scholarly journals Learning Neuroplastic Matching of Robot Dynamics in Closed-loop CPGs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Ruppert ◽  
Alexander Badri-Spröwitz
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Closed Loop ◽  
Pattern Generator ◽  
Legged Robots ◽  
Robot Dynamics ◽  
Control Task ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Control Effort ◽  
Natural Dynamics ◽  
The Cost

Abstract Legged robots have the potential to show locomotion performance with reduced control effort and energy efficiency by leveraging elastic structures inspired by animals' elastic tendons and muscles. However, it remains a challenge to match the natural dynamics of complex legged robots and their control task dynamics. Here we present a framework to match control task dynamics and natural dynamics based on the neuroelasticity and neuroplasticity concept. Inspired by animals we design quadruped robot Morti with strong natural dynamics as a testing platform. It is controlled through a bioinspired closed-loop central pattern generator (CPG) that is designed to neuroelastically mitigate short term perturbations using sparse contact feedback. We use the amount of neuroelastic activity as a proxy to quantify the dynamics' mismatching. By minimizing neuroelastic activity, we neuroplastically match the control task dynamics to the robot's natural dynamics. Through matching the robot learns to walk within one hour with only sparse feedback and improves its energy efficiency without explicitly minimizing it in the cost function.

Analysis of energy efficiency of polder of pumping stations in a Slavsk district of the Kaliningrad region

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Yuriy Spirin ◽  
Vladimir Puntusov
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Statistical Processing ◽  
Drainage Rate ◽  
Pumping Stations ◽  
Kaliningrad Region ◽  
Pumping Equipment ◽  
Excess Power ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Domestic Power

In the Kaliningrad region there are about 70 % of all polder lands in Russia. On these lands with high potential fertility, it is advisable to intensive agriculture. The area for the average moisture year is an area with excessive moisture, which indicates the need to maintain the rate of drainage on agricultural land. Many different factors play a role in ensuring the drainage rate, one of which is pumping stations and pumping equipment installed on them. An important parameter in the use of pump-power equipment is energy consumption, since in this industry it is a considerable expense item. Improving the energy efficiency of pumping stations on polders is a pressing issue today. At the majority of polder pumping stations, domestic power pumping equipment is installed with excess power and head of 4–8 meters, and a new one is selected based on the maximum possible head in a given place. In the Kaliningrad region, the energy efficiency of polder pumping equipment has never been analyzed. In this paper, a statistical processing of the geodesic pressure of water at the polder pumping stations of the Slavsk region for 2000–2002 was carried out. On the basis of these data and data on the hydraulic characteristics of pressure pipelines, the calculated water pressures were determined for the rational selection of pumping equipment. The calculation of the economic efficiency of pumps with optimal power compared with pumps of excess capacity. The results of the study can serve as a justification for the transition to the pumping equipment with less power and pressure, which will lead to a decrease in the cost of money for electricity.

Protecting the Desperate: The Regulation of Payday Lending

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Andrew J Serpell
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Credit ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Payday Lending ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Payday Loans ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Credit Contracts ◽  
The Cost

Payday loans are small-amount, short-term, unsecured, high-cost credit contracts provided by non-mainstream credit providers. Payday loans are usually taken out to help the consumer pay for essential items, such as food, rent, electricity, petrol, broken-down appliances or car registration or repairs. These consumers take out payday loans because they cannot — or believe that they cannot — obtain a loan from a mainstream credit provider such as a bank. In recent years there has been a protracted debate in Australia — and in several overseas jurisdictions — about how to regulate the industry. Recent amendments to the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (Cth) — referred to in this article as the 2013 reforms — are designed to better protect payday loan consumers. While the 2013 reforms provide substantially improved protection for payday loan consumers, further changes to the law may be warranted. This article raises several law reform issues which should be considered as part of the 2015 review into small amount credit contracts, including whether the caps on the cost of credit are set at the right level, whether the required content and presentation of the consumer warnings needs to be altered, whether more needs to be done to protect consumers who are particularly disadvantaged or vulnerable and whether a general anti-avoidance provision should be included in the credit legislation.

scholarly journals Forecasting for Ultra-Short-Term Electric Power Load Based on Integrated Artificial Neural Networks

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1063 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horng-Lin Shieh ◽  
Fu-Hsien Chen
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Electric Power ◽  
Production Efficiency ◽  
Load Forecasting ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Inference System ◽  
Power Load ◽  
Power Load Forecasting ◽  
New Energy ◽  
Electric Power Load

Energy efficiency and renewable energy are the two main research topics for sustainable energy. In the past ten years, countries around the world have invested a lot of manpower into new energy research. However, in addition to new energy development, energy efficiency technologies need to be emphasized to promote production efficiency and reduce environmental pollution. In order to improve power production efficiency, an integrated solution regarding the issue of electric power load forecasting was proposed in this study. The solution proposed was to, in combination with persistence and search algorithms, establish a new integrated ultra-short-term electric power load forecasting method based on the adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and back-propagation neural network (BPN), which can be applied in forecasting electric power load in Taiwan. The research methodology used in this paper was mainly to acquire and process the all-day electric power load data of Taiwan Power and execute preliminary forecasting values of the electric power load by applying ANFIS, BPN and persistence. The preliminary forecasting values of the electric power load obtained therefrom were called suboptimal solutions and finally the optimal weighted value was determined by applying a search algorithm through integrating the above three methods by weighting. In this paper, the optimal electric power load value was forecasted based on the weighted value obtained therefrom. It was proven through experimental results that the solution proposed in this paper can be used to accurately forecast electric power load, with a minimal error.

scholarly journals A Constrained Markovian Diffusion Model for Controlling the Pollution Accumulation

Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (13) ◽  
pp. 1466
Author(s):  
Beatris Adriana Escobedo-Trujillo ◽  
José Daniel López-Barrientos ◽  
Javier Garrido-Meléndez
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Programming ◽  
Dirichlet Problem ◽  
Stochastic Control ◽  
Finite Time ◽  
Time Horizon ◽  
Closed Loop ◽  
Programming Techniques ◽  
Pollution Accumulation ◽  
Finite Time Horizon ◽  
The Cost

This work presents a study of a finite-time horizon stochastic control problem with restrictions on both the reward and the cost functions. To this end, it uses standard dynamic programming techniques, and an extension of the classic Lagrange multipliers approach. The coefficients considered here are supposed to be unbounded, and the obtained strategies are of non-stationary closed-loop type. The driving thread of the paper is a sequence of examples on a pollution accumulation model, which is used for the purpose of showing three algorithms for the purpose of replicating the results. There, the reader can find a result on the interchangeability of limits in a Dirichlet problem.

scholarly journals Methods to Prevent Future Severe Animal Welfare Problems Caused by COVID-19 in the Pork Industry

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 830
Author(s):  
Temple Grandin
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Detrimental Effect ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Electrical Parameters ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Pork Industry ◽  
Third Party Auditing ◽  
The Cost ◽  
High Welfare

In the U.S., the most severe animal welfare problems caused by COViD-19 were in the pork industry. Thousands of pigs had to be destroyed on the farm due to reduced slaughter capacity caused by ill workers. In the future, both short-term and long-term remedies will be needed. In the short-term, a portable electrocution unit that uses scientifically validated electrical parameters for inducing instantaneous unconsciousness, would be preferable to some of the poor killing methods. A second alternative would be converting the slaughter houses to carcass production. This would require fewer people to process the same number of pigs. The pandemic revealed the fragility of large centralized supply chains. A more distributed supply chain with smaller abattoirs would be more robust and less prone to disruption, but the cost of pork would be greater. Small abattoirs can coexist with large slaughter facilities if they process pigs for specialized premium markets such as high welfare pork. The pandemic also had a detrimental effect on animal welfare inspection and third party auditing programs run by large meat buyers. Most in-person audits in the slaughter plants were cancelled and audits were done by video. Video audits should never completely replace in-person audits.

Control of a lamination process

2005 ◽  
Vol 219 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Whalley ◽  
M Ebrahimi
Keyword(s):  
High Speed ◽  
Closed Loop ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Closed Loop System ◽  
Design Validation ◽  
Control Effort ◽  
Speed Of Response ◽  
Feedback Compensation ◽  
Lamination Process ◽  
Compensation Design

A high-speed laminating machine for a fabric coating and conversion process is considered. Following analysis procedures, state-space and the admittance transfer function descriptions for the system are derived. Regulation of the fabric tension owing to heat shrinkage and environmental and coating variations is necessary. An optimum, minimum control effort strategy is proposed, enabling simple cost effective regulation, without the use of active elements. The speed of response of the system is improved by the use of feedback compensation. Design validation, via simulation, obtaining the open- and closed-loop system responses is employed, demonstrating the achievement of smooth, almost monotonic variations in tension following reference changes, as specified.

Efficiency Centered Maintenance of Preheat Train of a Crude Oil Distillation Unit

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Fajardo ◽  
D. Yabrudy ◽  
D. Barreto ◽  
C. Negrete ◽  
B. Sarria ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Heat Transfer ◽  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Heat Transfer Coefficient ◽  
Heat Exchanger ◽  
Transfer Coefficient ◽  
Operational Reliability ◽  
Distillation Unit ◽  
Maintenance Costs ◽  
Oil Refineries ◽  
The Cost

Abstract Nowadays, maintenance is based on the synergistic integration of operational reliability and timely maintenance, which guarantees the required availability and optimal cost. Operational reliability implies producing more, better performance, longer life, and availability. Timely maintenance involves the least time out of service, fewer maintenance costs, fewer operating costs, and less money. In this work, we study the preheating train of a crude distillation unit of a refinery, which processes 994 m3/h, which presents a formation of a fouling layer inside it. Among the impacts of fouling is the reduction in the effectiveness of heat transfer, the increase in fuel consumption, the increase in CO2 emissions, the increase in maintenance costs, and the decrease in the profit margin of process. An appropriate cleaning program of the surface of the heat exchanger network is necessary to preserve its key performance parameters, preferably close to design values. This paper presents the maintenance method centered on energy efficiency, to plan the intervention of the preheating train equipment maintenance, which considers the economic energy improvement and the cost of the type of maintenance. The method requires the calculation of the fouling evolution from which the global heat transfer coefficient is obtained, and the heat flux is determined as a function of time. It was observed that, as time passes, the resistance provided by fouling increases and that the overall heat transfer coefficient decreases. The energy efficiency centered maintenance has an indicator of economic justification (factor J) that relates the economic-energy improvement achieved when performing maintenance, taking into account the economic effort invested. Depending on the cost of the type of maintenance to be performed, a threshold should be chosen, from which the maintenance activity is justified. The effectiveness values of the heat exchanger (ε) and the J indicator are used to form a criticality matrix, which allows prioritizing maintenance activities in each equipment. The planning of the implementation dates of the maintenance of each heat exchanger, from the maintenance method centered on energy efficiency applied to the crude distillation unit’s, preheat train, constitutes a contribution in this specific field. The conceptual design of the maintenance method centered on energy efficiency presented in this work is feasible for other heat transfer equipment used in oil refineries and industry in general. The procedure developed uses real operation values, and with its implementation, a saving of 150000 US dollars was achieved.

scholarly journals Reserves of Motor-Vehicle Insurance in Finland

1962 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teivo Pentikäinen
Keyword(s):  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
Accurate Calculation ◽  
Short Term ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Image Position ◽  
Premium Income ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Motor Vehicle Insurance ◽  
Cluster Points

The Ministry of Social Affairs, which acts i.a. as the supervising office in Finland, has given instructions regarding the normal reserves of insurance companies. A summary of these and some comments are given here as far as they concern motor-vehicle insurance. The instructions as far as they concern the subject referred to in the following in the items 2-6, 9 and 10, were compiled by a committee, presided over by Mr. I. Ketola, M. Sc, which availed itself of the experience of several Finnish insurance companies.In order to give a review of the system as a whole many items, which are mathematically trivial and well-known, are briefly explained.The conventional principle of “pro rata parte temporis” is followed, which leads to the well-known reserve where P is the premium income of the company. This provides that the days when the premiums fall due are approximately equally distributed over the year (which can be checked from the premium sums of the different months in the book-keeping) or at least have no cluster points in the second half of the year and that the cost of the collecting of premiums is not less than 0.2 P. A more accurate calculation takes into account i.a. temporary short term policies etc.In casu-reserve. All unpaid claims (except those mentioned later) due to accidents which occured before the end of the account year, are listed and rated one by one. Doubtful cases, e.g. where the cause of the accident is still under litigation, are calculated in accordance with the “worst” alternative.

scholarly journals Demonstration and Assessment of Purification Cascades for the Separation and Valorization of Hemicellulose from Organosolv Beechwood Hydrolyzates

Membranes ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Roy Nitzsche ◽  
Hendrik Etzold ◽  
Marlen Verges ◽  
Arne Gröngröft ◽  
Matthias Kraume
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Hydrothermal Treatment ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Aspen Plus ◽  
High Potential ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Specific Production ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Value Added Products

Hemicellulose and its derivatives have a high potential to replace fossil-based materials in various high-value-added products. Within this study, two purification cascades for the separation and valorization of hemicellulose and its derived monomeric sugars from organosolv beechwood hydrolyzates (BWHs) were experimentally demonstrated and assessed. Purification cascade 1 included hydrothermal treatment for converting remaining hemicellulose oligomers to xylose and the purification of the xylose by nanofiltration. Purification cascade 2 included the removal of lignin by adsorption, followed by ultrafiltration for the separation and concentration of hemicellulose. Based on the findings of the experimental work, both cascades were simulated on an industrial scale using Aspen Plus®. In purification cascade 1, 63% of the oligomeric hemicellulose was hydrothermally converted to xylose and purified by nanofiltration to 7.8 t/h of a xylose solution with a concentration of 200 g/L. In purification cascade 2, 80% of the lignin was removed by adsorption, and 7.6 t/h of a purified hemicellulose solution with a concentration of 200 g/L was obtained using ultrafiltration. The energy efficiency of the cascades was 59% and 26%, respectively. Furthermore, the estimation of specific production costs showed that xylose can be recovered from BWH at the cost of 73.7 EUR/t and hemicellulose at 135.1 EUR/t.

scholarly journals PENERAPAN INFORMASI AKUNTANSI DIFERENSIAL DALAM PENGAMBILAN KEPUTUSAN MEMBELI ATAU MEMBUAT SENDIRI PRODUK SETENGAH JADI PADA UD. BERKAT ANUGERAH

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phamela D Tampubolon ◽  
David Paul Elia Saerang ◽  
Agus Toni Poputra
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Accounting Information ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Management Measure ◽  
The Cost

Amid competition is so rapid and uncertain economic conditions, every company is required to be more efficient in order tobe more efficient in orderto survive and all of it can not be separated from the role of management.  Management measure which is occupied to measure the success or failure of the company is profit. To produce an efficient profit differential accounting information requires management to select the best course of action among alternatives available. The purpose of this study is to analyze the application of differential accounting information in the decision to buy or make your own semi-finished products on UD. Berkat Anugerah. This study uses a descriptive research method. The result of the analysis of research conducted on UD. Berkat Anugerah seen from the cost accounting showed diferential role in the short-term decision making, where the company should buy semi-finished products from third party cost incurred due to lower than producing its own.

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