has been investigated to speed up flow processing in virtual network functions (VNFs), by leveraging the parallelism of GPUs. VNFs that need accelerations prefer to stay at cloudlets (locations) equipped with GPUs. However, little attention has been paid for the VNF placement that takes into account GPU-affinity in cloudlets of mobile edge clouds. In this paper, we consider the affinity-aware throughput maximization problem in a mobile edge cloud via leveraging the parallelism on GPUs for user requests with VNF requirements. We consider two types of affinities in the VNF placement: The soft-affinity that allows VNFs to be executed by either CPUs or GPUs in cloudlets; and the hard-affinity that only allows VNFs to be placed to the GPUs of a specified set of cloudlets. We formulate two corresponding VNF placement problems in a mobile edge cloud. Specifically, we first propose an exact solution to the soft-affinity throughput maximization problem by formulating an Integer Linear Program (ILP). We then propose an efficient algorithm for the problem, by proposing a randomized algorithm with a provable approximation ratio for the hard-affinity-aware throughput maximization problem and extending the proposed approximation algorithm to the soft-affinity throughput maximization problem. Furthermore, assuming that user requests arrive into the mobile edge cloud one by one without the knowledge of future arrivals, we devise an online algorithm with a good competitive ratio for this dynamic hard-affinity-aware throughput maximization problem. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, through simulations and implementations in a real test-bed. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms outperform their existing counterparts and achieve higher throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel distributed model predictive control (DMPC) strategy based on voltage observer for multiple energy storage systems (ESs) is firstly proposed to achieve a tradeoff between voltage regulation and power sharing. In order to reduce the impact of communication delay on voltage observer, an improved DMPC consensus algorithm is proposed. This scheme improves the robustness of the system to the delay. Besides, a small-signal dynamic model of a DC microgrid with the improved DMPC controllers is established to analyze its dynamic performance. The time-domain simulation results are presented to verify that, under the constraints of the DC bus voltage, a flexible trade-off between voltage regulation and power distribution can be achieved. Besides, the communication delay problems can be reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With continuing advances in high-performance parallel computing platforms, parallel algorithms have become powerful tools for development of faster than real-time power system dynamic simulations. In particular, it has been demonstrated in recent years that parallel-in-time (Parareal) algorithms have the potential to achieve such an ambitious goal. The selection of a fast and reasonably accurate coarse operator of the Parareal algorithm is crucial for its effective utilization and performance. This paper examines semi-analytical solution (SAS) methods as the coarse operators of the Parareal algorithm and explores performance of the SAS methods to the standard numerical time integration methods. Two promising time-power series-based SAS methods were considered; Adomian decomposition method and Homotopy analysis method with a windowing approach for improving the convergence. Numerical performance case studies on 10-generator 39-bus system and 327-generator 2383-bus system were performed for these coarse operators over different disturbances, evaluating the number of Parareal iterations, computational time, and stability of convergence. All the coarse operators tested with different scenarios have converged to the same corresponding true solution (if they are convergent) and the SAS methods provide comparable computational speed, while having more stable convergence to the true solution in many cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of multiple graph matching (MGM) by considering both offline batch mode and online setting. We explore the concept of cycle-consistency over pairwise matchings and formulate the problem as finding optimal composition path on the supergraph, whose vertices refer to graphs and edge weights denote score function regarding consistency and affinity. By our theoretical study we show that the offline and online MGM on supergraph can be converted to finding all pairwise shortest paths and single-source shortest paths respectively. We adopt the Floyd algorithm and shortest path faster algorithm (SPFA) , to effectively find the optimal path. Extensive experimental results show our methods surpass state-of-the-art MGM methods, including CAO , MISM , IMGM , and many other recent methods in offline and online settings. Source code will be made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the execution requirements of delay-sensitive services in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, vehicular services need to be offloaded to edge computing nodes. For complex, large-scale services, the services need to be migrated if the services are not completed before the vehicles leave the coverage of edge computing nodes. Trust and resource matching between areas thus become major problems. This paper studies the decision model of vehicular service offloading and migration. First, software-defined network (SDN) technology is introduced into the traditional network architecture, and a two-layer distributed SDN-controlled VEC network architecture is designed, which is divided into a domain control layer and an area control layer. In this framework, we use the consortium blockchain as a carrier to share network topology information between SDN controllers to prevent information leakage. We then established a service offloading and migration optimization problem model to minimize service execution delay, reduce energy consumption and maximize the throughput of the blockchain system. We describe the problem model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), introduce a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and design a dynamic service offloading and migration algorithm (DSOMA) based on A3C to solve the problem. Simulation results show that DSOMA can increase the throughput of the blockchain system, and DSOMA is superior to the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm and greedy offloading algorithm in reducing service execution delay and system energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a flexible pilot assignment method to jointly optimize the uplink and downlink data transmission in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with correlated Rayleigh fading channels. By utilizing a closed-form expression of the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) achieved with maximum ratio processing, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the minimum weighted sum of the uplink and downlink SEs subject to the transmit powers and pilot assignment sets. This combinatiorial optimization problem is solved by two sequential algorithms: a heuristic pilot assignment is first proposed to obtain a good pilot reuse set and the data power control is then implemented. Numerical results manifest that the proposed algorithm converges fast to a better minimum sum SE per user than the algorithms in previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic battery modeling uncertainties, even if low, may lead to significant performance degradation or even divergence of the state-of-charge estimation algorithm. This paper investigates the integration of the extended-Kalman-filter with the smooth-variable-structure-filter algorithms for state-of-charge estimation of lithium-ion batteries. The robustness of the presented approach to modeling uncertainty is assessed for batteries operating in highly dynamic environments. The presented approach combines the benefit of the smooth- variable-structure-filter in its robustness to model uncertainty with the benefit of the extended-Kalman-filter in its near-optimality for a given dynamics and measurement noise sequences. The algorithm is rigorously tested using various datasets including standardrized and artificial drive cycles with added dynamics. The drive cycle power profile is calculated for an electric Ford F150 truck and scaled for the 18650PF cell used in the tests. Experimental validation is performed by investigating four different scenarios in which knowledge of the initial conditions as well as accuracy of the battery model were varied. The results demonstrate a substantially enhanced estimation accuracy achieved by the adopted approach through its optimality to measurement and model noise as well as its robustness to model uncertainty. The adopted approach results in a reduction in the complexity of the state-of-charge control algorithm and therefore enhances the battery management system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy detection technology is recommended in the licensed assisted access (LAA) scheme by 3GPP because of its simplicity and low cost. However, due to its inherent limitation, there may exist imperfect channel detection, which can lead to the decrease of the channel utilization efficiency and the deterioration of fairness. The imperfect detection can generally be represented by the detection probability and false alarm probability, which depend on detection time, signal to noise ration (SNR), sampling rate and energy threshold. However, among the parameters, only the energy threshold can be dominated by LAA small base stations (SBSs) in the LAA scheme. Therefore, the energy threshold should be dynamically adjusted in the changeable channel environment such that the detection accuracy can improved as high as possible. Consider the fact that the optimization theory cannot be used to optimize the energy threshold since the expressions of performance indexes about the energy threshold are extremely complex, a Q-learning based energy threshold optimization algorithm (QLET) is thus proposed in the paper, where LAA SBSs act as the agent, the energy threshold is defined as the agent action, the different combinations of fairness and throughput are defined as the agent states, and the fairness and the reward function are also redefined. In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the proposed QLET algorithm, the information exchange mechanism, where the sending-confirmation mechanism and 1- persistent CSMA are used, is also proposed. Based on the proposed QL framework, the agent can learn the optimal energy threshold by repeatedly interacting with the environment, which enables the coexistence system to obtain the best coexistence performance. A large number of simulation results show that the proposed QLET is superior to the traditional fixed energy threshold scheme (FET) in terms of the fairness, WiFi collision probability and transmission delay, and that QLET is almost the same as FET in term of throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The join operations, including both equi and non-equi joins, are essential to the complex data analytics in the big data era. However, they are not inherently supported by existing DSPEs (Distributed Stream Processing Engines). The state-of-the-art join solutions on DSPEs rely on either complicated routing strategies or resource-inefficient processing structures, which are susceptible to dynamic workload, especially when the DSPEs face various join predicate operations and skewed data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new cost-effective stream join framework, named A-DSP (Adaptive Dimensional Space Processing), which enhances the adaptability of real-time join model and minimizes the resource used over the dynamic workloads. Our proposal includes: 1) a join model generation algorithm devised to adaptively switch between different join schemes so as to minimize the number of processing task required; 2) a load-balancing mechanism which maximizes the processing throughput; and 3) a lightweight algorithm designed for cutting down unnecessary migration cost. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare our proposal against state-of-the-art solutions on both benchmark and real-world workloads. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our method, especially on reducing the operational cost under pay-as-you-go pricing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a human–robot coexisting environment, reaching the target place efficiently and safely is pivotal for a mobile service robot. In this paper, a Risk-based Dual-Tree Rapidly exploring Random Tree (Risk-DTRRT) algorithm is proposed for the robot motion planning in a dynamic environment, which provides a homotopy optimal trajectory on the basis of a heuristic trajectory. A dual-tree framework consisting of an RRT tree and a rewired tree is proposed for the trajectory searching. The RRT tree is a time-based tree, considering the future trajectory predictions of the pedestrians, and this tree is utilized to generate a heuristic trajectory. However, the heuristic trajectory is usually nonoptimal. Then, a line-of-sight (LoS) control checking algorithm is proposed to detect whether two time-based nodes can be rewired with the least cost. On the basis of the LoS control checking algorithm, a tree rewiring algorithm is proposed to optimize the heuristic trajectory. The tree generated in the tree rewiring process is called the rewired tree. The trajectory generated by the Risk-DTRRT algorithm proves to be optimal in the homotopy class of the heuristic trajectory. The navigation run time and the lengths of the planned trajectories are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results in both simulation studies and real-world implementations reveal that our proposed method achieves convincing performance in both static and dynamic environments. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by planning optimized trajectories for the mobile service robots in dynamic environments with pedestrians. In this area, the sampling-based motion planning algorithms have been widely used for their high efficiency and robustness. However, the real-time optimality of the motion planning cannot be guaranteed due to the challenges caused by the moving pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a dual-tree framework to solve this problem. First, a classic Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT) is constructed to generate a heuristic trajectory. Then, instead of reconnecting the nodes on the heuristic trajectory directly, a rewired tree is built to optimize the heuristic trajectory. This proposed dual-tree framework can fully exploit the information of the RRT tree and ensure the completeness of the motion planning. The proposed motion planning algorithm also considers the constraints of the nonholonomic mobile robots, and it can be applied in most mobile service robots to improve their motion planning quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the dynamic access point (AP) clustering and precoding problem in the downlink of user-centric virtual cell networks. The goal is to maximize the weighted sum spectral efficiency (SE) while satisfying the power constraints and AP clustering constraints in adjacent time slots (TSs). By adopting the random walk mobility to model the mobile user equipments’ movement behaviors, we consider dynamic and time-varying channel conditions. Therefore, the weighted sum SE maximization programming takes the form of discrete-time sequence of mixed-integer non-convex optimization problems. In this paper, we propose to solve this sequential problem in two stages. In the first stage, a dynamic AP clustering approach based on discrete particle swarm optimization is developed. This approach takes the advantage of the channel correlation by exploiting the relationship between AP clustering solutions in adjacent TSs to improve the SE performance and reduce complexity. In the second stage, given the AP clustering solution obtained in the first stage, a distributed precoding algorithm is devised via applying the weighted minimum mean square error method. By combining these two stages, we propose a novel dynamic AP clustering and precoding algorithm (DAPC-Pre). The effectiveness of the proposed DAPC-Pre algorithm is verified by the simulation results. In particular, the proposed algorithm converges fast and significantly outperforms benchmark algorithms in terms of sum SE under different dynamic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion of power electronics allows increased controllability and stability in power systems. The simulation of such systems on a large-scale is challenging due to the presence of a large number of switches and nonlinear devices. This paper presents an advanced simulation algorithm to solve the aforementioned problem. The algorithm considers separation of differential algebraic equations (DAEs) on the basis of numerical stiffness and applies hybrid discretization algorithms to simulate the DAEs. The DAEs, in this paper, represent the nonlinear nonautonomous switched system dynamics of power systems. Stability analysis is performed on a general class of nonlinear nonautonomous switched systems to show the constraints under which the proposed algorithm is stable. To show the validity of the proposed algorithm, two case studies are considered: 1) single high-voltage direct current (HVdc) substation based on the modular multilevel converter (MMC); and 2) an example three-terminal MMC-HVdc system. Relaxation techniques are introduced to create a stable interface for the separated DAEs. The developed algorithms are also validated with PSCAD/EMTDC-detailed reference models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problems of the Plug-in Electric Vehicles charging costs in housing sector. A review of the optimal strategies is proposed and as such six algorithms are presented: three smart unidirectional and three smart bidirectional charging algorithms where the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) and the Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) concepts were exploited. In addition an innovative V2G algorithm named Optimal Logical Control (V2G-OLC) is introduced in this paper. This latter is dedicated to the French energy billing system within the peak/base hour's contract. All the algorithms are tested over a set of 1000 data composed of real elements with four different daily energy price profiles. The results show a great efficiency of the V2G-OLC algorithm compared to the traditional optimal charging strategies. Indeed, the results show a reduction of 47.94% of the average charging cost with a unitary selling/buying price ratio in comparison to the simple charging at 230V-32A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we derive an algorithm for enabling a single robotic unmanned aerial vehicle to herd a flock of birds away from a designated volume of space, such as the air space around an airport. The herding algorithm, referred to as the $m$ -waypoint algorithm, is designed using a dynamic model of bird flocking based on Reynolds’ rules. We derive bounds on its performance using a combination of reduced-order modeling of the flock's motion, heuristics, and rigorous analysis. A unique contribution of the paper is the experimental demonstration of several facets of the herding algorithm on flocks of live birds reacting to a robotic pursuer. The experiments allow us to estimate several parameters of the flocking model, and especially the interaction between the pursuer and the flock. The herding algorithm is also demonstrated using numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear optimization problems with dynamical parameters are widely arising in many practical scientific and engineering applications, and various computational models are presented for solving them under the hypothesis of short-time invariance. To eliminate the large lagging error in the solution of the inherently dynamic nonlinear optimization problem, the only way is to estimate the future unknown information by using the present and previous data during the solving process, which is termed the future dynamic nonlinear optimization (FDNO) problem. In this paper, to suppress noises and improve the accuracy in solving FDNO problems, a novel noise-tolerant neural (NTN) algorithm based on zeroing neural dynamics is proposed and investigated. In addition, for reducing algorithm complexity, the quasi-Newton Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) method is employed to eliminate the intensively computational burden for matrix inversion, termed NTN-BFGS algorithm. Moreover, theoretical analyses are conducted, which show that the proposed algorithms are able to globally converge to a tiny error bound with or without the pollution of noises. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to validate the superiority of the proposed NTN and NTN-BFGS algorithms for the online solution of FDNO problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semidefinite Programming (SDP) is a powerful technique to compute tight lower bounds for Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems. Even using clique decomposition techniques, semidefinite relaxations are still computationally demanding. However, there are many different clique decompositions for the same SDP problem and they are not equivalent in terms of computation time. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to compute efficient clique decompositions with a clique merging heuristic. This heuristic is based on two different estimates of the computational burden of an SDP problem: the size of the problem and an estimation of a per-iteration cost for a state-of-the-art interior-point algorithm. We compare our strategy with other algorithms on MATPOWER instances and we show a significant decrease in solver time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the resource allocation problem for a group of agents communicating over a strongly connected directed graph, where the total objective function of the problem is composted of the sum of the local objective functions incurred by the agents. With local convex sets, we first design a continuous-time projection algorithm over a strongly connected and weight-balanced directed graph. Our convergence analysis indicates that when the local objective functions are strongly convex, the output state of the projection algorithm could asymptotically converge to the optimal solution of the resource allocation problem. In particular, when the projection operation is not involved, we show the exponential convergence at the equilibrium point of the algorithm. Second, we propose an adaptive continuous-time gradient algorithm over a strongly connected and weight-unbalanced directed graph for the reduced case without local convex sets. In this case, we prove that the adaptive algorithm converges exponentially to the optimal solution of the considered problem, where the local objective functions and their gradients satisfy strong convexity and Lipachitz conditions, respectively. Numerical simulations illustrate the performance of our algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm is developed for the infinite-horizon ($H_{\infty}$) optimal control problems with unknown continuous-time (CT) nonlinear systems subject to external disturbances. To facilitate the implementation of the algorithm, generalized fuzzy hyperbolic models (GFHMs) are utilized to establish an identifier–critic architecture, where the identifier is designed to reconstruct the unknown system dynamics, and the GFHM-based critic network is employed to approximate the value functions. The CT $H_{\infty}$ optimal control issue is converted into a two-player zero-sum game and the corresponding Hamilton–Jacobi–Isaacs equation is derived. The learning procedure of the critic design is adaptively implemented with the help of the reconstructed model, thus the requirement of the complete system dynamics is relaxed. Furthermore, by the means of Lyapunov direct method, the uniform ultimate boundedness stability analysis of the closed-loop control system is explicitly provided. Finally, to compare the control performances and disturbance attenuation properties of the proposed method and the existing ADP algorithms, two numerical examples are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel policy iteration adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm is presented which is called “local policy iteration ADP algorithm” to obtain the optimal control for discrete stochastic processes. In the proposed local policy iteration ADP algorithm, the iterative decision rules are updated in a local space of the whole state space. Hence, we can significantly reduce the computational burden for the CPU in comparison with the conventional policy iteration algorithm. By analyzing the convergence properties of the proposed algorithm, it is shown that the iterative value functions are monotonically nonincreasing. Besides, the iterative value functions can converge to the optimum in a local policy space. In addition, this local policy space will be described in detail for the first time. Under a few weak constraints, it is also shown that the iterative value function will converge to the optimal performance index function of the global policy space. Finally, a simulation example is presented to validate the effectiveness of the developed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For systems that can only be locally stabilized, control laws and their effective regions are both important. In this paper, invariant policy iteration is proposed to solve the optimal control of discrete-time systems. At each iteration, a given policy is evaluated in its invariantly admissible region, and a new policy and a new region are updated for the next iteration. Theoretical analysis shows the method is regionally convergent to the optimal value and the optimal policy. Combined with sum-of-squares polynomials, the method is able to achieve the near-optimal control of a class of discrete-time systems. An invariant adaptive dynamic programming algorithm is developed to extend the method to scenarios where system dynamics is not available. Online data are utilized to learn the near-optimal policy and the invariantly admissible region. Simulated experiments verify the effectiveness of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning undirected graphical models from data generated according to the Glauber dynamics (also known as the Gibbs sampler). The Glauber dynamics is a Markov chain that sequentially updates individual nodes (variables) in a graphical model and it is frequently used to sample from the stationary distribution (to which it converges given sufficient time). Additionally, the Glauber dynamics is a natural dynamical model in a variety of settings. This paper deviates from the standard formulation of graphical model learning in the literature, where one assumes access to independent identically distributed samples from the distribution. Much of the research on graphical model learning has been directed toward finding algorithms with low computational cost. As the main result of this paper, we establish that the problem of reconstructing binary pairwise graphical models is computationally tractable when we observe the Glauber dynamics. Specifically, we show that a binary pairwise graphical model on p nodes with maximum degree d can be learned in time f(d)p^2\log p , for a function f(d) defined explicitly in this paper, using nearly the information-theoretic minimum number of samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distributed power control algorithms available in this paper assume perfect estimation of interference power at the receivers and often, the availability of perfect local channel state information (CSI). However, perfect estimation of interference power or acquisition of channel information is impractical. In this paper, we consider a generic class of distributed power control algorithms and analyze the resulting performance loss when faced with errors in CSI and/or interference level estimation. We approximate such power control algorithms with linearized state space dynamics wherein the errors in the estimation of received interference or the CSI, can be modeled as additive observation noise. Based on the proposed model, we derive lower bounds on the norm of the errors in the transmit power vector and receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) vector. Our analysis suggests that when the target SINR vector approaches the Pareto-optimal bound, the errors in the transmit vectors could grow without bound. As a consequence, to maintain a performance loss within an acceptable range, either much longer estimation times or lower target SINRs are required. Our numerical results confirm the validity of our analysis and the validity of the proposed bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a model predictive control-based obstacle avoidance algorithm for autonomous ground vehicles at high speed in unstructured environments. The novelty of the algorithm is its capability to control the vehicle to avoid obstacles at high speed taking into account dynamical safety constraints through a simultaneous optimization of reference speed and steering angle without a priori knowledge about the environment and without a reference trajectory to follow. Previous work in this specific context optimized only the steering command. In this paper, obstacles are detected using a planar light detection and ranging sensor. A multi-phase optimal control problem is then formulated to simultaneously optimize the reference speed and steering angle within the detection range. Vehicle acceleration capability as a function of speed, as well as stability and handling concerns such as preventing wheel lift-off, are included as constraints in the optimization problem, whereas the cost function is formulated to navigate the vehicle as quickly as possible with smooth control commands. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of safely exploiting the dynamic limits of the vehicle while navigating the vehicle through sensed obstacles of different sizes and numbers. It is also shown that the proposed variable speed formulation can significantly improve performance by allowing navigation of obstacle fields that would otherwise not be cleared with steering control alone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simulated ultrasound data is a valuable tool for development and validation of quantitative image analysis methods in echocardiography. Unfortunately, simulation time can become prohibitive for phantoms consisting of a large number of point scatterers. The COLE algorithm by Gao et al. is a fast convolution-based simulator that trades simulation accuracy for improved speed. We present highly efficient parallelized CPU and GPU implementations of the COLE algorithm with an emphasis on dynamic simulations involving moving point scatterers. We argue that it is crucial to minimize the amount of data transfers from the CPU to achieve good performance on the GPU. We achieve this by storing the complete trajectories of the dynamic point scatterers as spline curves in the GPU memory. This leads to good efficiency when simulating sequences consisting of a large number of frames, such as B-mode and tissue Doppler data for a full cardiac cycle. In addition, we propose a phase-based subsample delay technique that efficiently eliminates flickering artifacts seen in B-mode sequences when COLE is used without enough temporal oversampling. To assess the performance, we used a laptop computer and a desktop computer, each equipped with a multicore Intel CPU and an NVIDIA GPU. Running the simulator on a high-end TITAN X GPU, we observed two orders of magnitude speedup compared to the parallel CPU version, three orders of magnitude speedup compared to simulation times reported by Gao et al. in their paper on COLE, and a speedup of 27000 times compared to the multithreaded version of Field II, using numbers reported in a paper by Jensen. We hope that by releasing the simulator as an open-source project we will encourage its use and further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a classic measure of the relevance among different nodes in a graph, and has been applied in numerous systems, such as Twitter's Who-To-Follow and Pinterest's Related Pins. Existing work on PPR has mainly focused on three general types of queries, namely, single-pair PPR, single-source PPR, and all-pair PPR. However, we observe that there are applications that rely on a new query type (referred to as batch one-hop PPR), which takes as input a set $S$ S of source nodes and, for each node $s \in S$ s ∈ S and each of $s$ s 's neighbor $v$ v , asks for the PPR value of $v$ v with respect to $s$ s . None of the existing PPR algorithms is able to efficiently process batch one-hop queries, due to the inherent differences between batch one-hop PPR and the three general query types. To address the limitations of existing algorithms, this paper presents Baton, an algorithm for batch one-hop PPR that offers both strong theoretical guarantees and practical efficiency. Baton leverages the characteristics of one-hop PPR to avoid unnecessary computation, and it incorporates advanced mechanisms to improve the cost-effectiveness of PPR derivations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that Baton is up to three orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art, while offering the same accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]