Review and Comparison of Intelligent Optimization Modelling Techniques for Energy Forecasting and Condition-Based Maintenance in PV Plants

Within the field of soft computing, intelligent optimization modelling techniques include various major techniques in artificial intelligence. These techniques pretend to generate new business knowledge transforming sets of "raw data" into business value. One of the principal applications of these techniques is related to the design of predictive analytics for the improvement of advanced CBM (condition-based maintenance) strategies and energy production forecasting. These advanced techniques can be used to transform control system data, operational data and maintenance event data to failure diagnostic and prognostic knowledge and, ultimately, to derive expected energy generation. One of the systems where these techniques can be applied with massive potential impact are the legacy monitoring systems existing in solar PV energy generation plants. These systems produce a great amount of data over time, while at the same time they demand an important e ort in order to increase their performance through the use of more accurate predictive analytics to reduce production losses having a direct impact on ROI. How to choose the most suitable techniques to apply is one of the problems to address. This paper presents a review and a comparative analysis of six intelligent optimization modelling techniques, which have been applied on a PV plant case study, using the energy production forecast as the decision variable. The methodology proposed not only pretends to elicit the most accurate solution but also validates the results, in comparison with the di erent outputs for the di erent techniques

ROTEX-TRIIFEX: Proposal for a joint FRG-USA telerobotic flight experiment

The concepts and main elements of a RObot Technology EXperiment (ROTEX) proposed to fly with the next German spacelab mission, D2, are presented. It provides a 1 meter size, six axis robot inside a spacelab rack, equipped with a multisensory gripper (force-torque sensors, an array of range finders, and mini stereo cameras). The robot will perform assembly and servicing tasks in a generic way, and will grasp a floating object. The man machine and supervisory control concepts for teleoperation from the spacelab and from ground are discussed. The predictive estimation schemes for an extensive use of time-delay compensating 3D computer graphics are explained

Transferring big data across the globe

Transmitting data via the Internet is a routine and common task for users today. The amount of data being transmitted by the average user has dramatically increased over the past few years. Transferring a gigabyte of data in an entire day was normal, however users are now transmitting multiple gigabytes in a single hour. With the influx of big data and massive scientific data sets that are measured in tens of petabytes, a user has the propensity to transfer even larger amounts of data. When transferring data sets of this magnitude on public or shared networks, the performance of all workloads in the system will be impacted. This dissertation addresses the issues and challenges inherent with transferring big data over shared networks. A survey of current transfer techniques is provided and these techniques are evaluated in simulated, experimental and live environments. The main contribution of this dissertation is the development of a new, nice model for big data transfers, which is based on a store-and-forward methodology instead of an end-to-end approach. This nice model ensures that big data transfers only occur when there is idle bandwidth that can be repurposed for these large transfers. The nice model improves overall performance and significantly reduces the transmission time for big data transfers. The model allows for efficient transfers regardless of time zone differences or variations in bandwidth between sender and receiver. Nice is the first model that addresses the challenges of transferring big data across the globe

Proactive software rejuvenation solution for web enviroments on virtualized platforms

The availability of the Information Technologies for everything, from everywhere, at all times is a growing requirement. We use information Technologies from common and social tasks to critical tasks like managing nuclear power plants or even the International Space Station (ISS). However, the availability of IT infrastructures is still a huge challenge nowadays. In a quick look around news, we can find reports of corporate outage, affecting millions of users and impacting on the revenue and image of the companies. It is well known that, currently, computer system outages are more often due to software faults, than hardware faults. Several studies have reported that one of the causes of unplanned software outages is the software aging phenomenon. This term refers to the accumulation of errors, usually causing resource contention, during long running application executions, like web applications, which normally cause applications/systems to hang or crash. Gradual performance degradation could also accompany software aging phenomena. The software aging phenomena are often related to memory bloating/ leaks, unterminated threads, data corruption, unreleased file-locks or overruns. We can find several examples of software aging in the industry. The work presented in this thesis aims to offer a proactive and predictive software rejuvenation solution for Internet Services against software aging caused by resource exhaustion. To this end, we first present a threshold based proactive rejuvenation to avoid the consequences of software aging. This first approach has some limitations, but the most important of them it is the need to know a priori the resource or resources involved in the crash and the critical condition values. Moreover, we need some expertise to fix the threshold value to trigger the rejuvenation action. Due to these limitations, we have evaluated the use of Machine Learning to overcome the weaknesses of our first approach to obtain a proactive and predictive solution. Finally, the current and increasing tendency to use virtualization technologies to improve the resource utilization has made traditional data centers turn into virtualized data centers or platforms. We have used a Mathematical Programming approach to virtual machine allocation and migration to optimize the resources, accepting as many services as possible on the platform while at the same time, guaranteeing the availability (via our software rejuvenation proposal) of the services deployed against the software aging phenomena. The thesis is supported by an exhaustive experimental evaluation that proves the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposals for current systems

Replica Creation Algorithm for Data Grids

Data grid system is a data management infrastructure that facilitates reliable access and sharing of large amount of data, storage resources, and data transfer services that can be scaled across distributed locations. This thesis presents a new replication algorithm that improves data access performance in data grids by distributing relevant data copies around the grid. The new Data Replica Creation Algorithm (DRCM) improves performance of data grid systems by reducing job execution time and making the best use of data grid resources (network bandwidth and storage space). Current algorithms focus on number of accesses in deciding which file to replicate and where to place them, which ignores resources’ capabilities. DRCM differs by considering both user and resource perspectives; strategically placing replicas at locations that provide the lowest transfer cost. The proposed algorithm uses three strategies: Replica Creation and Deletion Strategy (RCDS), Replica Placement Strategy (RPS), and Replica Replacement Strategy (RRS). DRCM was evaluated using network simulation (OptorSim) based on selected performance metrics (mean job execution time, efficient network usage, average storage usage, and computing element usage), scenarios, and topologies. Results revealed better job execution time with lower resource consumption than existing approaches. This research contributes replication strategies embodied in one algorithm that enhances data grid performance, capable of making a decision on creating or deleting more than one file during same decision. Furthermore, dependency-level-between-files criterion was utilized and integrated with the exponential growth/decay model to give an accurate file evaluation

Implementation of Sub-Grid-Federation Model for Performance Improvement in Federated Data Grid

In this work, a new model for federation data grid system called Sub-Grid-Federation was designed to improve access latency by accessing data from the nearest possible sites. The strategy in optimising data access was based on the process of searching into the area identified as ‘Network Core Area’ (NCA). The performance of access latency in Sub-Grid-Federation was tested based on the mathematical proving and simulated using OptorSim simulator. Four case studies were carried out and tested in Optimal Downloading Replication Strategy (ODRS) and the Sub-Grid-Federation. The results show that Sub-Grid-Federation is 20% better in terms of access latency and 21% better in terms of reducing remotes sites access compared to ODRS. The results indicate that the Sub-Grid-Federation is a better alternative for the implementation of collaboration and data sharing in data grid system.                                                                                    Keywords: Data grid, replication, scheduling, access latenc

ALOJA: A framework for benchmarking and predictive analytics in Hadoop deployments

This article presents the ALOJA project and its analytics tools, which leverages machine learning to interpret Big Data benchmark performance data and tuning. ALOJA is part of a long-term collaboration between BSC and Microsoft to automate the characterization of cost-effectiveness on Big Data deployments, currently focusing on Hadoop. Hadoop presents a complex run-time environment, where costs and performance depend on a large number of configuration choices. The ALOJA project has created an open, vendor-neutral repository, featuring over 40,000 Hadoop job executions and their performance details. The repository is accompanied by a test-bed and tools to deploy and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different hardware configurations, parameters and Cloud services. Despite early success within ALOJA, a comprehensive study requires automation of modeling procedures to allow an analysis of large and resource-constrained search spaces. The predictive analytics extension, ALOJA-ML, provides an automated system allowing knowledge discovery by modeling environments from observed executions. The resulting models can forecast execution behaviors, predicting execution times for new configurations and hardware choices. That also enables model-based anomaly detection or efficient benchmark guidance by prioritizing executions. In addition, the community can benefit from ALOJA data-sets and framework to improve the design and deployment of Big Data applications.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595). This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Economy of Spain under contracts TIN2012-34557 and 2014SGR1051.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version