Efficient Placement of Fault Indicators in an Actual Distribution System Using Evolutionary Computing

This paper proposes an evolutionary computing strategy to solve the problem of fault indicator (FI) placement in primary distribution feeders. More specifically, a genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to search for an efficient configuration of FIs, located at the best positions on the main feeder of a real-life distribution system. Thus, the problem is modeled as one of optimization, aimed at improving the distribution reliability indices, while, at the same time, finding the least expensive solution. Based on actual data, the results confirm the efficiency of the GA approach to the FI placement problem.

The education of the body for an "integral soldier", "physically strong, intelligent and soul superior"

This study examines the paramilitary training carried out by the Integralist Militia (Militia Integralista), unit of the Brazilian Integralist Action (Acao Integralista Brasileira, AIB) of the extreme right wing political party in Brazil in the 1930s. The training was aimed to create the "integral soldier", a "physically strong, intelligent and soul superior" one. The study analyzes issues of the newspaper "Monitor Integralista", a prescriptive and dogmatic journal of the movement, found in the Public and History Archives of the city of Rio Claro, State of Sao Paulo, and in the "A Offensiva" newspaper, microfilmed an archived at the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. It concludes that Plinio Salgado's goal, the National Head of the AIB, was to train, by using verbal persuasion, speeches, word of mouth and by vote, by force and physical combat, the integralists to defend the causes of the movement.

New approach for power transformer protection based on intelligent hybrid systems

A power transformer needs continuous monitoring and fast protection as it is a very expensive piece of equipment and an essential element in an electrical power system. The most common protection technique used is the percentage differential logic, which provides discrimination between an internal fault and different operating conditions. Unfortunately, there are some operating conditions of power transformers that can mislead the conventional protection affecting the power system stability negatively. This study proposes the development of a new algorithm to improve the protection performance by using fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. An electrical power system was modelled using Alternative Transients Program software to obtain the operational conditions and fault situations needed to test the algorithm developed, as well as a commercial differential relay. Results show improved reliability, as well as a fast response of the proposed technique when compared with conventional ones.

Modeling of active holonic control systems for intelligent buildings

Building facilities have become important infrastructures for modern productive plants dedicated to services. In this context, the control systems of intelligent buildings have evolved while their reliability has evidently improved. However, the occurrence of faults is inevitable in systems conceived, constructed and operated by humans. Thus, a practical alternative approach is found to be very useful to reduce the consequences of faults. Yet, only few publications address intelligent building modeling processes that take into consideration the occurrence of faults and how to manage their consequences. In the light of the foregoing, a procedure is proposed for the modeling of intelligent building control systems, considersing their functional specifications in normal operation and in the of the event of faults. The proposed procedure adopts the concepts of discrete event systems and holons, and explores Petri nets and their extensions so as to represent the structure and operation of control systems for intelligent buildings under normal and abnormal situations. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A quantitative analysis of current security concerns and solutions for cloud computing

The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security: while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns and solutions in cloud computing, and propose a taxonomy of security in cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.

Intelligent tutoring system for distance education

This study aims to develop and implement a tool called intelligent tutoring system in an online course to help a formative evaluation in order to improve student learning. According to Bloom et al. (1971,117) formative evaluation is a systematic evaluation to improve the process of teaching and learning. The intelligent tutoring system may provide a timely and high quality feedback that not only informs the correctness of the solution to the problem, but also informs students about the accuracy of the response relative to their current knowledge about the solution. Constructive and supportive feedback should be given to students to reveal the right and wrong answers immediately after taking the test. Feedback about the right answers is a form to reinforce positive behaviors. Identifying possible errors and relating them to the instructional material may help student to strengthen the content under consideration. The remedial suggestion should be given in each answer with detaileddescription with regards the materials and instructional procedures before taking next step. The main idea is to inform students about what they have learned and what they still have to learn. The open-source LMS called Moodle was extended to accomplish the formative evaluation, high-quality feedback, and the communal knowledge presented here with a short online financial math course that is being offered at a large University in Brazil. The preliminary results shows that the intelligent tutoring system using high quality feedback helped students to improve their knowledge about the solution to the problems based on the errors of their past cohorts. The results and suggestion for future work are presented and discussed.

Recent trends in intelligent data analysis

European Regional Development Fund

Matrix-vector multiplication and triangular linear solver using GPGPU for symmetric positive definite matrices derived from elliptic equations

The modern GPUs are well suited for intensive computational tasks and massive parallel computation. Sparse matrix multiplication and linear triangular solver are the most important and heavily used kernels in scientific computation, and several challenges in developing a high performance kernel with the two modules is investigated. The main interest it to solve linear systems derived from the elliptic equations with triangular elements. The resulting linear system has a symmetric positive definite matrix. The sparse matrix is stored in the compressed sparse row (CSR) format. It is proposed a CUDA algorithm to execute the matrix vector multiplication using directly the CSR format. A dependence tree algorithm is used to determine which variables the linear triangular solver can determine in parallel. To increase the number of the parallel threads, a coloring graph algorithm is implemented to reorder the mesh numbering in a pre-processing phase. The proposed method is compared with parallel and serial available libraries. The results show that the proposed method improves the computation cost of the matrix vector multiplication. The pre-processing associated with the triangular solver needs to be executed just once in the proposed method. The conjugate gradient method was implemented and showed similar convergence rate for all the compared methods. The proposed method showed significant smaller execution time.

Parallel Layout Construction Algorithm for Irregular Shape Packing Problems

Cutting and packing problems arise in a variety of industries, including garment, wood and shipbuilding. Irregular shape packing is a special case which admits irregular items and is much more complex due to the geometry of items. In order to ensure that items do not overlap and no item from the layout protrudes from the container, the collision free region concept was adopted. It represents all possible translations for a new item to be inserted into a container with already placed items. To construct a feasible layout, collision free region for each item is determined through a sequence of Boolean operations over polygons. In order to improve the speed of the algorithm, a parallel version of the layout construction was proposed and it was applied to a simulated annealing algorithm used to solve bin packing problems. Tests were performed in order to determine the speed improvement of the parallel version over the serial algorithm