A multi-agent system for a bus crew rescheduling system

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Unpredictable events (UE) are major factors that cause disruption to everyday bus operation. In the occurrence of UE, the main resources - crews and vehicles - are affected, and this leads to crew schedule disruption. One way to deal with the problem is crew rescheduling. Most of the current approaches are based on static schedules do not support rescheduling in a real-time scenario. They have the ability to reschedule but a new complete schedule is produced without concerning the real time situation. The mathematical approaches which are used by most scheduling packages have the ability to search for optimum or near optimum schedules but they are usually slow to produce results in real-time because they are computationally intensive when faced with complex situations. In practice, crew or bus rescheduling is managed manually, based on the supervisor's capabilities and experience in managing UE. However, manual rescheduling is complex, prone to error and not optimum, especially when dealing with many UE at the same time. This research proposes the CRSMAS (Crew Rescheduling System with Multi Agent System) approach as an alternative that may help supervisors to make quick rescheduling decisions by automating the crew rescheduling process. A Multi Agent System (MAS) is considered suitable to support this rescheduling because agents can dynamically adapt their behaviour to changing environments and they can find solutions quickly via negotiations and cooperation between them. To evaluate the CRSMAS, two types of experiment are carried out: Single Event and Multiple Events. The Single Event experiment is used to find characteristics of crew schedules that influence the crew rescheduling process while the Multiple Events experiment is used to test the capability of CRSMAS in dealing with numerous events that occur randomly. A wide range of simulation results, based on real-world data, are reported and analysed. Based on the experiment it is concluded that CRSMAS is suitable for automating the crew rescheduling process and capable of quick rescheduling whether facing single events or multiple events at the same time, the success of rescheduling is not only dependant on the tool but also to other factors such as the characteristics of crew schedules and the period of the UE, and one limitation of CRSMAS that was discovered is it cannot simulate different type of events at the same time. This limitation is because in different events there are different rules but, in Virtual World, agents can only negotiate with one set of rules at a time.Financial support was obtained from the Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM)

Practical and user friendly tool of analytic hierarchy process for decision making

This paper discusses on the use of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) aiming at improving and enhancing the decision making process.Currently, the decision provided by user is referring to their opinion and experience.If there is a supported tool, normally mean for expert users or researchers.By using a practical and user friendly AHP tool, many users are benefited from the tool. There are three basic features of AHP called criteria, sub-criteria and alternative.These features consist of a combination of users experience and mathematical approach. The method aim to give users a decision making process according to the given problem. The results will suggest users on what is the best decision should be made.In order to test its applicability, a real world case study at Palm Oil Mill (POM) plant is used.A satisfactory result has confirmed the practicality and user friendliness of the tool

An Analysis of the Requirements for Efficient Protocols in WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) plays a major role in the advancement of technology, particularly for diagnosising the many life threatening diseases as well as providing real-time health monitoring. The objective of this paper is to study and analyze the problems of protocols in WBAN to provide the requirements related to health care in a medical environment. The protocols need to be energy efficient and reliable as well. To date, several metrics, such as channel utilization and energy efficiencies are defined. This research provides a clear outlook on the types of routing protocols and the problems related to the losses and distribution of data in a medical environment, thus meeting energy efficiency, low delay and reliability

Importance and significance of information sharing in terrorism field

Years after the 11th Sept 2001 have led in researchers to re-structure intelligence and counter terrorism in technology information to overcome problems and issues related to terrorism. This work provides an updated research of Information and Communication technology (ICT) related to re-structuring of intelligence and counter-terrorism. For this purpose, the objectives of this work is to conduct a survey on the conceptual view of the researchers who developed tools for electronic information sharing employed in intelligence and counterterrorism and summary of their works in this emerging field. The work discusses the different visions and views of information sharing, critical infrastructure, tools and key resources discussed by the researchers. It also shows some of the experiences in countries considered as international reference on the subject, including some information-sharing issues. In addition, the work carries out a review of current tools, software applications and modelling techniques around anti-terrorism in accordance with their functionality in information sharing tools. The work emphasises on identifying the various counter terrorism related works that have direct relevance to information transportation researches and advocating security informatics studies that are closely integrated with transportation research and information technologies related to the recommendations of the 9/11 commission report in 2004. The importance of this study is that it gives a unified view of the existing approaches of electronic information sharing in order to help developing tools used in intelligence and counter terrorism for future coordination and collaboration in national security applications

Analysis and Design of Integrated Vehicle and Crew Scheduling System Using GAIA Methodology

An integrated vehicle and crew scheduling is a complex problem to solve because of the large number of resources that need to be managed, and complexity of rules regarding allocating vehicle and crew shifts. However, there are potential benefits from integrating both scheduling including cost saving in regional area where routes have fewer relief points. The aim of this research is to design the integrated vehicle and crew scheduling system using Multi-Agents System (MAS). The paper presents agents analysis and design using Gaia methodology

Experimental Approach On Thresholding Using Reverse Biorthogonal Wavelet Decomposition For Eye Image

This study focus on compression in wavelet decomposition for security in biometric data. The objectives of this research are two folds: a) to investigate whether compressed human eye image differ with the original eye and b) to obtain the compression ratio values using proposed methods. The experiments have been conducted to explore the application of sparsity-norm balance and sparsity-norm balance square root techniques in wavelet decomposition. The eye image with [320x280] dimension is used through the wavelet 2D tool of Matlab. The results showed that, the percentage of coefficients before compression energy was 99.65% and number of zeros were 97.99%. However, the percentage of energy was 99.97%, increased while the number of zeros was same after compression. Based on our findings, the impact of the compression produces different ratio and with minimal lost after the compression. The future work should imply in artificial intelligent area for protecting biometric data

Principal Component Analysis in Used Oil Data for Condition Based Maintenance

Thls paper reports on a study using the available oil monitoring lntormation that is ohtained from the Speeunmetric Oi] Analysis Programme (SOAP), to predict the residual life oi‘ a set of ship engines. The analysis oi‘ oil samples talaen from an engine git-es an indication of the suitability oi’ the oil for continued use and provides important information about the condition of the engine. This could allnw the ident.i.l‘ioation of wearing components heiore severe failure could occur without dismantling the engine. Given this condition-monitoring data, maintenance decisions may be taken as required and, moat importantly, maintenance may he done in an effective and eflicie-at way. This paper starts with some analysis. assumptions and techniques necessary to gain insight intn SOAP data that will he nseful to our modelling development. Several issues regarding the oonsistency, incompleteness and dimensions of the data used are discussed, which include the implementation oi‘ principal component analysis technique. This research proposed an approach called the ‘total metal concentrations’ ealculatjon, which is used to esplain the relationship hetvveen the residual life and the total wear concentrations which are avaiiahle irom SOAP data. Unce the ‘clean‘ data is attained, the next modelling steps can he eshlhiished tn rccnmmend the optimal maintenance actions in terms of cost, availability or any criterion of interest

Feature Extraction From Epigenetic Traits Using Edge Detection In Iris Recognition System

Iris recognition is the most accurate biometric identification system on hand. Most iris recognition systems use algorithms developed by Daugman. The performance of iris recognition is highly depends on edge detection. Canny is the edge detectors which commonly used. The objectives of this research are to a) study the edge detection criteria and b)measure the PSNR values in estimating the noise between the original iris feature and new iris template. The eye image with [320x280] dimension is obtained from the CASIA database which has been pre-processed through the segmentation and normalization in obtaining the rubber sheet model with [20x240] in dimension. Once it has been produced, the important information is extracted from the iris. Results show that, the PSNR values of iris feature before and after the process of extraction, was 24.93 and 9.12. For sobel and prewitt, both give 18.5 after the process. Based on our findings, the impact of edge detection techniques produces higher accuracy in iris recognition system

A New Model of Securing Iris Authentication Using Steganography

The integration of steganography in biometric system is a solution for enhancing security in iris. The process of biometric enrollment and verification is not highly secure due to hacking activities at the biometric point system such as overriding iris template in database. In this paper, we proposed an enhancement of temporal-spatial domain algorithm which involves the scheme of Least Significant Bits (LSB) as the new model which converts iris images to binary stream and hides into a proper lower bit plane. Here, the stego key, n, will be inserted into the binary values from the plane which concealed the information; where n is the input parameter in binary values which inserted to the iris codes, m. These values produce the output which is the new iris stego image after binary conversion. Theoretically, the proposed model is promising a high security performance implementation in the future