150,771 research outputs found
Development of Economic Water Usage Sensor and Cyber-Physical Systems Co-Simulation Platform for Home Energy Saving
In this thesis, two Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) approaches were considered to reduce residential building energy consumption. First, a flow sensor was developed for residential gas and electric storage water heaters. The sensor utilizes unique temperature changes of tank inlet and outlet pipes upon water draw to provide occupant hot water usage. Post processing of measured pipe temperature data was able to detect water draw events. Conservation of energy was applied to heater pipes to determine relative internal water flow rate based on transient temperature measurements. Correlations between calculated flow and actual flow were significant at a 95% confidence level. Using this methodology, a CPS water heater controller can activate existing residential storage water heaters according to occupant hot water demand. The second CPS approach integrated an open-source building simulation tool, EnergyPlus, into a CPS simulation platform developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST platform utilizes the High Level Architecture (HLA) co-simulation protocol for logical timing control and data communication. By modifying existing EnergyPlus co-simulation capabilities, NIST’s open-source platform was able to execute an uninterrupted simulation between a residential house in EnergyPlus and an externally connected thermostat controller. The developed EnergyPlus wrapper for HLA co-simulation can allow active replacement of traditional real-time data collection for building CPS development. As such, occupant sensors and simple home CPS product can allow greater residential participation in energy saving practices, saving up to 33% on home energy consumption nationally
System Support for Managing Invalid Bindings
Context-aware adaptation is a central aspect of pervasive computing
applications, enabling them to adapt and perform tasks based on contextual
information. One of the aspects of context-aware adaptation is reconfiguration
in which bindings are created between application component and remote services
in order to realize new behaviour in response to contextual information.
Various research efforts provide reconfiguration support and allow the
development of adaptive context-aware applications from high-level
specifications, but don't consider failure conditions that might arise during
execution of such applications, making bindings between application and remote
services invalid. To this end, we propose and implement our design approach to
reconfiguration to manage invalid bindings. The development and modification of
adaptive context-aware applications is a complex task, and an issue of an
invalidity of bindings further complicates development efforts. To reduce the
development efforts, our approach provides an application-transparent solution
where the issue of the invalidity of bindings is handled by our system,
Policy-Based Contextual Reconfiguration and Adaptation (PCRA), not by an
application developer. In this paper, we present and describe our approach to
managing invalid bindings and compare it with other approaches to this problem.
We also provide performance evaluation of our approach
Direct tunneling through high- amorphous HfO: effects of chemical modification
We report first principles modeling of quantum tunneling through amorphous
HfO dielectric layer of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) nanostructures in
the form of n-Si/HfO/Al. In particular we predict that chemically modifying
the amorphous HfO barrier by doping N and Al atoms in the middle region -
far from the two interfaces of the MOS structure, can reduce the
gate-to-channel tunnel leakage by more than one order of magnitude. Several
other types of modification are found to enhance tunneling or induce
substantial band bending in the Si, both are not desired from leakage point of
view. By analyzing transmission coefficients and projected density of states,
the microscopic physics of electron traversing the tunnel barrier with or
without impurity atoms in the high- dielectric is revealed.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Drugs for exceptionally rare diseases: a commentary on Hughes et al
Recently in this journal, Hughes and colleagues discussed special funding status to ultra-orphan drugs. They concluded that there should be a uniform policy for the provision of orphan drugs across Europe; that complete restriction was impractical, and that UK policy should aspire to the values of the EU directive on orphan drugs. We critically assess these arguments, demonstrating that they failed to justify special status for treatments for rare diseases
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
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