89,945 research outputs found
Don't Treat the Symptom, Find the Cause! Efficient Artificial-Intelligence Methods for (Interactive) Debugging
In the modern world, we are permanently using, leveraging, interacting with,
and relying upon systems of ever higher sophistication, ranging from our cars,
recommender systems in e-commerce, and networks when we go online, to
integrated circuits when using our PCs and smartphones, the power grid to
ensure our energy supply, security-critical software when accessing our bank
accounts, and spreadsheets for financial planning and decision making. The
complexity of these systems coupled with our high dependency on them implies
both a non-negligible likelihood of system failures, and a high potential that
such failures have significant negative effects on our everyday life. For that
reason, it is a vital requirement to keep the harm of emerging failures to a
minimum, which means minimizing the system downtime as well as the cost of
system repair. This is where model-based diagnosis comes into play.
Model-based diagnosis is a principled, domain-independent approach that can
be generally applied to troubleshoot systems of a wide variety of types,
including all the ones mentioned above, and many more. It exploits and
orchestrates i.a. techniques for knowledge representation, automated reasoning,
heuristic problem solving, intelligent search, optimization, stochastics,
statistics, decision making under uncertainty, machine learning, as well as
calculus, combinatorics and set theory to detect, localize, and fix faults in
abnormally behaving systems.
In this thesis, we will give an introduction to the topic of model-based
diagnosis, point out the major challenges in the field, and discuss a selection
of approaches from our research addressing these issues.Comment: Habilitation Thesi
Developing Hybrid Machine Learning Models to Assign Health Score to Railcar Fleets for Optimal Decision Making
A large amount of data is generated during the operation of a railcar fleet,
which can easily lead to dimensional disaster and reduce the resiliency of the
railcar network. To solve these issues and offer predictive maintenance, this
research introduces a hybrid fault diagnosis expert system method that combines
density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and
principal component analysis (PCA). Firstly, the DBSCAN method is used to
cluster categorical data that are similar to one another within the same group.
Secondly, PCA algorithm is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the data and
eliminate redundancy in order to improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis.
Finally, we explain the engineered features and evaluate the selected models by
using the Gain Chart and Area Under Curve (AUC) metrics. We use the hybrid
expert system model to enhance maintenance planning decisions by assigning a
health score to the railcar system of the North American Railcar Owner (NARO).
According to the experimental results, our expert model can detect 96.4% of
failures within 50% of the sample. This suggests that our method is effective
at diagnosing failures in railcars fleet.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
Sensor placement for fault location identification in water networks: A minimum test cover approach
This paper focuses on the optimal sensor placement problem for the
identification of pipe failure locations in large-scale urban water systems.
The problem involves selecting the minimum number of sensors such that every
pipe failure can be uniquely localized. This problem can be viewed as a minimum
test cover (MTC) problem, which is NP-hard. We consider two approaches to
obtain approximate solutions to this problem. In the first approach, we
transform the MTC problem to a minimum set cover (MSC) problem and use the
greedy algorithm that exploits the submodularity property of the MSC problem to
compute the solution to the MTC problem. In the second approach, we develop a
new \textit{augmented greedy} algorithm for solving the MTC problem. This
approach does not require the transformation of the MTC to MSC. Our augmented
greedy algorithm provides in a significant computational improvement while
guaranteeing the same approximation ratio as the first approach. We propose
several metrics to evaluate the performance of the sensor placement designs.
Finally, we present detailed computational experiments for a number of real
water distribution networks
On the role of Prognostics and Health Management in advanced maintenance systems
The advanced use of the Information and Communication Technologies is evolving the way that systems are managed and maintained. A great number of techniques and methods have emerged in the light of these advances allowing to have an accurate and knowledge about the systems’ condition evolution and remaining useful life. The advances are recognized as outcomes of an innovative discipline, nowadays discussed under the term of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). In order to analyze how maintenance will change by using PHM, a conceptual model is proposed built upon three views. The model highlights: (i) how PHM may impact the definition of maintenance policies; (ii) how PHM fits within the Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) and (iii) how PHM can be integrated into Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) programs. The conceptual model is the research finding of this review note and helps to discuss the role of PHM in advanced maintenance systems.EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020, 645733 - Sustain-Owner - H2020-MSCA-RISE-201
A fault-tolerant intelligent robotic control system
This paper describes the concept, design, and features of a fault-tolerant intelligent robotic control system being developed for space and commercial applications that require high dependability. The comprehensive strategy integrates system level hardware/software fault tolerance with task level handling of uncertainties and unexpected events for robotic control. The underlying architecture for system level fault tolerance is the distributed recovery block which protects against application software, system software, hardware, and network failures. Task level fault tolerance provisions are implemented in a knowledge-based system which utilizes advanced automation techniques such as rule-based and model-based reasoning to monitor, diagnose, and recover from unexpected events. The two level design provides tolerance of two or more faults occurring serially at any level of command, control, sensing, or actuation. The potential benefits of such a fault tolerant robotic control system include: (1) a minimized potential for damage to humans, the work site, and the robot itself; (2) continuous operation with a minimum of uncommanded motion in the presence of failures; and (3) more reliable autonomous operation providing increased efficiency in the execution of robotic tasks and decreased demand on human operators for controlling and monitoring the robotic servicing routines
Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration
Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and
non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs.
Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs
On Repairing Reasoning Reversals via Representational Refinements
Representation is a fluent. A mismatch between the real world and an agent’s representation of it can be signalled by unexpected failures (or successes) of the agent’s reasoning. The ‘real world ’ may include the ontologies of other agents. Such mismatches can be repaired by refining or abstracting an agent’s ontology. These refinements or abstractions may not be limited to changes of belief, but may also change the signature of the agent’s ontology. We describe the implementation and successful evaluation of these ideas in the ORS system. ORS diagnoses failures in plan execution and then repairs the faulty ontologies. Our automated approach to dynamic ontology repair has been designed specifically to address real issues in multi-agent systems, for instance, as envisaged in the Semantic Web
Reset-free Trial-and-Error Learning for Robot Damage Recovery
The high probability of hardware failures prevents many advanced robots
(e.g., legged robots) from being confidently deployed in real-world situations
(e.g., post-disaster rescue). Instead of attempting to diagnose the failures,
robots could adapt by trial-and-error in order to be able to complete their
tasks. In this situation, damage recovery can be seen as a Reinforcement
Learning (RL) problem. However, the best RL algorithms for robotics require the
robot and the environment to be reset to an initial state after each episode,
that is, the robot is not learning autonomously. In addition, most of the RL
methods for robotics do not scale well with complex robots (e.g., walking
robots) and either cannot be used at all or take too long to converge to a
solution (e.g., hours of learning). In this paper, we introduce a novel
learning algorithm called "Reset-free Trial-and-Error" (RTE) that (1) breaks
the complexity by pre-generating hundreds of possible behaviors with a dynamics
simulator of the intact robot, and (2) allows complex robots to quickly recover
from damage while completing their tasks and taking the environment into
account. We evaluate our algorithm on a simulated wheeled robot, a simulated
six-legged robot, and a real six-legged walking robot that are damaged in
several ways (e.g., a missing leg, a shortened leg, faulty motor, etc.) and
whose objective is to reach a sequence of targets in an arena. Our experiments
show that the robots can recover most of their locomotion abilities in an
environment with obstacles, and without any human intervention.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables, 6 pseudocodes/algorithms, video at
https://youtu.be/IqtyHFrb3BU, code at
https://github.com/resibots/chatzilygeroudis_2018_rt
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