Editorial: Transactions on Education in the New Decade

A new year always brings new challenges and opportunities, and 2020 is no different for the IEEE Transactions on Education. In keeping with the start of a new decade, some of the changes are quite major

Tracking engineering education research and development: contributions from bibliometric analysis

In recent years, bibliometric analysis of publications has been receiving growing attention in engineering education research as an approach that can bring a number of benefits. In this paper two such forms, taxonomical analysis and citation analysis, are applied to papers from the first 2011 number of IEEE Transactions on Education (21 papers) and from the two 2011 numbers of the ASEE-published Advances in Engineering Education (22 papers). In the former approach, seven taxonomical dimensions are used to characterize the papers and in the second the references cited in the 43 papers were studied so as to analyze how the researchers were informed by previous studies. The results suggest that the silo effect identified by Wankat for disciplinary engineering education journals in 2009 was still apparent in the IEEE Transactions on Education in 2011. The Advances in Engineering Education papers show a wide range of cited references, including reference disciplines outside of engineering education, and this suggests that research published there is likely to be informed by a broad range of previous studies which may be interpreted as a sign of a growing maturity of engineering education as a research discipline

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Using Enquiry-and-Design-Based Learning to Spur Epistemological and Identity Development of Engineering Students

This Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Education focuses on using enquiry-based design projects to spur engineering students’ development, so as to increase understanding and application of the relevant theories, foster higher rates of student development and achieve this in healthy and productive ways

Introduction to the special issue: Social construct within an information society

Managing Information Systems (IS) is increasingly complex, as multiple stakeholders try to communicate, act, and interact for social and business gain. Understanding and managing these complex stakeholder relations and the contingencies of successful communication among culturally diverse stakeholder groups are some of the major challenges for professional communicators in the third millennium. Such challenges have important implications for communication between user and developer groups as training and education of the users becomes more complex. In an effort to connect information system practice with communication theory, this special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication looks at information systems as social constructs of an information societ

Modelling and Control of Parallel-Connected Transformerless Inverters for Large Photovoltaic Farms

[EN] This paper presents a control structure for transformerless photovoltaic inverters connected in parallel to manage photovoltaic fields in the MW range. Large photovoltaic farms are usually divided into several photovoltaic fields, each one of them managed by a centralized high power inverter. The current tendency to build up centralized inverters in the MW range is the use of several transformerless inverters connected in parallel, a topology that provokes the appearance of significant zero-sequence circulating currents among inverters. To eliminate this inconvenience, this paper proposes a control structure that avoids the appearance of circulating currents by controlling the zero-sequence component of the inverters. A second contribution of the paper is the development of a model of n parallel-connected inverters. To validate the concept, the proposed control structure has been applied to a photovoltaic field of 2 MW managed by four 500 kW photovoltaic inverters connected in parallel.This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under Grant ENE2015-64087-C2-2-R and the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU15/01274).Liberos-Mascarell, MA.; González-Medina, R.; Garcerá, G.; Figueres Amorós, E. (2017). Modelling and Control of Parallel-Connected Transformerless Inverters for Large Photovoltaic Farms. Energies. 10(8):1-25. https://doi.org/10.3390/en10081242S125108Pazheri, F. R., Othman, M. F., & Malik, N. H. (2014). A review on global renewable electricity scenario. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 31, 835-845. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2013.12.020Subudhi, B., & Pradhan, R. (2013). A Comparative Study on Maximum Power Point Tracking Techniques for Photovoltaic Power Systems. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, 4(1), 89-98. doi:10.1109/tste.2012.2202294Borrega, M., Marroyo, L., Gonzalez, R., Balda, J., & Agorreta, J. L. (2013). Modeling and Control of a Master–Slave PV Inverter With N-Paralleled Inverters and Three-Phase Three-Limb Inductors. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 28(6), 2842-2855. doi:10.1109/tpel.2012.2220859Araujo, S. V., Zacharias, P., & Mallwitz, R. (2010). Highly Efficient Single-Phase Transformerless Inverters for Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 57(9), 3118-3128. doi:10.1109/tie.2009.2037654PowerGate Plus 500 kWhttp://www.satcon.comAgorreta, J. L., Borrega, M., López, J., & Marroyo, L. (2011). Modeling and Control of $N$ -Paralleled Grid-Connected Inverters With LCL Filter Coupled Due to Grid Impedance in PV Plants. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 26(3), 770-785. doi:10.1109/tpel.2010.2095429Power Electronicshttp://www.power-electronics.comPVS980—1818 to 2091 kVAhttp://new.abb.comInfineon, Central Inverter Solutionshttps://www.infineon.com/cms/en/applications/solar-energy-systems/central-inverter-solutions/Xiao, H., Xie, S., Chen, Y., & Huang, R. (2011). An Optimized Transformerless Photovoltaic Grid-Connected Inverter. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 58(5), 1887-1895. doi:10.1109/tie.2010.2054056Mazumder, S. K. (2003). A novel discrete control strategy for independent stabilization of parallel three-phase boost converters by combining space-vector modulation with variable-structure control. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 18(4), 1070-1083. doi:10.1109/tpel.2003.813770Ching-Tsai Pan, & Yi-Hung Liao. (2008). Modeling and Control of Circulating Currents for Parallel Three-Phase Boost Rectifiers With Different Load Sharing. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 55(7), 2776-2785. doi:10.1109/tie.2008.925647Ogasawara, S., Takagaki, J., Akagi, H., & Nabae, A. (1992). A novel control scheme of a parallel current-controlled PWM inverter. IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, 28(5), 1023-1030. doi:10.1109/28.158825Figueres, E., Garcera, G., Sandia, J., Gonzalez-Espin, F., & Rubio, J. C. (2009). Sensitivity Study of the Dynamics of Three-Phase Photovoltaic Inverters With an LCL Grid Filter. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 56(3), 706-717. doi:10.1109/tie.2008.2010175Mohd, A., Ortjohann, E., Hamsic, N., Sinsukthavorn, W., Lingemann, M., Schmelter, A., & Morton, D. (2010). Control strategy and space vector modulation for three-leg four-wire voltage source inverters under unbalanced load conditions. IET Power Electronics, 3(3), 323. doi:10.1049/iet-pel.2008.0281Albatran, S., Fu, Y., Albanna, A., Schrader, R., & Mazzola, M. (2013). Hybrid 2D-3D Space Vector Modulation Voltage Control Algorithm for Three Phase Inverters. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, 4(3), 734-744. doi:10.1109/tste.2013.224568

New formats for computing with real-numbers under round-to-nearest

An edited version of this work was accepted in IEEE Transactions on computers, DOI 10.1109/TC.2015.2479623In this paper, a new family of formats to deal with real number for applications requiring round to nearest is proposed. They are based on shifting the set of exactly represented numbers which are used in conventional radix-R number systems. This technique allows performing radix complement and round to nearest without carry propagation with negligible time and hardware cost. Furthermore, the proposed formats have the same storage cost and precision as standard ones. Since conversion to conventional formats simply require appending one extra-digit to the operands, standard circuits may be used to perform arithmetic operations with operands under the new format. We also extend the features of the RN-representation system and carry out a thorough comparison between both representation systems. We conclude that the proposed representation system is generally more adequate to implement systems for computation with real number under round-to-nearest.Ministry of Education and Science of Spain under contracts TIN2013-42253-P

Reducing the loss of information through annealing text distortion

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Granados, A. ;Cebrian, M. ; Camacho, D. ; de Borja Rodriguez, F. "Reducing the Loss of Information through Annealing Text Distortion". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 23, no. 7 pp. 1090 - 1102, July 2011Compression distances have been widely used in knowledge discovery and data mining. They are parameter-free, widely applicable, and very effective in several domains. However, little has been done to interpret their results or to explain their behavior. In this paper, we take a step toward understanding compression distances by performing an experimental evaluation of the impact of several kinds of information distortion on compression-based text clustering. We show how progressively removing words in such a way that the complexity of a document is slowly reduced helps the compression-based text clustering and improves its accuracy. In fact, we show how the nondistorted text clustering can be improved by means of annealing text distortion. The experimental results shown in this paper are consistent using different data sets, and different compression algorithms belonging to the most important compression families: Lempel-Ziv, Statistical and Block-Sorting.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under TIN2010-19872 and TIN2010-19607 projects

Holistic Measures for Evaluating Prediction Models in Smart Grids

The performance of prediction models is often based on "abstract metrics" that estimate the model's ability to limit residual errors between the observed and predicted values. However, meaningful evaluation and selection of prediction models for end-user domains requires holistic and application-sensitive performance measures. Inspired by energy consumption prediction models used in the emerging "big data" domain of Smart Power Grids, we propose a suite of performance measures to rationally compare models along the dimensions of scale independence, reliability, volatility and cost. We include both application independent and dependent measures, the latter parameterized to allow customization by domain experts to fit their scenario. While our measures are generalizable to other domains, we offer an empirical analysis using real energy use data for three Smart Grid applications: planning, customer education and demand response, which are relevant for energy sustainability. Our results underscore the value of the proposed measures to offer a deeper insight into models' behavior and their impact on real applications, which benefit both data mining researchers and practitioners.Comment: 14 Pages, 8 figures, Accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2014. Authors' final version. Copyright transferred to IEE

Bibliometric analysis of 50 years of IEEE Industrial Electronics Society publications

Tertiary education increasingly relies on publications. Arguably, Ph.D.\@ work is also increasingly produced within larger teams or with more extensive collaborations. As way to obtain an objective measure of this trend, this manuscript examines authorship trends in IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE-IES) publications for the 50-year period from 1963 to 2012. We emphasize the trends related to the number of authors and pages per publication. In order to identify several bibliometric indicators, we have analyzed 34,409 entries from IEEE-Xplore digital library for IEEE-IES publications. We provide results for two different sets of publications. Firstly, we present evidence that the number of authors and the number of pages of articles in the IEEE Transactions in Industrial Electronics (TIE) for the 50-year period are increasing per decade an average of +0.42 authors and +0.87 pages, respectively. Secondly, we provide evidence that the number of authors per article in 14 publication venues for the 25-year period from 1988 to 2012 are increasing per decade an average of +0.375 authors.This work was partially supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the framework of the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013, and project UID/EEA/00066/2013

Simultaneous velocity, impact and force control

[EN] In this paper, we propose a control method to achieve three objectives simultaneously: velocity regulation during free motion, impact damping and finally force reference tracking. During impact, the parameters are switched in order to dissipate the energy of the system as fast as possible and the optimal switching criteria are deduced. The possibility of sliding regimes is analysed and the theoretical results are verified in simulations.We would like to thank the R&D&I Linguistic Assistance Office, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), for Granting financial support for the linguistic revision of this paper. This work has been partially funded by the European project MASMICRO (Project number 500095-2), by the projects FEDER-CICYT with reference, DPI2005-08732C02-02 and DP12006-15320-C03-01, of the Ministry of Education and Science as well as by the research Project of the Generalitat Valenciana, GVPRE/2008 20080916.Zotovic Stanisic, R.; Valera Fernández, Á. (2009). Simultaneous velocity, impact and force control. Robotica. 27(7):1039-1048. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263574709005451S1039104827710. Xu Y. , Hollerbach J. M. and Ma D. , “Force and Contact Transient Control Using Nonlinear PD Control,” Proceedings of the 1994 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (1994) pp. 924–930.Brach, R. M., & Goldsmith, W. (1991). Mechanical Impact Dynamics: Rigid Body Collisions. Journal of Engineering for Industry, 113(2), 248-249. doi:10.1115/1.2899694Chiaverini, S., & Sciavicco, L. (1993). The parallel approach to force/position control of robotic manipulators. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 9(4), 361-373. doi:10.1109/70.246048Armstrong, B. S. R., Gutierrez, J. A., Wade, B. A., & Joseph, R. (2006). Stability of Phase-Based Gain Modulation with Designer-Chosen Switch Functions. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 25(8), 781-796. doi:10.1177/0278364906067543Volpe, R., & Khosla, P. (1993). A Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Impact Control for Manipulators. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 12(4), 351-365. doi:10.1177/027836499301200403Impact modeling and control for industrial manipulators. (1998). IEEE Control Systems, 18(4), 65-71. doi:10.1109/37.710879Brogliato, B., Niculescu, S.-I., & Orhant, P. (1997). On the control of finite-dimensional mechanical systems with unilateral constraints. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 42(2), 200-215. doi:10.1109/9.554400Brogliato, B. (1999). Nonsmooth Mechanics. Communications and Control Engineering. doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-0557-2Armstrong, B., & Wade, B. A. (2000). Nonlinear PID Control with Partial State Knowledge: Damping without Derivatives. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 19(8), 715-731. doi:10.1177/02783640022067120Controlling contact transition. (1994). IEEE Control Systems, 14(1), 25-30. doi:10.1109/37.257891Seraji, H. (1998). Nonlinear and Adaptive Control of Force and Compliance in Manipulators. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 17(5), 467-484. doi:10.1177/027836499801700501Volpe, R., & Khosla, P. (1993). A theoretical and experimental investigation of explicit force control strategies for manipulators. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 38(11), 1634-1650. doi:10.1109/9.262033A nonlinear PD controller for force and contact transient control. (1995). IEEE Control Systems, 15(1), 15-21. doi:10.1109/37.341859Seraji, H., & Colbaugh, R. (1997). Force Tracking in Impedance Control. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 16(1), 97-117. doi:10.1177/027836499701600107Armstrong, B., Neevel, D., & Kusik, T. (2001). New results in NPID control: Tracking, integral control, friction compensation and experimental results. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 9(2), 399-406. doi:10.1109/87.91139