Vulnerability and use of Ground and Surface Waters in the Southern Mississippi Valley Region

There is a concern in the Southern Mississippi River Valley of the United States over non-point source pollution of ground and surface waters resulting from activities associated with agricultural production. This agriculturally intensive region consists of two major land resource areas (MLRAs): Southern Mississippi Valley Silty Uplands (MLRA 134) and the Southern Mississippi Valley Alluvium (MLRA 131). Both MLRAs have level to undulating and rolling topography, relatively fertile soils and a climate particularly conducive for row crop production

A Predictive Fuzzy-Neural Autopilot for the Guidance of Small Motorised Marine Craft

This thesis investigates the design and evaluation of a control system, that is able to adapt quickly to changes in environment and steering characteristics. This type of controller is particularly suited for applications with wide-ranging working conditions such as those experienced by small motorised craft. A small motorised craft is assumed to be highly agile and prone to disturbances, being thrown off-course very easily when travelling at high speed 'but rather heavy and sluggish at low speeds. Unlike large vessels, the steering characteristics of the craft will change tremendously with a change in forward speed. Any new design of autopilot needs to be to compensate for these changes in dynamic characteristics to maintain near optimal levels of performance. This study identities the problems that need to be overcome and the variables involved. A self-organising fuzzy logic controller is developed and tested in simulation. This type of controller learns on-line but has certain performance limitations. The major original contribution of this research investigation is the development of an improved self-adaptive and predictive control concept, the Predictive Self-organising Fuzzy Logic Controller (PSoFLC). The novel feature of the control algorithm is that is uses a neural network as a predictive simulator of the boat's future response and this network is then incorporated into the control loop to improve the course changing, as well as course keeping capabilities of the autopilot investigated. The autopilot is tested in simulation to validate the working principle of the concept and to demonstrate the self-tuning of the control parameters. Further work is required to establish the suitability of the proposed novel concept to other control

Fuzzy Rules from Ant-Inspired Computation

Centre for Intelligent Systems and their ApplicationsThis research identifies and investigates major issues in inducing accurate and comprehensible fuzzy rules from datasets.A review of the current literature on fuzzy rulebase induction uncovers two significant issues: A. There is a tradeoff between inducing accurate fuzzy rules and inducing comprehensible fuzzy rules; and, B. A common strategy for the induction of fuzzy rulebases, that of iterative rule learning where the rules are generated one by one and independently of each other, may not be an optimal one.FRANTIC, a system that provides a framework for exploring the claims above is developed. At the core lies a mechanism for creating individual fuzzy rules. This is based on a significantly modified social insect-inspired heuristic for combinatorial optimisation -- Ant Colony Optimisation. The rule discovery mechanism is utilised in two very different strategies for the induction of a complete fuzzy rulebase: 1. The first follows the common iterative rule learning approach for the induction of crisp and fuzzy rules; 2. The second has been designed during this research explicitly for the induction of a fuzzy rulebase, and generates all rules in parallel.Both strategies have been tested on a number of classification problems, including medical diagnosis and industrial plant fault detection, and compared against other crisp or fuzzy induction algorithms that use more well-established approaches. The results challenge statement A above, by presenting evidence to show that one criterion need not be met at the expense of the other. This research also uncovers the cost that is paid -- that of computational expenditure -- and makes concrete suggestions on how this may be resolved.With regards to statement B, until now little or no evidence has been put forward to support or disprove the claim. The results of this research indicate that definite advantages are offered by the second simultaneous strategy, that are not offered by the iterative one. These benefits include improved accuracy over a wide range of values for several key system parameters. However, both approaches also fare well when compared to other learning algorithms. This latter fact is due to the rule discovery mechanism itself -- the adapted Ant Colony Optimisation algorithm -- which affords several additional advantages. These include a simple mechanism within the rule construction process that enables it to cope with datasets that have an imbalanced distribution between the classes, and another for controlling the amount of fit to the training data.In addition, several system parameters have been designed to be semi-autonomous so as to avoid unnecessary user intervention, and in future work the social insect metaphor may be exploited and extended further to enable it to deal with industrial-strength data mining issues involving large volumes of data, and distributed and/or heterogeneous databases

Fuzzy Interpolation Systems and Applications

Fuzzy inference systems provide a simple yet effective solution to complex non-linear problems, which have been applied to numerous real-world applications with great success. However, conventional fuzzy inference systems may suffer from either too sparse, too complex or imbalanced rule bases, given that the data may be unevenly distributed in the problem space regardless of its volume. Fuzzy interpolation addresses this. It enables fuzzy inferences with sparse rule bases when the sparse rule base does not cover a given input, and it simplifies very dense rule bases by approximating certain rules with their neighbouring ones. This chapter systematically reviews different types of fuzzy interpolation approaches and their variations, in terms of both the interpolation mechanism (inference engine) and sparse rule base generation. Representative applications of fuzzy interpolation in the field of control are also revisited in this chapter, which not only validate fuzzy interpolation approaches but also demonstrate its efficacy and potential for wider applications

An extended Takagi–Sugeno–Kang inference system (TSK+) with fuzzy interpolation and its rule base generation

A rule base covering the entire input domain is required for the conventional Mamdani inference and Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) inference. Fuzzy interpolation enhances conventional fuzzy rule inference systems by allowing the use of sparse rule bases by which certain inputs are not covered. Given that almost all of the existing fuzzy interpolation approaches were developed to support the Mamdani inference, this paper presents a novel fuzzy interpolation approach that extends the TSK inference. This paper also proposes a data-driven rule base generation method to support the extended TSK inference system. The proposed system enhances the conventional TSK inference in two ways: 1) workable with incomplete or unevenly distributed data sets or incomplete expert knowledge that entails only a sparse rule base, and 2) simplifying complex fuzzy inference systems by using more compact rule bases for complex systems without the sacrificing of system performance. The experimentation shows that the proposed system overall outperforms the existing approaches with the utilisation of smaller rule bases

Interval Type-2 TSK+ Fuzzy Inference System

Type-2 fuzzy sets and systems can better handle uncertainties compared to its type-1 counterpart, and the widely applied Mamdani and TSK fuzzy inference approaches have been both extended to support interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Fuzzy interpolation enhances the conventional Mamdani and TKS fuzzy inference systems, which not only enables inferences when inputs are not covered by an incomplete or sparse rule base but also helps in system simplification for very complex problems. This paper extends the recently proposed fuzzy interpolation approach TSK+ to allow the utilization of interval type-2 TSK fuzzy rule bases. One illustrative case based on an example problem from the literature demonstrates the working of the proposed system, and the application on the cart centering problem reveals the power of the proposed system. The experimental investigation confirmed that the proposed approach is able to perform fuzzy inferences using either dense or sparse interval type-2 TSK rule bases with promising results generated

Towards sparse rule base generation for fuzzy rule interpolation

Fuzzy inference systems have been successfully applied to many real-world applications. Traditional fuzzy inference systems are only applicable to problems with dense rule bases by which the entire input domain is fully covered, whilst fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) is also able to work with sparse rule bases that may not cover certain observations. Thanks to their abilities to work with fewer rules, FRI approaches have also been utilised to reduce system complexity by removing those rules which can be approximated by their neighbouring ones for complex fuzzy models. A number of important fuzzy rule base generation approaches have been proposed in the literature, but the majority of these only target dense rule bases for traditional fuzzy inference systems. This paper proposes a novel sparse fuzzy rule base generation method to support FRI. The approach first identifies important rules that cannot be accurately approximated by their neighbouring ones to initialise the rule base. Then the raw rule base is optimised by fine tuning the membership functions of the fuzzy sets. Experimentation is conducted to demonstrate the working principles of the proposed system, with results comparable to those of traditional methods

Improvements and critique on Sugeno's and Yasukawa's qualitative modeling

Investigates Sugeno's and Yasukawa's (1993) qualitative fuzzy modeling approach. We propose some easily implementable solutions for the unclear details of the original paper, such as trapezoid approximation of membership functions, rule creation from sample data points, and selection of important variables. We further suggest an improved parameter identification algorithm to be applied instead of the original one. These details are crucial concerning the method's performance as it is shown in a comparative analysis and helps to improve the accuracy of the built-up model. Finally, we propose a possible further rule base reduction which can be applied successfully in certain cases. This improvement reduces the time requirement of the method by up to 16% in our experiments