An RFID Based Access Control System operating with a Computer Program and a Database

This article focuses on the realization of an access control system based on RFID (Radio Frequency by Identification) technology. It is an authentication system for controlling access to a sensitive place. This system is composed of RFID cards which are badges that act as electronic keys, an RFID reader, an electronic lock, a microcontroller, a wifi module and a database installed on a computer. The identification number of an RFID card detected by the RFID reader is transferred, via the serial interface, to the microcontroller that communicates with the computer through the wifi module for verification in the database. If the information is valid, the microcontroller triggers the opening of the electronic lock.

Query Sense Discovery Approach to Realize the User's Search Intent

The main goal of information retrieval is getting the most relevant documents to a user’s query. So, a search engine must not only understand the meaning of each keyword in the query but also their relative senses in the context of the query. Discovering the query meaning is a comprehensive and evolutionary process; the precise meaning of the query is established as developing the association between concepts. The meaning determination process is modeled by a dynamic system operating in the semantic space of WordNet. To capture the meaning of a user query, the original query is reformulating into candidate queries by combining the concepts and their synonyms. A semantic score characterizing the overall meaning of such queries is calculated, the one with the highest score was used to perform the search. The results confirm that the proposed "Query Sense Discovery" approach provides a significant improvement in several performance measures.

THE STANDARD OF PROOF UNDER LITHUANIAN AND RUSSIAN CIVIL PROCEDURE LAW: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The article is dedicated to the memory of Professor M.K. Treushnikov. The professor was the head of the candidate of law thesis of the author of the article, therefore, the beginning of the article is devoted to the author’s memories of M.K. Treushnikov. Since the main field of scientific research of M.K. Treushnikov is related to evidence and proof in civil proceedings, the main part of the article is devoted to the issues of the standard of proof. On the basis of the comparative method the author analyses how the approach to the standard of proof in Lithuania and Russia changed after 1990, both in legal doctrine and case law. It is concluded that there are many similarities in the standard of proof between Lithuanian and Russian civil procedure law, but there are also differences, which are due both to different legal doctrine approaches to this issue and to different case law. In particular, the author points out that there must be common standards for such cognitive, logical activity, which exist regardless of the legal system operating in one state or another, for there is only one logic.

Sensor-Based Predictive Maintenance with Reduction of False Alarms—A Case Study in Heavy Industry

In this paper, the problem of the identification of undesirable events is discussed. Such events can be poorly represented in the historical data, and it is predominantly impossible to learn from past examples. The discussed issue is considered in the work in the context of two use cases in which vibration and temperature measurements collected by wireless sensors are analysed. These use cases include crushers at a coal-fired power plant and gantries in a steelworks converter. The awareness, resulting from the cooperation with industry, of the need for a system that works in cold start conditions and does not flood the machine operator with alarms was the motivation for proposing a new predictive maintenance method. The proposed solution is based on the methods of outlier identification. These methods are applied to the collected data that was transformed into a multidimensional feature vector. The novelty of the proposed solution stems from the creation of a methodology for the reduction of false positive alarms, which was applied to a system identifying undesirable events. This methodology is based on the adaptation of the system to the analysed data, the interaction with the dispatcher, and the use of the XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) method. The experiments performed on several data sets showed that the proposed method reduced false alarms by 90.25% on average in relation to the performance of the stand-alone outlier detection method. The obtained results allowed for the implementation of the developed method to a system operating in a real industrial facility. The conducted research may be valuable for systems with a cold start problem where frequent alarms can lead to discouragement and disregard for the system by the user.

Mathematical Modeling of Integral Characteristics of Repair Process under Maintenance Contracts

The repair rate is a very important parameter for system maintainability and can be defined as a frequency of successfully performed repair actions on a failed component per unit of time. This paper analyzes the integral characteristics of a stochastic repair rate for corresponding values of availability in a system operating under maintenance contracts. The probability density function (PDF) of the repair rate has been studied extensively and it was concluded that it is not a symmetric function so its mean value does not correspond to its maximum. Based on that, the equation for the envelope line of the PDF maximums of the repair rate has been provided. Namely, instead of repair rate PDF equations, we can use envelope line parameters for certain calculations, which are expressed in a simpler mathematical form. That will reduce time required for calculations and prediction and enhance reactions in failure events. Further, for the analytical and numerical evaluation of a system performance, the annual repair rate PDFs are analyzed, such as particular solutions of corresponding differential equation, while the existence of a singular solution is considered and analyzed under different conditions. Moreover, we derived optimal values of availability for which the PDF maximums have been obtained. Finally, in order to generalize the behavior of the repair process, a partial differential equation, as a function of the repair rate process and availability parameter, has been formed.

A Variable Rate Drip Irrigation Prototype for Precision Irrigation

A new Variable Rate Drip Irrigation (VRDI) emitter that monitors individual water drops was designed, built, and tested. This new emitter controllers water application directly by monitoring the volume applied in contrast to uniform drip irrigation systems that control water application indirectly by pressure compensation and operational times. Prior approaches assumed irrigation volumes based on flow rates and time and typically did not verify the applied amount of water applied at each water outlet. The new VRDI emitter self-monitors the total volume of water applied and halts the flow once the desired total water application has been achieved. This study performed a test for a new VRDI emitter design with two inner diameters of 0.11 cm and 0.12 cm and two outer diameters 0.3 cm and 0.35 cm compared to a commercial drip emitter. Laboratory tests verify that the integrated volume measurements of the VRDI system are independent of pressure. Conversely, the flow rates of the commercial pressure-compensated drip lines were not independent of pressure. These results demonstrate that this form of VRDI is technically feasible and is shown to be energy efficient, requiring lower system operating pressures than pressure-compensated lines. The VRDI system can reduce water consumption and related water costs.

Optimized NFC Circuit and Coil Design for Wireless Power Transfer with 2D Free-Positioning and Low Load Sensibility

This paper proposes a method for optimizing and designing a wireless power transfer system operating at 13.56 MHz. It can be used as guidelines for designing coils for the new-trending technology that enables NFC devices to not only to communicate but also to charge. Since NFC wireless charging is an emerging technology, it is of interest to propose optimizations and a dedicated circuit design for such systems. This work proposes an optimization procedure to calculate the dimensions of a transmitter and receiver pair that assures the highest efficiency while considering all possible positions of a receiver that is placed on a desired surface. This procedure seeks to facilitate and automate the design of rectangular-shaped coils, whereas the literature proposes mainly square-shaped coils. Afterwards, a circuit analysis was conducted, and the series-parallel compensation network is proposed as the most promising topology of the receiver to assure a low efficiency sensibility to load variations for 13.56 MHz wireless power transfer systems. A pair of optimized transmitter and receiver coils is prototyped, and the experimental results are tested against the theory. The transmitter of 7 cm×11.4 cm and receiver of 4 cm ×4 cm are separated by 10 mm. The receiver can move on a surface of 8 cm ×12 cm and the load can vary from 36 Ω to 300 Ω while assuring a minimum and maximum efficiency of 80% and 88.3%, respectively.