A hierarchical Mamdani-type fuzzy modelling approach with new training data selection and multi-objective optimisation mechanisms: A special application for the prediction of mechanical properties of alloy steels

In this paper, a systematic data-driven fuzzy modelling methodology is proposed, which allows to construct Mamdani fuzzy models considering both accuracy (precision) and transparency (interpretability) of fuzzy systems. The new methodology employs a fast hierarchical clustering algorithm to generate an initial fuzzy model efficiently; a training data selection mechanism is developed to identify appropriate and efficient data as learning samples; a high-performance Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) based multi-objective optimisation mechanism is developed to further improve the fuzzy model in terms of both the structure and the parameters; and a new tolerance analysis method is proposed to derive the confidence bands relating to the final elicited models. This proposed modelling approach is evaluated using two benchmark problems and is shown to outperform other modelling approaches. Furthermore, the proposed approach is successfully applied to complex high-dimensional modelling problems for manufacturing of alloy steels, using ‘real’ industrial data. These problems concern the prediction of the mechanical properties of alloy steels by correlating them with the heat treatment process conditions as well as the weight percentages of the chemical compositions

Multiobjective programming for type-2 hierarchical fuzzy inference trees

This paper proposes a design of hierarchical fuzzy inference tree (HFIT). An HFIT produces an optimum tree-like structure. Specifically, a natural hierarchical structure that accommodates simplicity by combining several low-dimensional fuzzy inference systems (FISs). Such a natural hierarchical structure provides a high degree of approximation accuracy. The construction of HFIT takes place in two phases. Firstly, a nondominated sorting based multiobjective genetic programming (MOGP) is applied to obtain a simple tree structure (low model’s complexity) with a high accuracy. Secondly, the differential evolution algorithm is applied to optimize the obtained tree’s parameters. In the obtained tree, each node has a different input’s combination, where the evolutionary process governs the input’s combination. Hence, HFIT nodes are heterogeneous in nature, which leads to a high diversity among the rules generated by the HFIT. Additionally, the HFIT provides an automatic feature selection because it uses MOGP for the tree’s structural optimization that accept inputs only relevant to the knowledge contained in data. The HFIT was studied in the context of both type-1 and type-2 FISs, and its performance was evaluated through six application problems. Moreover, the proposed multiobjective HFIT was compared both theoretically and empirically with recently proposed FISs methods from the literature, such as McIT2FIS, TSCIT2FNN, SIT2FNN, RIT2FNS-WB, eT2FIS, MRIT2NFS, IT2FNN-SVR, etc. From the obtained results, it was found that the HFIT provided less complex and highly accurate models compared to the models produced by most of the other methods. Hence, the proposed HFIT is an efficient and competitive alternative to the other FISs for function approximation and feature selectio

A finder and representation system for knowledge carriers based on granular computing

In one of his publications Aristotle states ”All human beings by their nature desire to know” [Kraut 1991]. This desire is initiated the day we are born and accompanies us for the rest of our life. While at a young age our parents serve as one of the principle sources for knowledge, this changes over the course of time. Technological advances and particularly the introduction of the Internet, have given us new possibilities to share and access knowledge from almost anywhere at any given time. Being able to access and share large collections of written down knowledge is only one part of the equation. Just as important is the internalization of it, which in many cases can prove to be difficult to accomplish. Hence, being able to request assistance from someone who holds the necessary knowledge is of great importance, as it can positively stimulate the internalization procedure. However, digitalization does not only provide a larger pool of knowledge sources to choose from but also more people that can be potentially activated, in a bid to receive personalized assistance with a given problem statement or question. While this is beneficial, it imposes the issue that it is hard to keep track of who knows what. For this task so-called Expert Finder Systems have been introduced, which are designed to identify and suggest the most suited candidates to provide assistance. Throughout this Ph.D. thesis a novel type of Expert Finder System will be introduced that is capable of capturing the knowledge users within a community hold, from explicit and implicit data sources. This is accomplished with the use of granular computing, natural language processing and a set of metrics that have been introduced to measure and compare the suitability of candidates. Furthermore, are the knowledge requirements of a problem statement or question being assessed, in order to ensure that only the most suited candidates are being recommended to provide assistance

Curvature-based sparse rule base generation for fuzzy rule interpolation

Fuzzy logic has been successfully widely utilised in many real-world applications. The most common application of fuzzy logic is the rule-based fuzzy inference system, which is composed of mainly two parts including an inference engine and a fuzzy rule base. Conventional fuzzy inference systems always require a rule base that fully covers the entire problem domain (i.e., a dense rule base). Fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) makes inference possible with sparse rule bases which may not cover some parts of the problem domain (i.e., a sparse rule base). In addition to extending the applicability of fuzzy inference systems, fuzzy interpolation can also be used to reduce system complexity for over-complex fuzzy inference systems. There are typically two methods to generate fuzzy rule bases, i.e., the knowledge driven and data-driven approaches. Almost all of these approaches only target dense rule bases for conventional fuzzy inference systems. The knowledge-driven methods may be negatively affected by the limited availability of expert knowledge and expert knowledge may be subjective, whilst redundancy often exists in fuzzy rule-based models that are acquired from numerical data. Note that various rule base reduction approaches have been proposed, but they are all based on certain similarity measures and are likely to cause performance deterioration along with the size reduction. This project, for the first time, innovatively applies curvature values to distinguish important features and instances in a dataset, to support the construction of a neat and concise sparse rule base for fuzzy rule interpolation. In addition to working in a three-dimensional problem space, the work also extends the natural three-dimensional curvature calculation to problems with high dimensions, which greatly broadens the applicability of the proposed approach. As a result, the proposed approach alleviates the ‘curse of dimensionality’ and helps to reduce the computational cost for fuzzy inference systems. The proposed approach has been validated and evaluated by three real-world applications. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to generate sparse rule bases with less rules but resulting in better performance, which confirms the power of the proposed system. In addition to fuzzy rule interpolation, the proposed curvature-based approach can also be readily used as a general feature selection tool to work with other machine learning approaches, such as classifiers

Research on intelligent controller design for MIMO spatially -Distributed systems with applications

Spatially dynamic distributed systems have been attracting increasing attention from researchers in the field of system modelling and control since their introduction as an alternative to simple systems to meet the ever-greater requirements to make industrial systems more precise and energy-efficient and to overcome process complexities. An approach whereby complex systems with multi-dimensional parameters, inputs or outputs are simply disregarded or simplified with the help of convenient mathematical models is no longer feasible. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to contribute to the advancement of both theoretical and empirical knowledge in this field through the means of theoretical analysis, application simulations and case studies. From a theoretical perspective, this study focuses primarily on the design methodology of control systems. To this end, the first step is identification of requirements from the applications, followed by the implementation of an original approach underpinned by data prediction for type-2 T-S fuzzy control with the purpose of making the control system design more convenient. With this aim in mind, the study creates an interface/platform to link or anticipate spatially dynamic distributed system output from lumped system data by taking advantage of the threedimensional character of type-2 fuzzy sets. Moreover, on the basis of a decoupled spatially dynamic distributed system, this study applies Mamdani-type and interval type-2 T-S type fuzzy control, and extends a discussion about the results of simulation and analysis. With regard to application examination, the study contributes to primarily with system analysis and modelling. Along with the progress of physical analysis, a MIMO model is customized for the plant by expanding from the lumped physical character to a distributed system. Furthermore, the coupling feature of the object is addressed based on the decoupling approach and the pole placement approach, while the SISO approach is expanded to a universally acknowledged MIMO approach and Matlab is used to produce the simulation results.As a conclusion, in this research, firstly a state space model was established to expand the SISO system into a MIMO system and the interacted inputs and outputs have been decoupled using decoupling method; and then a Mamdani-type fuzzy control was designed for temperature control and an Interval Type-2 fuzzy control was designed for pressure control, using a simple state-space model instead of a fuzzy model, accordance with the practical plant in use, and very satisfied, very robust control performances were obtained

Graph Fuzzy System: Concepts, Models and Algorithms

Fuzzy systems (FSs) have enjoyed wide applications in various fields, including pattern recognition, intelligent control, data mining and bioinformatics, which is attributed to the strong interpretation and learning ability. In traditional application scenarios, FSs are mainly applied to model Euclidean space data and cannot be used to handle graph data of non-Euclidean structure in nature, such as social networks and traffic route maps. Therefore, development of FS modeling method that is suitable for graph data and can retain the advantages of traditional FSs is an important research. To meet this challenge, a new type of FS for graph data modeling called Graph Fuzzy System (GFS) is proposed in this paper, where the concepts, modeling framework and construction algorithms are systematically developed. First, GFS related concepts, including graph fuzzy rule base, graph fuzzy sets and graph consequent processing unit (GCPU), are defined. A GFS modeling framework is then constructed and the antecedents and consequents of the GFS are presented and analyzed. Finally, a learning framework of GFS is proposed, in which a kernel K-prototype graph clustering (K2PGC) is proposed to develop the construction algorithm for the GFS antecedent generation, and then based on graph neural network (GNNs), consequent parameters learning algorithm is proposed for GFS. Specifically, three different versions of the GFS implementation algorithm are developed for comprehensive evaluations with experiments on various benchmark graph classification datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed GFS inherits the advantages of both existing mainstream GNNs methods and conventional FSs methods while achieving better performance than the counterparts.Comment: This paper has been submitted to a journa

Architectural Uncertainty Analysis for Access Control Scenarios in Industry 4.0

Industrie 4.0-Systeme zeichnen sich durch ihre hohe Komplexität, Konnektivität und ihren hohen Datenaustausch aus. Aufgrund dieser Eigenschaften ist es entscheidend, eine Vertraulichkeit der Daten sicher zu stellen. Ein häufig verwendetes Verfahren zum Sicherstellen von Vertraulichkeit ist das Verwenden von Zugriffskontrolle. Basierend auf modellierter Softwarearchitektur, kann eine Zugriffskontrolle bereits während der Entwurfszeit konzeptionell auf das System angewendet werden. Dies ermöglicht es, potentielle Vertraulichkeitsprobleme bereits früh zu identifizieren und bietet die Möglichkeit, die Auswirkungen von Was-wäre-wenn-Szenarien auf die Vertraulichkeit zu analysieren, bevor entsprechende Änderungen umgesetzt werden. Ungewissheiten der Systemumgebung, die sich aus Unklarheiten in den frühen Phasen der Entwicklung oder der abstrakten Sicht des Softwarearchitekturmodells ergeben, können sich jedoch direkt auf bestehende Zugriffskontrollrichtlinien auswirken und zu einer reduzierten Vertraulichkeit führen. Um dies abzuschwächen, ist es wichtig, Ungewissheiten zu identifizieren und zu behandeln. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir unseren Ansatz zum Umgang mit Ungewissheiten der Zugriffskontrolle während der Entwurfszeit vor. Wir erstellen eine Charakterisierung von Ungewissheiten in der Zugriffskontrolle auf der Architekturebene, um ein besseres Verständnis über die existierenden Arten von Ungewissheiten zu erhalten. Darauf basierend definieren wir ein Konzept des Vertrauens in die Gültigkeit von Eigenschaften der Zugriffskontrolle. Dieses Konzept bietet die Möglichkeit mit Ungewissheiten umzugehen, die bereits in Publikationen zu Zugriffskontrollmodellen beschrieben wurden. Das Konzept des Vertrauens ist eine Zusammensetzung von Umgebungsfaktoren, die die Gültigkeit von und folglich das Vertrauen in Zugriffskontrolleigenschaften beeinflussen. Um Umgebungsfaktoren zu kombinieren und so Vertrauenswerte von Zugriffskontrolleigenschaften zu erhalten, nutzen wir Fuzzy-Inferenzsysteme. Diese erhaltenen Vertrauenswerte werden von einem Analyseprozess mit in Betracht gezogen, um Probleme zu identifizieren, die aus einem Mangel an Vertrauen entstehen. Wir erweitern einen bestehenden Ansatz zur Analyse von Informationsfluss und Zugriffskontrolle zur Entwurfszeit, basierend auf Datenflussdiagrammen. Das Wissen, welches wir mit unserem Konzept des Vertrauens hinzufügen, soll Softwarearchitekten die Möglichkeit geben, die Qualität ihrer Modelle zu erhöhen und Anforderungen an die Zugriffskontrolle ihrer Systeme bereits in frühen Phasen der Softwareentwicklung, unter Berücksichtigung von Ungewissheiten zu verifizieren. Die Anwendbarkeit unseres Ansatzes evaluieren wir anhand der Verfügbarkeit der notwendigen Daten in verschiedenen Phasen der Softwareentwicklung, sowie des potenziellen Mehrwerts für bestehende Systeme. Wir messen die Genauigkeit der Analyse beim Identifizieren von Problemen und die Skalierbarkeit hinsichtlich der Ausführungszeit, wenn verschiedene Modellaspekte individuell vergrößert werden