51,248 research outputs found
Scalable Approach to Uncertainty Quantification and Robust Design of Interconnected Dynamical Systems
Development of robust dynamical systems and networks such as autonomous
aircraft systems capable of accomplishing complex missions faces challenges due
to the dynamically evolving uncertainties coming from model uncertainties,
necessity to operate in a hostile cluttered urban environment, and the
distributed and dynamic nature of the communication and computation resources.
Model-based robust design is difficult because of the complexity of the hybrid
dynamic models including continuous vehicle dynamics, the discrete models of
computations and communications, and the size of the problem. We will overview
recent advances in methodology and tools to model, analyze, and design robust
autonomous aerospace systems operating in uncertain environment, with stress on
efficient uncertainty quantification and robust design using the case studies
of the mission including model-based target tracking and search, and trajectory
planning in uncertain urban environment. To show that the methodology is
generally applicable to uncertain dynamical systems, we will also show examples
of application of the new methods to efficient uncertainty quantification of
energy usage in buildings, and stability assessment of interconnected power
networks
Extinction calculations of multi-sphere polycrystalline graphitic clusters - A comparison with the 2175 AA peak and between a rigorous solution and discrete-dipole approximations
Certain dust particles in space are expected to appear as clusters of
individual grains. The morphology of these clusters could be fractal or
compact. In this paper we study the light scattering by compact and fractal
polycrystalline graphitic clusters consisting of touching identical spheres. We
compare three general methods for computing the extinction of the clusters in
the wavelength range 0.1 - 100 micron, namely, a rigorous solution (Gerardy &
Ausloos 1982) and two different discrete-dipole approximation methods --
MarCODES (Markel 1998) and DDSCAT (Draine & Flatau 1994). We consider clusters
of N = 4, 7, 8, 27,32, 49, 108 and 343 particles of radii either 10 nm or 50
nm, arranged in three different geometries: open fractal (dimension D = 1.77),
simple cubic and face-centred cubic. The rigorous solution shows that the
extinction of the fractal clusters, with N < 50 and particle radii 10 nm,
displays a peak within 2% of the location of the observed interstellar
extinction peak at ~4.6 inverse micron; the smaller the cluster, the closer its
peak gets to this value. By contrast, the peak in the extinction of the more
compact clusters lie more than 4% from 4.6 inverse micron. At short wavelengths
(0.1 - 0.5 micron), all the methods show that fractal clusters have markedly
different extinction from those of non-fractal clusters. At wavelengths > 5
micron, the rigorous solution indicates that the extinction from fractal and
compact clusters are of the same order of magnitude. It was only possible to
compute fully converged results of the rigorous solution for the smaller
clusters, due to computational limitations, however, we find that both
discrete-dipole approximation methods overestimate the computed extinction of
the smaller fractal clusters.Comment: Corrections added in accordance with suggestions by the referee. 12
pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic
A Density-Based Approach to the Retrieval of Top-K Spatial Textual Clusters
Keyword-based web queries with local intent retrieve web content that is
relevant to supplied keywords and that represent points of interest that are
near the query location. Two broad categories of such queries exist. The first
encompasses queries that retrieve single spatial web objects that each satisfy
the query arguments. Most proposals belong to this category. The second
category, to which this paper's proposal belongs, encompasses queries that
support exploratory user behavior and retrieve sets of objects that represent
regions of space that may be of interest to the user. Specifically, the paper
proposes a new type of query, namely the top-k spatial textual clusters (k-STC)
query that returns the top-k clusters that (i) are located the closest to a
given query location, (ii) contain the most relevant objects with regard to
given query keywords, and (iii) have an object density that exceeds a given
threshold. To compute this query, we propose a basic algorithm that relies on
on-line density-based clustering and exploits an early stop condition. To
improve the response time, we design an advanced approach that includes three
techniques: (i) an object skipping rule, (ii) spatially gridded posting lists,
and (iii) a fast range query algorithm. An empirical study on real data
demonstrates that the paper's proposals offer scalability and are capable of
excellent performance
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