Failure Prognosis of Wind Turbine Components

Wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in the World\u27s energy supply mix. In North America, many utility-scale wind turbines are approaching, or are beyond the half-way point of their originally anticipated lifespan. Accurate estimation of the times to failure of major turbine components can provide wind farm owners insight into how to optimize the life and value of their farm assets. This dissertation deals with fault detection and failure prognosis of critical wind turbine sub-assemblies, including generators, blades, and bearings based on data-driven approaches. The main aim of the data-driven methods is to utilize measurement data from the system and forecast the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of faulty components accurately and efficiently. The main contributions of this dissertation are in the application of ALTA lifetime analysis to help illustrate a possible relationship between varying loads and generators reliability, a wavelet-based Probability Density Function (PDF) to effectively detecting incipient wind turbine blade failure, an adaptive Bayesian algorithm for modeling the uncertainty inherent in the bearings RUL prediction horizon, and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for characterizing the bearing damage progression based on varying operating states to mimic a real condition in which wind turbines operate and to recognize that the damage progression is a function of the stress applied to each component using data from historical failures across three different Canadian wind farms

New Methods for Network Traffic Anomaly Detection

In this thesis we examine the efficacy of applying outlier detection techniques to understand the behaviour of anomalies in communication network traffic. We have identified several shortcomings. Our most finding is that known techniques either focus on characterizing the spatial or temporal behaviour of traffic but rarely both. For example DoS attacks are anomalies which violate temporal patterns while port scans violate the spatial equilibrium of network traffic. To address this observed weakness we have designed a new method for outlier detection based spectral decomposition of the Hankel matrix. The Hankel matrix is spatio-temporal correlation matrix and has been used in many other domains including climate data analysis and econometrics. Using our approach we can seamlessly integrate the discovery of both spatial and temporal anomalies. Comparison with other state of the art methods in the networks community confirms that our approach can discover both DoS and port scan attacks. The spectral decomposition of the Hankel matrix is closely tied to the problem of inference in Linear Dynamical Systems (LDS). We introduce a new problem, the Online Selective Anomaly Detection (OSAD) problem, to model the situation where the objective is to report new anomalies in the system and suppress know faults. For example, in the network setting an operator may be interested in triggering an alarm for malicious attacks but not on faults caused by equipment failure. In order to solve OSAD we combine techniques from machine learning and control theory in a unique fashion. Machine Learning ideas are used to learn the parameters of an underlying data generating system. Control theory techniques are used to model the feedback and modify the residual generated by the data generating state model. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets confirm that the OSAD problem captures a general scenario and tightly integrates machine learning and control theory to solve a practical problem

A new recursive dynamic factor analysis for point and interval forecast of electricity price

published_or_final_versio

A survey on pseudonym changing strategies for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The initial phase of the deployment of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) has begun and many research challenges still need to be addressed. Location privacy continues to be in the top of these challenges. Indeed, both of academia and industry agreed to apply the pseudonym changing approach as a solution to protect the location privacy of VANETs'users. However, due to the pseudonyms linking attack, a simple changing of pseudonym shown to be inefficient to provide the required protection. For this reason, many pseudonym changing strategies have been suggested to provide an effective pseudonym changing. Unfortunately, the development of an effective pseudonym changing strategy for VANETs is still an open issue. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and classification of pseudonym changing strategies. We then discuss and compare them with respect to some relevant criteria. Finally, we highlight some current researches, and open issues and give some future directions

IoT-Based Cyber-Physical Communication Architecture: Challenges and Research Directions

In order to provide intelligent services, the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates millions of smart cyber-physical devices to be enabled with network connectivity to sense, collect, process, and exchange information. Unfortunately, the traditional communication infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and link failures, so it is a challenging task for the IoT to explore these applications. In order to begin research and contribute into the IoT-based cyber-physical digital world, one will need to know the technical challenges and research opportunities. In this study, several key technical challenges and requirements for the IoT communication systems are identified. Basically, privacy, security, intelligent sensors/actuators design, low cost and complexity, universal antenna design, and friendly smart cyber-physical system design are the main challenges for the IoT implementation. Finally, the authors present a diverse set of cyber-physical communication system challenges such as practical implementation, distributed state estimation, real-time data collection, and system identification, which are the major issues require to be addressed in implementing an efficient and effective IoT communication system

The importance of selecting the optimal number of principal components for fault detection using principal component analysis

Includes summary.Includes bibliographical references.Fault detection and isolation are the two fundamental building blocks of process monitoring. Accurate and efficient process monitoring increases plant availability and utilization. Principal component analysis is one of the statistical techniques that are used for fault detection. Determination of the number of PCs to be retained plays a big role in detecting a fault using the PCA technique. In this dissertation focus has been drawn on the methods of determining the number of PCs to be retained for accurate and effective fault detection in a laboratory thermal system. SNR method of determining number of PCs, which is a relatively recent method, has been compared to two commonly used methods for the same, the CPV and the scree test methods

Distance-based sensor node localization by using ultrasound, RSSI and ultra-wideband - A comparision between the techniques

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most important topics in wireless communication during the last decade. In a wireless sensor system, sensors are spread over a region to build a sensor network and the sensors in a region co-operate to each other to sense, process, filter and routing. Sensor Positioning is a fundamental and crucial issue for sensor network operation and management. WSNs have so many applications in different areas such as health-care, monitoring and control, rescuing and military; they all depend on nodes being able to accurately determine their locations. This master’s thesis is focused on distance-based sensor node localization techniques; Received signal strength indicator, ultrasound and ultra-wideband. Characteristics and factors which affect these distance estimation techniques are analyzed theoretically and through simulation the quality of these techniques are compared in different scenarios. MDS, a centralized algorithm is used for solving the coordinates. It is a set of data analysis techniques that display the structure of distance-like data as a geometrical picture. Centralized and distributed implementations of MDS are also discussed. All simulations and computations in this thesis are done in Matlab. Virtual WSN is simulated on Sensorviz. Sensorviz is a simulation and visualization tool written by Andreas Savvides.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Distance-based sensor node localization by using ultrasound, RSSI and ultra-wideband - A comparision between the techniques

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most important topics in wireless communication during the last decade. In a wireless sensor system, sensors are spread over a region to build a sensor network and the sensors in a region co-operate to each other to sense, process, filter and routing. Sensor Positioning is a fundamental and crucial issue for sensor network operation and management. WSNs have so many applications in different areas such as health-care, monitoring and control, rescuing and military; they all depend on nodes being able to accurately determine their locations. This master’s thesis is focused on distance-based sensor node localization techniques; Received signal strength indicator, ultrasound and ultra-wideband. Characteristics and factors which affect these distance estimation techniques are analyzed theoretically and through simulation the quality of these techniques are compared in different scenarios. MDS, a centralized algorithm is used for solving the coordinates. It is a set of data analysis techniques that display the structure of distance-like data as a geometrical picture. Centralized and distributed implementations of MDS are also discussed. All simulations and computations in this thesis are done in Matlab. Virtual WSN is simulated on Sensorviz. Sensorviz is a simulation and visualization tool written by Andreas Savvides.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Statistical analysis of network traffic for anomaly detection and quality of service provisioning

Network-wide traffic analysis and monitoring in large-scale networks is a challenging and expensive task. In this thesis work we have proposed to analyze the traffic of a large-scale IP network from aggregated traffic measurements, reducing measurement overheads and simplifying implementation issues. We have provided contributions in three different networking fields related to network-wide traffic analysis and monitoring in large-scale IP networks. The first contribution regards Traffic Matrix (TM) modeling and estimation, where we have proposed new statistical models and new estimation methods to analyze the Origin-Destination (OD) flows of a large-scale TM from easily available link traffic measurements. The second contribution regards the detection and localization of volume anomalies in the TM, where we have introduced novel methods with solid optimality properties that outperform current well-known techniques for network-wide anomaly detection proposed so far in the literature. The last contribution regards the optimization of the routing configuration in large-scale IP networks, particularly when the traffic is highly variable and difficult to predict. Using the notions of Robust Routing Optimization we have proposed new approaches for Quality of Service provisioning under highly variable and uncertain traffic scenarios. In order to provide strong evidence on the relevance of our contributions, all the methods proposed in this thesis work were validated using real traffic data from different operational networks. Additionally, their performance was compared against well-known works in each field, showing outperforming results in most cases. Taking together the ensemble of developed TM models, the optimal network-wide anomaly detection and localization methods, and the routing optimization algorithms, this thesis work offers a complete solution for network operators to efficiently monitor large-scale IP networks from aggregated traffic measurements and to provide accurate QoS-based performance, even in the event of volume traffic anomalie

A WiFi RSSI Ranking Fingerprint Positioning System and Its Application to Indoor Activities of Daily Living Recognition

WiFi RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicators) seem to be the basis of the most widely used method for Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) driven by the growth of deployed WiFi Access Points (AP), especially within urban areas. However, there are still several challenges to be tackled: its accuracy is often 2-3m, it’s prone to interference and attenuation effects, and the diversity of Radio Frequency (RF) receivers, e.g., smartphones, affects its accuracy. RSSI fingerprinting can be used to mitigate against interference and attenuation effects. In this paper, we present a novel, more accurate, RSSI ranking-based method that consists of three parts. First, an AP selection based on a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to reduce the positioning computational cost and increase the positioning accuracy. Second, Kendall Tau Correlation Coefficient (KTCC) and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are applied to extract the ranking features for estimating locations. Third, an Extended Kalman filter (EKF) is then used to smooth the estimated sequential locations before Multi-Dimensional Dynamic Time Warping (MD-DTW) is used to match similar trajectories or paths representing ADLs from different or the same users that vary in time and space In order to leverage and evaluate our IPS system, we also used it to recognise Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in an office like environment. It was able to achieve an average positioning accuracy of 1.42m and a 79.5% recognition accuracy for 9 location-driven activities