1,448 research outputs found
Application of Integer Programming for Mine Evacuation Modeling with Multiple Transportation Modes
The safe evacuation of miners during an emergency within the shortest possible time is very important for the success of a mine evacuation program. Despite developments in the field of mine evacuation, little research has been done on the use of mine vehicles during evacuation. Current research into mine evacuation has emphasized on miner evacuation by foot. Mathematical formulations such as Minimum Cost Network Flow (MCNF) models, Ant Colony algorithms, and shortest path algorithms including Dijkstra's algorithm and Floyd-Warshall algorithm have been used to achieve this. These models, which concentrate on determining the shortest escape routes during evacuation, have been found to be computationally expensive with expanding problem sizes and parameter ranges or they may not offer the best possible solutions.An ideal evacuation route for each miner must be determined considering the available mine vehicles, locations of miners, safe havens such as refuge chambers, and fresh-air bases. This research sought to minimize the total evacuation cost as a function of the evacuation time required during an emergency while simultaneously helping to reduce the risk of exposure of the miners to harmful conditions during the evacuation by leveraging the use of available mine vehicles. A case study on the Turquoise Ridge Underground Mine (Nevada Gold Mines) was conducted to validate the Integer Programming (IP) model. Statistical analysis of the IP model in comparison with a benchmark MCNF model proved that leveraging the use of mine vehicles during an emergency can further reduce the total evacuation time. A cost-savings analysis was made for the IP model, and it was found that the time saved during evacuation, by utilizing the IP model, increased linearly, with an increase in the number of miners present at the time of evacuation
Reading the news through its structure: new hybrid connectivity based approaches
In this thesis a solution for the problem of identifying the structure of news published
by online newspapers is presented. This problem requires new approaches and algorithms
that are capable of dealing with the massive number of online publications in existence
(and that will grow in the future). The fact that news documents present a high degree of
interconnection makes this an interesting and hard problem to solve. The identification
of the structure of the news is accomplished both by descriptive methods that expose the
dimensionality of the relations between different news, and by clustering the news into
topic groups. To achieve this analysis this integrated whole was studied using different
perspectives and approaches.
In the identification of news clusters and structure, and after a preparatory data collection
phase, where several online newspapers from different parts of the globe were
collected, two newspapers were chosen in particular: the Portuguese daily newspaper
PĂşblico and the British newspaper The Guardian.
In the first case, it was shown how information theory (namely variation of information)
combined with adaptive networks was able to identify topic clusters in the news published
by the Portuguese online newspaper PĂşblico.
In the second case, the structure of news published by the British newspaper The
Guardian is revealed through the construction of time series of news clustered by a kmeans
process. After this approach an unsupervised algorithm, that filters out irrelevant
news published online by taking into consideration the connectivity of the news labels
entered by the journalists, was developed. This novel hybrid technique is based on Qanalysis
for the construction of the filtered network followed by a clustering technique to
identify the topical clusters. Presently this work uses a modularity optimisation clustering technique but this step is general enough that other hybrid approaches can be used without
losing generality.
A novel second order swarm intelligence algorithm based on Ant Colony Systems
was developed for the travelling salesman problem that is consistently better than the
traditional benchmarks. This algorithm is used to construct Hamiltonian paths over the
news published using the eccentricity of the different documents as a measure of distance.
This approach allows for an easy navigation between published stories that is dependent
on the connectivity of the underlying structure.
The results presented in this work show the importance of taking topic detection in
large corpora as a multitude of relations and connectivities that are not in a static state.
They also influence the way of looking at multi-dimensional ensembles, by showing that
the inclusion of the high dimension connectivities gives better results to solving a particular
problem as was the case in the clustering problem of the news published online.Neste trabalho resolvemos o problema da identificação da estrutura das notĂcias publicadas
em linha por jornais e agĂŞncias noticiosas. Este problema requer novas abordagens e
algoritmos que sejam capazes de lidar com o número crescente de publicações em linha
(e que se espera continuam a crescer no futuro). Este facto, juntamente com o elevado
grau de interconexĂŁo que as notĂcias apresentam tornam este problema num problema
interessante e de difĂcil resolução. A identificação da estrutura do sistema de notĂcias foi
conseguido quer através da utilização de métodos descritivos que expõem a dimensão das
relações existentes entre as diferentes notĂcias, quer atravĂ©s de algoritmos de agrupamento
das mesmas em tópicos. Para atingir este objetivo foi necessário proceder a ao estudo deste
sistema complexo sob diferentes perspectivas e abordagens.
ApĂłs uma fase preparatĂłria do corpo de dados, onde foram recolhidos diversos jornais
publicados online optou-se por dois jornais em particular: O PĂşblico e o The Guardian.
A escolha de jornais em lĂnguas diferentes deve-se Ă vontade de encontrar estratĂ©gias de
análise que sejam independentes do conhecimento prévio que se tem sobre estes sistemas.
Numa primeira análise é empregada uma abordagem baseada em redes adaptativas
e teoria de informação (nomeadamente variação de informação) para identificar tópicos
noticiosos que sĂŁo publicados no jornal portuguĂŞs PĂşblico.
Numa segunda abordagem analisamos a estrutura das notĂcias publicadas pelo jornal
Britânico The Guardian atravĂ©s da construção de sĂ©ries temporais de notĂcias. Estas foram
seguidamente agrupadas através de um processo de k-means. Para além disso desenvolveuse
um algoritmo que permite filtrar de forma nĂŁo supervisionada notĂcias irrelevantes que
apresentam baixa conectividade Ă s restantes notĂcias atravĂ©s da utilização de Q-analysis
seguida de um processo de clustering. Presentemente este mĂ©todo utiliza otimização de modularidade, mas a tĂ©cnica Ă© suficientemente geral para que outras abordagens hĂbridas
possam ser utilizadas sem perda de generalidade do método.
Desenvolveu-se ainda um novo algoritmo baseado em sistemas de colĂłnias de formigas
para solução do problema do caixeiro viajante que consistentemente apresenta resultados
melhores que os tradicionais bancos de testes. Este algoritmo foi aplicado na construção
de caminhos Hamiltonianos das notĂcias publicadas utilizando a excentricidade obtida a
partir da conectividade do sistema estudado como medida da distância entre notĂcias. Esta
abordagem permitiu construir um sistema de navegação entre as notĂcias publicadas que Ă©
dependente da conectividade observada na estrutura de notĂcias encontrada.
Os resultados apresentados neste trabalho mostram a importância de analisar sistemas
complexos na sua multitude de relações e conectividades que não são estáticas e que
influenciam a forma como tradicionalmente se olha para sistema multi-dimensionais.
Mostra-se que a inclusão desta dimensões extra produzem melhores resultados na resolução
do problema de identificar a estrutura subjacente a este problema da publicação de notĂcias em linha
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
Ant Colony Optimization
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is the best example of how studies aimed at understanding and modeling the behavior of ants and other social insects can provide inspiration for the development of computational algorithms for the solution of difficult mathematical problems. Introduced by Marco Dorigo in his PhD thesis (1992) and initially applied to the travelling salesman problem, the ACO field has experienced a tremendous growth, standing today as an important nature-inspired stochastic metaheuristic for hard optimization problems. This book presents state-of-the-art ACO methods and is divided into two parts: (I) Techniques, which includes parallel implementations, and (II) Applications, where recent contributions of ACO to diverse fields, such as traffic congestion and control, structural optimization, manufacturing, and genomics are presented
A robust solving strategy for the vehicle routing problem with multiple depots and multiple objectives
This document presents the development of a robust solving strategy for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Depots and Multiple Objectives (MO-MDVRP). The problem tackeled in this work is the problem to minimize the total cost and the load imbalance in vehicle routing plan for distribution of goods. This thesis presents a MILP mathematical model and a solution strategy based on a Hybrid Multi- Objective Scatter Search Algorithm. Several experiments using simulated instances were run proving that the proposed method is quite robust, this is shown in execution times (less than 4 minutes for an instance with 8 depots and 300 customers); also, the proposed method showed good results compared to the results found with the MILP model for small instances (up to 20 clients and 2 depots).MaestrĂaMagister en IngenierĂa Industria
A review of clustering techniques and developments
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. This paper presents a comprehensive study on clustering: exiting methods and developments made at various times. Clustering is defined as an unsupervised learning where the objects are grouped on the basis of some similarity inherent among them. There are different methods for clustering the objects such as hierarchical, partitional, grid, density based and model based. The approaches used in these methods are discussed with their respective states of art and applicability. The measures of similarity as well as the evaluation criteria, which are the central components of clustering, are also presented in the paper. The applications of clustering in some fields like image segmentation, object and character recognition and data mining are highlighted
Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence has emerged as one of the most studied artificial intelligence branches during the last decade, constituting the fastest growing stream in the bio-inspired computation community. A clear trend can be deduced analyzing some of the most renowned scientific databases available, showing that the interest aroused by this branch has increased at a notable pace in the last years. This book describes the prominent theories and recent developments of Swarm Intelligence methods, and their application in all fields covered by engineering. This book unleashes a great opportunity for researchers, lecturers, and practitioners interested in Swarm Intelligence, optimization problems, and artificial intelligence
AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments
This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to
the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications
environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia
rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching,
clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti
cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid
approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that
is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of
being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed
events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques,
covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning
paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches,
but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of
developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability
to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches
are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within
rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses
for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives.
The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal
behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect
when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives,
i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not
trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation,
often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal
behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture
unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update
each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded
that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state
based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation
of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of
canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation
are more readily facilitated
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