An Intelligent Hybrid Model for Bus Load Forecasting in Electrical Short-Term Operation Tasks

The main objective of this chapter is to present a hybrid model for bus load forecasting. This approach represents an essential tool for the operation of the electrical power system and the hybrid model combines a bus clustering process and a load forecasting model. As a case study, the model was applied to the real Brazilian electrical system, and the results revealed a performance similar to that of conventional models for bus load forecasting, but about 14 times faster. The results are compatible with the safe operating load levels for the Brazilian electrical power system and have proved to be adequate for use in real operation tasks.

Secure RFID-Enablement in Modern Companies

Current RFID implementations suffer from security threats and privacy issues since the technology was not designed for secured data exchange. In emerging global RFID-aided supply chains, the need for open interfaces between supply chain partners exposes business secrets. A case study focusing on the development of detected counterfeits in the pharmaceutical industries in Europe and in the United States of America motivates the rising importance for RFID security. A formal model for describing RFID-aided supply chains is introduced to analyze flow of messages and data. Countermeasure tasks for all involved supply chain participants are defined to harden the integrity of the global supply chain. Motivated by concerns of exposing data via the air interface, two mutual authentication protocols are presented that aim to keep tag production costs low. Their applicability in context of the pharmaceutical industry is discussed.

III-V Nitride Based Novel Solid-State Terahertz Power-Source

The static and dynamic characteristics of Wide Bandgap GaN having different structures and doping profiles are thoroughly investigated. The study has established the potential of this WBG semiconductor in fabricating high-power IMPATT devices in the above high frequency regimes. A comparison between the device performances of WZ- & ZB- GaN IMPATTs has shown that WZ-GaN IMPATTs are superior to ZB-GaN IMPATTs as far as output power density, efficiency, and high-temperature operation are concerned. Starting with brief review on state-of-the-art THz devices and on the conventional ATT devices, a details analysis of THz frequency performances of the novel III-V Nitride semiconductor based ATT devices will be presented in this chapter. Application possibilities of such devices in defence and industrial sectors will be presented in a nutshell. Emphasis will be given on the studies on their experimental realization. Photo-sensitivity studies of the new class of devices are also the scope the chapter.

Improving Industrial Product Lifecycle Management by Semantic Data Federations

It is expected that the amount of product information available from the Internet of Things and Services will be so tremendous that the main challenge will be to provide the right information, at the right time, in the right place, and to the right people. This objective is addressed by Aletheia – a distributed Information System that enables the federation and semantic integration of very heterogeneous information sources. This chapter discusses the goals, functionality, and architecture of Aletheia, guided by a real-world case study in the industrial service sector and conducted in cooperation with ABB, a major company providing power and automation technologies, products, and services for utility and industry customers. Further, the authors discuss several issues from the Aletheia project experience they believe to be valuable for researchers and implementers of semantic data federation systems as well as practitioners in the industrial service sector.

Rough Set Based Aggregation for Effective Evaluation of Web Search Systems

Rank aggregation is the process of generating a single aggregated ranking for a given set of rankings. In industrial environment, there are many applications where rank aggregation must be applied. Rough set based rank aggregation is a user feedback based technique which mines ranking rules for rank aggregation using rough set theory. In this chapter, the authors discuss rough set based rank aggregation technique in light of Web search evaluation. Since there are many search engines available, which can be used by used by industrial houses to advertise their products, Web search evaluation is essential to decide which search engines to rely on. Here, the authors discuss the limitations of rough set based rank aggregation and present an improved version of the same, which is more suitable for aggregation of different techniques for Web search evaluation. In the improved version, the authors incorporate the confidence of the rules in predicting a class for a given set of data. They validate the mined ranking rules by comparing the predicted user feedback based ranking with the actual user feedback based ranking. They show their experimental results pertaining to the evaluation of seven public search engines using improved version of rough set based aggregation for a set of 37 queries.

Fuzzy Logic

The field of industrial informatics has emerged as one of the key disciplines for the purpose of intelligent management and dissemination of information in today’s world. With the advent of newer technical know-how, the subject of informative intelligence has assumed increasing importance in the industrial arena, thanks to the evolution of data intensive industry. Real world data exhibit varied amount of unquantifiable uncertainty in the information content. Conventional logic is often unable to explain the associated uncertainty and imprecision therein due to the principles of finiteness of observations and quantifying propositions employed. Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic provide a logical framework for description of the varied amount of ambiguity, uncertainty and imprecision exhibited in real world data under consideration. The resultant fuzzy inference engine and the fuzzy logic control theory supplement the power of the framework in design of robust failsafe real life systems.

Intelligent Techniques for the Analysis of Power Quality Data in Electrical Power Distribution System

This chapter is about the intelligent techniques for the analysis of power quality problems in electrical power distribution system. The problems related with electrical power industry are becoming more widespread, complex, and diversified. The behaviour of power distribution systems can be monitored effectively using artificial intelligence techniques and methodologies. There is a need of understanding the power system operations from power utility perspectives and application of computational intelligence methods to solve the problems of the power industry. The real power quality (PQ) data is taken from a power utility in Victoria Australia. Principal Component Analysis Technique (PCAT) is used to reduce the large number of PQ data attributes of the power distribution system. After the pre-processing of PQ data using PCAT, intelligent computational techniques will be used for the analysis of power quality data. Neural network techniques will be employed to estimate the values of PQ parameters of the power distribution system. The Feed Forward Back Propagation (FFBP) neural network and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are used for intelligent estimation of PQ data. The results obtained through these intelligent techniques are compared with the real data of power utility in Victoria, Australia for stability, reliability and enhanced power systems performance.

SoftPLC-Based Control

Nowadays, most control systems are based on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and on commercial programs, but the use of conventional PCs is becoming an increasing by popularity and competitive alternative. After an introduction that underlines the positive and negative aspects of both solutions, EtherCAT, a hard real-time industrial Ethernet protocol that allows the use of both conventional PCs and open-source software, is analyzed. Two different EtherCAT master implementations are compared, which are based on a commercial and on a open-source software, respectively. In order to highlight differences and provide a short reference, a simple example was implemented in the two environments.

Feasible Automatic Reconfigurations of Real-Time OS Tasks

This research deals with reconfigurable uniprocessor embedded real-time systems to be implemented by different OS tasks that should be independent, synchronous, and periodic, and that should meet functional and temporal properties described in user requirements. The authors define two forms of automatic reconfigurations assumed to be applied at run-time: addition-removal of tasks or just modifications of their temporal parameters; WCET and/or periods. The authors define a new semantic of reconfigurations where a crucial criterion to consider is the automatic improvement of the system’s feasibility at run-time.

Linux Based Real-Time Control over Industrial Networks

This chapter deals with industrial networked control systems. These systems are the most modern means of industrial control. The current approach contains several problems. Mostly discussed problem in the control theory is a network-caused variable transport delay problem. On the software point of view there is problem of the system latency, which limits time period of the discrete control. State of art research in hardware part of the system shows that latency source and transport delay variations are caused by unpredictable hardware behavior as well. Another problem is the control system security. This was the case of the Mexico gulf oil rig disaster in 2010, as well as Iran nuclear program three months later the same year, caused by worm attack at its centrifuges. Therein lies the question; how can security issues be avoided? The authors demonstrate how via using GNU/Linux, which solves timing correctness by their project of the plasma cutting machine design.