Novel strategies for process control based on hybrid semi-parametric mathematical systems

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Química. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Investigating biocomplexity through the agent-based paradigm.

Capturing the dynamism that pervades biological systems requires a computational approach that can accommodate both the continuous features of the system environment as well as the flexible and heterogeneous nature of component interactions. This presents a serious challenge for the more traditional mathematical approaches that assume component homogeneity to relate system observables using mathematical equations. While the homogeneity condition does not lead to loss of accuracy while simulating various continua, it fails to offer detailed solutions when applied to systems with dynamically interacting heterogeneous components. As the functionality and architecture of most biological systems is a product of multi-faceted individual interactions at the sub-system level, continuum models rarely offer much beyond qualitative similarity. Agent-based modelling is a class of algorithmic computational approaches that rely on interactions between Turing-complete finite-state machines--or agents--to simulate, from the bottom-up, macroscopic properties of a system. In recognizing the heterogeneity condition, they offer suitable ontologies to the system components being modelled, thereby succeeding where their continuum counterparts tend to struggle. Furthermore, being inherently hierarchical, they are quite amenable to coupling with other computational paradigms. The integration of any agent-based framework with continuum models is arguably the most elegant and precise way of representing biological systems. Although in its nascence, agent-based modelling has been utilized to model biological complexity across a broad range of biological scales (from cells to societies). In this article, we explore the reasons that make agent-based modelling the most precise approach to model biological systems that tend to be non-linear and complex

Taxonomic evidence applying intelligent information algorithm and the principle of maximum entropy: the case of asteroids families

The Numeric Taxonomy aims to group operational taxonomic units in clusters (OTUs or taxons or taxa), using the denominated structure analysis by means of numeric methods. These clusters that constitute families are the purpose of this series of projects and they emerge of the structural analysis, of their phenotypical characteristic, exhibiting the relationships in terms of grades of similarity of the OTUs, employing tools such as i) the Euclidean distance and ii) nearest neighbor techniques. Thus taxonomic evidence is gathered so as to quantify the similarity for each pair of OTUs (pair-group method) obtained from the basic data matrix and in this way the significant concept of spectrum of the OTUs is introduced, being based the same one on the state of their characters. A new taxonomic criterion is thereby formulated and a new approach to Computational Taxonomy is presented, that has been already employed with reference to Data Mining, when apply of Machine Learning techniques, in particular to the C4.5 algorithms, created by Quinlan, the degree of efficiency achieved by the TDIDT family´s algorithms when are generating valid models of the data in classification problems with the Gain of Entropy through Maximum Entropy Principle.Fil: Perichinsky, Gregorio. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Jiménez Rey, Elizabeth Miriam. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Grossi, María Delia. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Vallejos, Félix Anibal. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas; ArgentinaFil: Servetto, Arturo Carlos. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Orellana, Rosa Beatriz. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Plastino, Ángel Luis. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Departamento de Física; Argentin

Application of Computational Intelligence Techniques to Process Industry Problems

In the last two decades there has been a large progress in the computational intelligence research field. The fruits of the effort spent on the research in the discussed field are powerful techniques for pattern recognition, data mining, data modelling, etc. These techniques achieve high performance on traditional data sets like the UCI machine learning database. Unfortunately, this kind of data sources usually represent clean data without any problems like data outliers, missing values, feature co-linearity, etc. common to real-life industrial data. The presence of faulty data samples can have very harmful effects on the models, for example if presented during the training of the models, it can either cause sub-optimal performance of the trained model or in the worst case destroy the so far learnt knowledge of the model. For these reasons the application of present modelling techniques to industrial problems has developed into a research field on its own. Based on the discussion of the properties and issues of the data and the state-of-the-art modelling techniques in the process industry, in this paper a novel unified approach to the development of predictive models in the process industry is presented

Computational neural learning formalisms for manipulator inverse kinematics

An efficient, adaptive neural learning paradigm for addressing the inverse kinematics of redundant manipulators is presented. The proposed methodology exploits the infinite local stability of terminal attractors - a new class of mathematical constructs which provide unique information processing capabilities to artificial neural systems. For robotic applications, synaptic elements of such networks can rapidly acquire the kinematic invariances embedded within the presented samples. Subsequently, joint-space configurations, required to follow arbitrary end-effector trajectories, can readily be computed. In a significant departure from prior neuromorphic learning algorithms, this methodology provides mechanisms for incorporating an in-training skew to handle kinematics and environmental constraints