2D multi-objective placement algorithm for free-form components

This article presents a generic method to solve 2D multi-objective placement problem for free-form components. The proposed method is a relaxed placement technique combined with an hybrid algorithm based on a genetic algorithm and a separation algorithm. The genetic algorithm is used as a global optimizer and is in charge of efficiently exploring the search space. The separation algorithm is used to legalize solutions proposed by the global optimizer, so that placement constraints are satisfied. A test case illustrates the application of the proposed method. Extensions for solving the 3D problem are given at the end of the article.Comment: ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, San Diego : United States (2009

Invariance and control of autonomous vehicles

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Optimal uncertainty quantification for legacy data observations of Lipschitz functions

We consider the problem of providing optimal uncertainty quantification (UQ) --- and hence rigorous certification --- for partially-observed functions. We present a UQ framework within which the observations may be small or large in number, and need not carry information about the probability distribution of the system in operation. The UQ objectives are posed as optimization problems, the solutions of which are optimal bounds on the quantities of interest; we consider two typical settings, namely parameter sensitivities (McDiarmid diameters) and output deviation (or failure) probabilities. The solutions of these optimization problems depend non-trivially (even non-monotonically and discontinuously) upon the specified legacy data. Furthermore, the extreme values are often determined by only a few members of the data set; in our principal physically-motivated example, the bounds are determined by just 2 out of 32 data points, and the remainder carry no information and could be neglected without changing the final answer. We propose an analogue of the simplex algorithm from linear programming that uses these observations to offer efficient and rigorous UQ for high-dimensional systems with high-cardinality legacy data. These findings suggest natural methods for selecting optimal (maximally informative) next experiments.Comment: 38 page

Constructive procedures to solve 2-dimensional bin packing problems with irregular pieces and guillotine cuts

This paper presents an approach for solving a new real problem in cutting and packing. At its core is an innovative mixed integer programme model that places irregular pieces and defines guillotine cuts. The two-dimensional irregular shape bin packing problem with guillotine constraints arises in the glass cutting industry, for example, the cutting of glass for conservatories. Almost all cutting and packing problems that include guillotine cuts deal with rectangles only, where all cuts are orthogonal to the edges of the stock sheet and a maximum of two angles of rotation are permitted. The literature tackling packing problems with irregular shapes largely focuses on strip packing i.e. minimizing the length of a single fixed width stock sheet, and does not consider guillotine cuts. Hence, this problem combines the challenges of tackling the complexity of packing irregular pieces with free rotation, guaranteeing guillotine cuts that are not always orthogonal to the edges of the stock sheet, and allocating pieces to bins. To our knowledge only one other recent paper tackles this problem. We present a hybrid algorithm that is a constructive heuristic that determines the relative position of pieces in the bin and guillotine constraints via a mixed integer programme model. We investigate two approaches for allocating guillotine cuts at the same time as determining the placement of the piece, and a two phase approach that delays the allocation of cuts to provide flexibility in space usage. Finally we describe an improvement procedure that is applied to each bin before it is closed. This approach improves on the results of the only other publication on this problem, and gives competitive results for the classic rectangle bin packing problem with guillotine constraint

The Limited Workspace Model for Geometric Algorithms

Space usage has been a concern since the very early days of algorithm design. The increased availability of devices with limited memory or power supply – such as smartphones, drones, or small sensors – as well as the proliferation of new storage media for which write access is comparatively slow and may have negative effects on the lifetime – such as flash drives – have led to renewed interest in the subject. As a result, the design of algorithms for the limited workspace model has seen a significant rise in popularity in computational geometry over the last decade. In this setting, we typically have a large amount of data that needs to be processed. Although we may access the data in any way and as often as we like, write-access to the main storage is limited and/or slow. Thus, we opt to use only higher level memory for intermediate data (e.g., CPU registers). Since the application areas of the devices mentioned above – sensors, smartphones, and drones – often handle a large amount of geographic (i.e., geometric) data, the scenario becomes particularly interesting from the viewpoint of computational geometry. Motivated by these considerations, we investigate geometric problems in the limited workspace model. In this model the input of size n resides in read-only memory, an algorithm may use a workspace of size s = {1, . . . , n} to read and write the intermediate data during its execution, and it reports the output to a write-only stream. The goal is to design algorithms whose running time decreases as s increases, which provides a time-space trade-off. In this thesis, we consider three fundamental geometric problems, namely, computing different types of Voronoi diagrams of a planar point set, computing the Euclidean minimum spanning tree of a planar point set, and computing the k-visibility region of a point inside a polygonal domain. Using several innovative techniques, we either achieve the first time-space trade-offs for those problems or improve the previous results.Der Speicherplatzbedarf ist seit den Anfängen des Algorithmenentwurfs von Interesse. Die erhöhte Verfügbarkeit von Geräten mit begrenztem Speicherplatz oder begrenzter Stromversorgung – wie Smartphones, Drohnen oder kleine Sensoren – sowie die Verbreitung neuer Speichermedien, bei denen der Schreibzugriff vergleichsweise langsam ist und negative Auswirkungen auf die Lebensdauer haben kann – wie beispielsweise Flash-Laufwerken – haben zu erneuter Aufmerksamkeit für dieses Thema geführt. In der Folge hat der Entwurf von Algorithmen für das Limited Workspace Model (Modell mit begrenztem Arbeitsspeicher) in den letzten zehn Jahren einen signifikanten Anstieg an Popularität in der algorithmischen Geometrie erfahren. In diesem Setting haben wir in der Regel eine große Menge an Daten, die verarbeitet werden müssen. Obwohl wir auf die Daten beliebig oft und in beliebiger Weise zugreifen können, ist der Schreibzugriff auf den Hauptspeicher begrenzt und/oder langsam. Zwischenergebnisse werden daher nur in einem kleineren, übergeordneten Speicher (z. B. CPU-Register) abgelegt. Da die Anwendungsbereiche der oben genannten Geräte – Sensoren, Smartphones und Drohnen – oft mit einer großen Menge an geografischen (d. h., geometrischen) Daten umgehen, ist dieses Szenario aus Sicht der algorithmischen Geometrie besonders interessant. Motiviert durch diese Überlegungen haben wir geometrische Probleme im Limited Workspace Model untersucht. In diesem Modell befindet sich die Eingabe der Größe n in einem schreibgeschützten Speicher, ein Algorithmus kann einen Arbeitsspeicher der Größe s = {1, . . . , n} verwenden, um die Zwischendaten während der Ausführung zu lesen und zu schreiben. Die Ausgabe sendet er an einen lesegeschützten Stream. Ziel ist es, Algorithmen zu entwickeln, deren Laufzeit mit zunehmender Verfügbarkeit an Arbeitsspeicher abnimmt, was einen Time-Space Trade-Off (Laufzeit-Speicher-Abwägung) darstellt. In dieser Arbeit betrachten wir drei grundlegende geometrische Probleme, nämlich die Berechnung verschiedener Arten von Voronoi-Diagrammen einer Punktmenge in der Ebene, die Berechnung des euklidischen minimalen Spannbaums einer ebenen Punktmenge und die Bestimmung der k-Sichtbarkeitsregion (k-visibility region) eines Punkts innerhalb eines polygonalen Gebiets. Mit mehreren innovativen Techniken entwickeln wir entweder die ersten Time-Space Trade-Offs für diese Probleme oder verbessern die bisherigen Ergebnisse

3D oceanographic data compression using 3D-ODETLAP

This paper describes a 3D environmental data compression technique for oceanographic datasets. With proper point selection, our method approximates uncompressed marine data using an over-determined system of linear equations based on, but essentially different from, the Laplacian partial differential equation. Then this approximation is refined via an error metric. These two steps work alternatively until a predefined satisfying approximation is found. Using several different datasets and metrics, we demonstrate that our method has an excellent compression ratio. To further evaluate our method, we compare it with 3D-SPIHT. 3D-ODETLAP averages 20% better compression than 3D-SPIHT on our eight test datasets, from World Ocean Atlas 2005. Our method provides up to approximately six times better compression on datasets with relatively small variance. Meanwhile, with the same approximate mean error, we demonstrate a significantly smaller maximum error compared to 3D-SPIHT and provide a feature to keep the maximum error under a user-defined limit