Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Informational Paradigm, management of uncertainty and theoretical formalisms in the clustering framework: A review

Fifty years have gone by since the publication of the first paper on clustering based on fuzzy sets theory. In 1965, L.A. Zadeh had published “Fuzzy Sets” [335]. After only one year, the first effects of this seminal paper began to emerge, with the pioneering paper on clustering by Bellman, Kalaba, Zadeh [33], in which they proposed a prototypal of clustering algorithm based on the fuzzy sets theory

Context Exploitation in Data Fusion

Complex and dynamic environments constitute a challenge for existing tracking algorithms. For this reason, modern solutions are trying to utilize any available information which could help to constrain, improve or explain the measurements. So called Context Information (CI) is understood as information that surrounds an element of interest, whose knowledge may help understanding the (estimated) situation and also in reacting to that situation. However, context discovery and exploitation are still largely unexplored research topics. Until now, the context has been extensively exploited as a parameter in system and measurement models which led to the development of numerous approaches for the linear or non-linear constrained estimation and target tracking. More specifically, the spatial or static context is the most common source of the ambient information, i.e. features, utilized for recursive enhancement of the state variables either in the prediction or the measurement update of the filters. In the case of multiple model estimators, context can not only be related to the state but also to a certain mode of the filter. Common practice for multiple model scenarios is to represent states and context as a joint distribution of Gaussian mixtures. These approaches are commonly referred as the join tracking and classification. Alternatively, the usefulness of context was also demonstrated in aiding the measurement data association. Process of formulating a hypothesis, which assigns a particular measurement to the track, is traditionally governed by the empirical knowledge of the noise characteristics of sensors and operating environment, i.e. probability of detection, false alarm, clutter noise, which can be further enhanced by conditioning on context. We believe that interactions between the environment and the object could be classified into actions, activities and intents, and formed into structured graphs with contextual links translated into arcs. By learning the environment model we will be able to make prediction on the target\u2019s future actions based on its past observation. Probability of target future action could be utilized in the fusion process to adjust tracker confidence on measurements. By incorporating contextual knowledge of the environment, in the form of a likelihood function, in the filter measurement update step, we have been able to reduce uncertainties of the tracking solution and improve the consistency of the track. The promising results demonstrate that the fusion of CI brings a significant performance improvement in comparison to the regular tracking approaches

Semantic Decision Support for Information Fusion Applications

La thèse s'inscrit dans le domaine de la représentation des connaissances et la modélisation de l'incertitude dans un contexte de fusion d'informations. L'idée majeure est d'utiliser les outils sémantiques que sont les ontologies, non seulement pour représenter les connaissances générales du domaine et les observations, mais aussi pour représenter les incertitudes que les sources introduisent dans leurs observations. Nous proposons de représenter ces incertitudes au travers d'une méta-ontologie (DS-ontology) fondée sur la théorie des fonctions de croyance. La contribution de ce travail porte sur la définition d'opérateurs d'inclusion et d'intersection sémantique et sur lesquels s'appuie la mise en œuvre de la théorie des fonctions de croyance, et sur le développement d'un outil appelé FusionLab permettant la fusion d'informations sémantiques à partir du développement théorique précédent. Une application de ces travaux a été réalisée dans le cadre d'un projet de surveillance maritime.This thesis is part of the knowledge representation domain and modeling of uncertainty in a context of information fusion. The main idea is to use semantic tools and more specifically ontologies, not only to represent the general domain knowledge and observations, but also to represent the uncertainty that sources may introduce in their own observations. We propose to represent these uncertainties and semantic imprecision trough a metaontology (called DS-Ontology) based on the theory of belief functions. The contribution of this work focuses first on the definition of semantic inclusion and intersection operators for ontologies and on which relies the implementation of the theory of belief functions, and secondly on the development of a tool called FusionLab for merging semantic information within ontologies from the previous theorical development. These works have been applied within a European maritime surveillance project.ROUEN-INSA Madrillet (765752301) / SudocSudocFranceF

Fusion of Information and Analytics: A Discussion on Potential Methods to Cope with Uncertainty in Complex Environments (Big Data and IoT)

International audienceInformation overload and complexity are core problems to most organizations of today. The advances in networking capabilities have created the conditions of complexity by enabling richer, real-time interactions between and among individuals, objects, systems and organizations. Fusion of Information and Analytics Technologies (FIAT) are key enablers for the design of current and future decision support systems to support prognosis, diagnosis, and prescriptive tasks in such complex environments. Hundreds of methods and technologies exist, and several books have been dedicated to either analytics or information fusion so far. However, very few have discussed the methodological aspects and the need of integrating frameworks for these techniques coming from multiple disciplines. This paper presents a discussion of potential integrating frameworks as well as the development of a computational model to evolve FIAT-based systems capable of meeting the challenges of complex environments such as in Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT)

Autonomous Flight, Fault, and Energy Management of the Flying Fish Solar-Powered Seaplane.

The Flying Fish autonomous unmanned seaplane is designed and built for persistent ocean surveillance. Solar energy harvesting and always-on autonomous control and guidance are required to achieve unattended long-term operation. This thesis describes the Flying Fish avionics and software systems that enable the system to plan, self-initiate, and autonomously execute drift-flight cycles necessary to maintain a designated watch circle subject to environmentally influenced drift. We first present the avionics and flight software architecture developed for the unique challenges of an autonomous energy-harvesting seaplane requiring the system to be: waterproof, robust over a variety of sea states, and lightweight for flight. Seaplane kinematics and dynamics are developed based on conventional aircraft and watercraft and upon empirical flight test data. These models serve as the basis for development of flight control and guidance strategies which take the form of a cyclic multi-mode guidance protocol that smoothly transitions between nested gain-scheduled proportional-derivative feedback control laws tuned for the trim conditions of each flight mode. A fault-tolerant airspeed sensing system is developed in response to elevated failure rates arising from pitot probe water ingestion in the test environment. The fault-tolerance strategy utilizes sensor characteristics and signal energy to combine redundant sensor measurements in a weighted voting strategy, handling repeated failures, sensor recovery, non-homogenous sensors, and periods of complete sensing failure. Finally, a graph-based mission planner combines models of global solar energy, local ocean-currents, and wind with flight-verified/derived aircraft models to provide an energy-aware flight planning tool. An NP-hard asymmetric multi-visit traveling salesman planning problem is posed that integrates vehicle performance and environment models using energy as the primary cost metric. A novel A* search heuristic is presented to improve search efficiency relative to uniform cost search. A series of cases studies are conducted with surface and airborne goals for various times of day and for multi-day scenarios. Energy-optimal solutions are identified except in cases where energy harvesting produces multiple comparable-cost plans via negative-cost cycles. The always-on cyclic guidance/control system, airspeed sensor fault management algorithm, and the nested-TSP heuristic for A* are all critical innovation required to solve the posed research challenges.Ph.D.Aerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91453/1/eubankrd_1.pd