A study on matching and multi-objective fuzzy control strategy of heavy truck suspension system

Matching method of heavy truck-rear air suspensions is discussed, and a fuzzy control strategy which improves both ride comfort and road friendliness of truck by adjusting damping coefficients of the suspension system is found. In the first place, a Dongfeng EQ1141G7DJ heavy truck’s ten DOF whole vehicle-road model was set up based on Matlab/Simulink and vehicle dynamics. Then appropriate passive air suspensions were chosen to replace the original rear leaf springs of the truck according to truck-suspension matching criterions, consequently, the stiffness of front leaf springs were adjusted too. Then the semi-active fuzzy controllers were designed for further enhancement of the truck’s ride comfort and the road friendliness. After the application of semi-active fuzzy control strategy through simulation, is was indicated that both ride comfort and road friendliness could be enhanced effectively under various road conditions. The strategy proposed may provide theory basis for design and development of truck suspension system in China.

Security metrics for object-oriented class designs

Measuring quality attributes of object-oriented designs (e.g. maintainability and performance) has been covered by a number of studies. However, these studies have not considered security as much as other quality attributes. Also, most security studies focus at the level of individual program statements. This approach makes it hard and expensive to discover and fix vulnerabilities caused by design errors. In this work, we focus on the security design of an object oriented application and define a number of security metrics. These metrics allow designers to discover and fix security vulnerabilities at an early stage, and help compare the security of various alternative designs. In particular, we propose seven security metrics to measure Data Encapsulation (accessibility) and Cohesion (interactions) of a given object-oriented class from the point of view of potential information flow.

The interrelations among the project team’s conduit networks, knowledge network and its performance

From the perspective of network, a project team’s social capital consists of conduits network, and resource exchange network. Prior research intensively studies the effect of the structure of conduits network on the team’s performance, assuming knowledge transfer is the causal mechanism linking conduits network to performance. This paper attempts to explore the interrelations between conduits network and knowledge network, and further distinguish the different influence between various conduit networks, and hypothesizes that a project team’s knowledge network mediates the effect of various conduit networks on the team’s performance. This research can enrich our knowledge of disparate influence of the various conduit networks on knowledge transfer, and imply some management practices to enhance the organization’s social capital, and hence improve the organization’s performance.

Open access policies, practices and licensing : a review of the literature in Australia and selected jurisdictions

The full economic, cultural and environmental value of information produced or funded by the public sector can be realised through enabling greater access to and reuse of the information. To do this effectively it is necessary to describe and implement a policy framework that supports greater access and reuse among a distributed, online network of information suppliers and users. The objective of this study was to identify materials dealing with policies, principles and practices relating to information access and reuse in Australia and in other key jurisdictions internationally. Open Access Policies, Practices and Licensing: A review of the literature in Australia and selected jurisdictions sets out the findings of an extensive review of published materials dealing with policies, practices and legal issues relating to information access and reuse, with a particular focus on materials generated, held or funded by public sector bodies. The report was produced as part of the work program of the project “Enabling Real-Time Information Access in Both Urban and Regional Areas”, established within the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI).

Configurable multi-perspective business process models

A configurable process model provides a consolidated view of a family of business processes. It promotes the reuse of proven practices by providing analysts with a generic modelling artifact from which to derive individual process models. Unfortunately, the scope of existing notations for configurable process modelling is restricted, thus hindering their applicability. Specifically, these notations focus on capturing tasks and control-flow dependencies, neglecting equally important ingredients of business processes such as data and resources. This research fills this gap by proposing a configurable process modelling notation incorporating features for capturing resources, data and physical objects involved in the performance of tasks. The proposal has been implemented in a toolset that assists analysts during the configuration phase and guarantees the correctness of the resulting process models. The approach has been validated by means of a case study from the film industry.

Configurable reference modeling languages

This chapter discusses reference modelling languages for business systems analysis and design. In particular, it reports on reference models in the context of the design-for/by-reuse paradigm, explains how traditional modelling techniques fail to provide adequate conceptual expressiveness to allow for easy model reuse by configuration or adaptation and elaborates on the need for reference modelling languages to be configurable. We discuss requirements for and the development of reference modelling languages that reflect the need for configurability. Exemplarily, we report on the development, definition and configuration of configurable event-driven process chains. We further outline how configurable reference modelling languages and the corresponding design principles can be used in future scenarios such as process mining and data modelling.

Adaptive unsupervised learning of human actions

Automatic detection of suspicious activities in CCTV camera feeds is crucial to the success of video surveillance systems. Such a capability can help transform the dumb CCTV cameras into smart surveillance tools for fighting crime and terror. Learning and classification of basic human actions is a precursor to detecting suspicious activities. Most of the current approaches rely on a non-realistic assumption that a complete dataset of normal human actions is available. This paper presents a different approach to deal with the problem of understanding human actions in video when no prior information is available. This is achieved by working with an incomplete dataset of basic actions which are continuously updated. Initially, all video segments are represented by Bags-Of-Words (BOW) method using only Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features. Then, a data-stream clustering algorithm is applied for updating the system's knowledge from the incoming video feeds. Finally, all the actions are classified into different sets. Experiments and comparisons are conducted on the well known Weizmann and KTH datasets to show the efficacy of the proposed approach.

The measurement of broadband ultrasonic attenuation in cancellous bone-a review of the science and technology

The measurement of broadband ultrasonic attenuation (BUA) in cancellous bone at the calcaneus was first described in 1984. The assessment of osteoporosis by BUA has recently been recognized by Universities UK, within its EurekaUK book, as being one of the “100 discoveries and developments in UK Universities that have changed the world” over the past 50 years, covering the whole academic spectrum from the arts and humanities to science and technology. Indeed, BUA technique has been clinically validated and is utilized worldwide, with at least seven commercial systems providing calcaneal BUA measurement. However, a fundamental understanding of the dependence of BUA upon the material and structural properties of cancellous bone is still lacking. This review aims to provide a science- and technology-orientated perspective on the application of BUA to the medical disease of osteoporosis.

A University Support Model for eResearch

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is faced with a rapidly growing research agenda built upon a strategic research capacity-building program. This presentation will outline the results of a project that has recently investigated QUT’s research support requirements and which has developed a model for the support of eResearch across the university. QUT’s research building strategy has produced growth at the faculty level and within its research institutes. This increased research activity is pushing the need for university-wide eResearch platforms capable of providing infrastructure and support in areas such as collaboration, data, networking, authentication and authorisation, workflows and the grid. One of the driving forces behind the investigation is data-centric nature of modern research. It is now critical that researchers have access to supported infrastructure that allows the collection, analysis, aggregation and sharing of large data volumes for exploration and mining in order to gain new insights and to generate new knowledge. However, recent surveys into current research data management practices by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) and by QUT itself, has revealed serious shortcomings in areas such as research data management, especially its long term maintenance for reuse and authoritative evidence of research findings. While these internal university pressures are building, at the same time there are external pressures that are magnifying them. For example, recent compliance guidelines from bodies such as the ARC, and NHMRC and Universities Australia indicate that institutions need to provide facilities for the safe and secure storage of research data along with a surrounding set of policies, on its retention, ownership and accessibility. The newly formed Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is developing strategies and guidelines for research data management and research institutions are a central focus, responsible for managing and storing institutional data on platforms that can be federated nationally and internationally for wider use. For some time QUT has recognised the importance of eResearch and has been active in a number of related areas: ePrints to digitally publish research papers, grid computing portals and workflows, institutional-wide provisioning and authentication systems, and legal protocols for copyright management. QUT also has two widely recognised centres focused on fundamental research into eResearch itself: The OAK LAW project (Open Access to Knowledge) which focuses upon legal issues relating eResearch and the Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre whose goal is to accelerate scientific research discovery, through new smart software. In order to better harness all of these resources and improve research outcomes, the university recently established a project to investigate how it might better organise the support of eResearch. This presentation will outline the project outcomes, which include a flexible and sustainable eResearch support service model addressing short and longer term research needs, identification of resource requirements required to establish and sustain the service, and the development of research data management policies and implementation plans.

Multi-vehicles interaction graph model for cooperative collision warning system

Cooperative collision warning system for road vehicles, enabled by recent advances in positioning systems and wireless communication technologies, can potentially reduce traffic accident significantly. To improve the system, we propose a graph model to represent interactions between multiple road vehicles in a specific region and at a specific time. Given a list of vehicles in vicinity, we can generate the interaction graph using several rules that consider vehicle's properties such as position, speed, heading, etc. Safety applications can use the model to improve emergency warning accuracy and optimize wireless channel usage. The model allows us to develop some congestion control strategies for an efficient multi-hop broadcast protocol.

Toward a fuzzy domain ontology extraction method for adaptive e-learning

With the widespread applications of electronic learning (e-Learning) technologies to education at all levels, increasing number of online educational resources and messages are generated from the corresponding e-Learning environments. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult, if not totally impossible, for instructors to read through and analyze the online messages to predict the progress of their students on the fly. The main contribution of this paper is the illustration of a novel concept map generation mechanism which is underpinned by a fuzzy domain ontology extraction algorithm. The proposed mechanism can automatically construct concept maps based on the messages posted to online discussion forums. By browsing the concept maps, instructors can quickly identify the progress of their students and adjust the pedagogical sequence on the fly. Our initial experimental results reveal that the accuracy and the quality of the automatically generated concept maps are promising. Our research work opens the door to the development and application of intelligent software tools to enhance e-Learning.

Designing for engagement : building IT systems

Context The School of Information Technology at QUT has recently undertaken a major restructuring of their Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) course. Some of the aims of this restructuring include a reduction in first year attrition and to provide an attractive degree course that meets both student and industry expectations. Emphasis has been placed on the first semester in the context of retaining students by introducing a set of four units that complement one another and provide introductory material on technology, programming and related skills, and generic skills that will aid the students throughout their undergraduate course and in their careers. This discussion relates to one of these four fist semester units, namely Building IT Systems. The aim of this unit is to create small Information Technology (IT) systems that use programming or scripting, databases as either standalone applications or web applications. In the prior history of teaching introductory computer programming at QUT, programming has been taught as a stand alone subject and integration of computer applications with other systems such as databases and networks was not undertaken until students had been given a thorough grounding in those topics as well. Feedback has indicated that students do not believe that working with a database requires programming skills. In fact, the teaching of the building blocks of computer applications have been compartmentalized and taught in isolation from each other. The teaching of introductory computer programming has been an industry requirement of IT degree courses as many jobs require at least some knowledge of the topic. Yet, computer programming is not a skill that all students have equal capabilities of learning (Bruce et al., 2004) and this is clearly shown by the volume of publications dedicated to this topic in the literature over a broad period of time (Eckerdal & Berglund, 2005; Mayer, 1981; Winslow, 1996). The teaching of this introductory material has been done pretty much the same way over the past thirty years. During this period of time that introductory computer programming courses have been taught at QUT, a number of different programming languages and programming paradigms have been used and different approaches to teaching and learning have been attempted in an effort to find the golden thread that would allow students to learn this complex topic. Unfortunately, computer programming is not a skill that can be learnt in one semester. Some basics can be learnt but it can take many years to master (Norvig, 2001). Faculty data typically has shown a bimodal distribution of results for students undertaking introductory programming courses with a high proportion of students receiving a high mark and a high proportion of students receiving a low or failing mark. This indicates that there are students who understand and excel with the introductory material while there is another group who struggle to understand the concepts and practices required to be able to translate a specification or problem statement into a computer program that achieves what is being requested. The consequence of a large group of students failing the introductory programming course has been a high level of attrition amongst first year students. This attrition level does not provide good continuity in student numbers in later years of the degree program and the current approach is not seen as sustainable.

The explicit hazard model – part 1: theoretical development

Modern Engineering Asset Management (EAM) requires the accurate assessment of current and the prediction of future asset health condition. Appropriate mathematical models that are capable of estimating times to failures and the probability of failures in the future are essential in EAM. In most real-life situations, the lifetime of an engineering asset is influenced and/or indicated by different factors that are termed as covariates. Hazard prediction with covariates is an elemental notion in the reliability theory to estimate the tendency of an engineering asset failing instantaneously beyond the current time assumed that it has already survived up to the current time. A number of statistical covariate-based hazard models have been developed. However, none of them has explicitly incorporated both external and internal covariates into one model. This paper introduces a novel covariate-based hazard model to address this concern. This model is named as Explicit Hazard Model (EHM). Both the semi-parametric and non-parametric forms of this model are presented in the paper. The major purpose of this paper is to illustrate the theoretical development of EHM. Due to page limitation, a case study with the reliability field data is presented in the applications part of this study.

The Explicit Hazard Model – Part 2 : Applications

Hazard and reliability prediction of an engineering asset is one of the significant fields of research in Engineering Asset Health Management (EAHM). In real-life situations where an engineering asset operates under dynamic operational and environmental conditions, the lifetime of an engineering asset can be influenced and/or indicated by different factors that are termed as covariates. The Explicit Hazard Model (EHM) as a covariate-based hazard model is a new approach for hazard prediction which explicitly incorporates both internal and external covariates into one model. EHM is an appropriate model to use in the analysis of lifetime data in presence of both internal and external covariates in the reliability field. This paper presents applications of the methodology which is introduced and illustrated in the theory part of this study. In this paper, the semi-parametric EHM is applied to a case study so as to predict the hazard and reliability of resistance elements on a Resistance Corrosion Sensor Board (RCSB).

Towards an acoustic environmental observatory

The need for large scale environmental monitoring to manage environmental change is well established. Ecologists have long used acoustics as a means of monitoring the environment in their field work, and so the value of an acoustic environmental observatory is evident. However, the volume of data generated by such an observatory would quickly overwhelm even the most fervent scientist using traditional methods. In this paper we present our steps towards realising a complete acoustic environmental observatory - i.e. a cohesive set of hardware sensors, management utilities, and analytical tools required for large scale environmental monitoring. Concrete examples of these elements, which are in active use by ecological scientists, are also presented