Fault-tolerant observer design with a tolerance measure for systems with sensor failure

A fault-tolerant switching observer design methodology is proposed. The aim is to maintain a desired level of closed-loop performance under a range of sensor fault scenarios while the fault-free nominal performance is optimized. The range of considered fault scenarios is determined by a minimum number p of assumed working sensors. Thus the smaller p is, the more fault tolerant is the observer. This is then used to define a fault tolerance measure for observer design. Due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, a semidefinite relaxation procedure is proposed to deal with the large number of fault scenarios for systems that have many vulnerable sensors. The procedure results in a significant reduction in the number of constraints needed to solve the problem. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the fault-tolerant observer design

Market economy and traditional societies producing poverty in Argentina Norte Grande

El Norte Grande Argentino alberga la sociedad más pobre del país. Se analiza el contexto territorial a partir de una conjetura sobre la manera en que tiempo y espacio (o sociedad y naturaleza) fueron urdiendo la trama que hiciera posible esta situación. Si bien el proceso se enraíza muy atrás en el tiempo, se sostiene que la consolidación del capitalismo, que entre fines del XIX y comienzos del XX contribuyó al desarrollo de las agroindustrias regionales, constituye uno de los hitos de mayor trascendencia. Las formas de articulación entre las sociedades tradicionales y las nuevas agroindustrias, la persistencia de sociedades marginadas de esa articulación, el comportamiento de las élites, los procesos recientes de expansión agropecuaria, señalan que aquella trama contiene un sustento econó- mico y territorial inscripto en un diseño fuertemente cultural.The Norte Grande Argentino harbours the domestic poorest society. The territorial context is analyzed starting from a conjecture about the way in that time and space (or society and nature) were concocting the plot that made possible this situation. Although the process takes root very behind in the time, it is sustained that the consolidation of the capitalism that contributed to development of the regional agroindustries between ends of the XIX and beginnings of the XX century, was one of the landmarks of greatest transcendence. The articulation between the traditional societies and the new agroindustries, the persistence of excluded societies out of that articulation, the behaviour of the elites, the recent processes of agricultural expansion, points out that the plot contains an economic and territorial support that includes a strong cultural design.Fil: Bolsi, Alfredo Segundo C.. Instituto de Estudios Geograficos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Meichtry, Norma Cristina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Nordeste. Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas. Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas; Argentin

DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION ALGORITHM APPLIED IN A NUMERICAL COST OPTIMIZATION DESIGN OF A SHELL AND-TUBE HEAT EXCHANGER

Shell-and-tube heat exchangers are the most common heat exchangers that can be found in several industrial applications. The reduction of the investment cost and the operation of this equipment it’s one of main industrial designers and entrepreneurs aim. With the intention of reducing total costs of a shell-and-tube heat exchangers, as proposed by Caputo et al. (2008), employed in this present study the optimization technique called Differential Evolution (DE), which basically consists in a calculation mechanism, supported on operators of “crossing” and “mutation” differential, through mathematical and heuristics arguments that indicate your adequacy for function optimization. This study is defined as a mono-objective optimization problem and the total cost of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger is the objective function. To this, it was taken as a design variable intern diameter tube, the outer diameter of the shell and the spacing between baffles or deflectors. The results reached in this work were compared with the same problem when used GA (Genetics Algorithms), PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), QPSO (Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization) and QPSOZ (Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization by Zaslavskii). Regarding the literature, the capital investment in the heat exchange reduces corresponding in 15.2% and consequently the depreciation charge of the equipment decrease approximately 12.5%. In general, the total cost of the shell-and-tube heat exchange in analysis, presented a reduction of 15%, showing the potential of applied method in this study, the technique DE

Aplicando Crowdsourcing na Sincronização de Vídeos Gerados por Usuários

Crowdsourcing é uma estratégia para resolução de problemas baseada na coleta de resultados parciais a partir das contribuições de indivíduos, agregando-as em um resultado unificado. Com base nesta estratégia, esta tese mostra como a crowd é capaz de sincronizar um conjunto de vídeos produzidos por usuários quaisquer, correlacionados a um mesmo evento social. Cada usuário filma o evento com seu ponto de vista e de acordo com suas limitações (ângulo do evento, oclusões na filmagem, qualidade da câmera utilizada, etc.). Nesse cenário, não é possível garantir que todos os conteúdos gerados possuam características homogêneas (instante de início e duração de captura, resolução, qualidade, etc.), dificultando o uso de um processo puramente automático de sincronização. Além disso, os vídeos gerados por usuário são disponibilizados de forma distribuída entre diversos servidores de conteúdo independentes. A hipótese desta tese é que a capacidade de adaptação da inteligência humana pode ser usada para processar um grupo de vídeos produzidos de forma descoordenada e distribuída, e relacionados a um mesmo evento social, gerando a sua sincronização. Para comprovar esta hipótese, as seguintes etapas foram executadas: (i) o desenvolvimento de um método de sincronização para múltiplos vídeos provenientes de fontes independentes; (ii) a execução de um mapeamento sistemático acerca do uso de crowdsourcing para processamento de vídeos; (iii) o desenvolvimento de técnicas para o uso da crowd na sincronização de vídeos; (iv) o desenvolvimento de um modelo funcional para desenvolvimento de aplicações de sincronização utilizando crowdsourcing, que pode ser estendido para aplicações de vídeos em geral; e (v) a realização de experimentos que permitem mostrar a capacidade da crowd para realizar a sincronização. Os resultados encontrados após estas etapas mostram que a crowd é capaz de participar do processo de sincronização e que diversos fatores podem influenciar na precisão dos resultados obtidos

Methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain

A methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain is presented in this paper. This methodology is a user-centred design approach consisting of four main steps: requirement analysis, parallel corpus generation, technology adaptation to the new domain, and finally, system evaluation. During the requirement analysis, both the user and technical requirements are evaluated and defined. For generating the parallel corpus, it is necessary to collect Spanish sentences in the new domain and translate them into LSE (Lengua de Signos Española: Spanish Sign Language). LSE is represented by glosses and using video recordings. This corpus is used for training the two main modules of the advanced communications system to the new domain: the spoken Spanish into the LSE translation module and the Spanish generation from the LSE module. The main aspects to be generated are the vocabularies for both languages (Spanish words and signs), and the knowledge for translating in both directions. Finally, the field evaluation is carried out with deaf people using the advanced communications system to interact with hearing people in several scenarios. In this evaluation, the paper proposes several objective and subjective measurements for evaluating the performance. In this paper, the new considered domain is about dialogues in a hotel reception. Using this methodology, the system was developed in several months, obtaining very good performance: good translation rates (10% Sign Error Rate) with small processing times, allowing face-to-face dialogues

Gastroethnobotany of Halophytes

The halophytes are a specialized group of plants among which there are some representatives that have been cultivated for millenia. Domesticated or wild lineages are also consumed as food, being chard and dates fruits a good example of it. Other species highly appreciated and consumed locally are collected from wild, like Crithmum, and form part of the traditional cuisine of various areas of the planet. Within this group, some are the object of global cultivation and are distributed by haute cuisine networks such as Salicornia, Mertensia, or Tetragonia. Finally, there are other wild halophytes that were only consumed in situations of extreme need such as famines. Generally, they have not been appreciated by the populations that collect them, such as Halosarcia, Suaeda, or Arthrocnemum. The case of Tetragonia, a species native to Australia, is very significant. The perception of the aborigines, who did not eat it, was different from that of the European settlers who did consume them and even sent their seeds to Europe for domestication and cultivation as new vegetable. Currently, the new gastronomy, sometimes based on tradition and others on experimentation itself, has incorporated into the kitchen many news halophytes and with them has developed numerous unpublished and novel recipes

Gender-based characteristics of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in an emerging country: is this a man’s world?

Purpose: Worldwide, Ecuador is one of the countries with the most entrepreneurial activity from micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). However, the effect of adopting the US dollar (dollarization), over which the central bank has no control, combined with being mainly an exporter of primary products, as well as strategic currency devaluation by neighboring economies, has created a difficult situation, especially for Ecuadorian women’s MSMEs. This paper aims to study the relationship between female ownership and Ecuadorian MSMEs’ financial, economic and social outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: The authors compile a near-population panel of 617,804 firm-year observations representing an unbalanced panel of 112,917 MSMEs during the 2007–2016 sampling window. Panel (fixed effects) regression is used to test the hypotheses concerning the antecedents to firm financial performance, economic and social outcomes. Cox proportional hazards modeling is used to assess the impact of antecedents on firm survival. Findings: First, firms providing more social benefits (e.g. employment and higher wages) have higher survival rates. Second, female ownership is negatively related with microenterprise financial performance, but positively associated with small-enterprise financial performance. Third, female-owned enterprises tend to provide higher wages per employee for all firm sizes. Fourth, although female-owned microenterprises are less efficient, they tend to provide more for their employees and possibly communities, through the economic stimulus they provide, in terms of the size of the financial outcomes. Originality/value: This paper shows that, although this is a “man’s world,” women are learning earlier, developing faster professionally and overcoming stereotypes to focus on activities that generate both economic performance and social outcomes. Governmental policies that have contributed to MSMEs’ growth and women’s participation are identified. The findings suggest ways to improve and support both the creation of more women-owned MSMEs in emerging countries, such as Ecuador, and the survival of existing male- and female-owned MSMEs

Real-time phase-shift detection of the surface plasmon resonance

We investigate a method to directly measure the phase of a laser beam reflected from a metallic film after excitation of surface plasmon polaritons. This method permits real time access to the phase information, it increases the possible speed of data acquisition, and it may thus prove useful for increasing the sensitivity of surface plasmon based sensors

Spectrophotometric determination of iron and boron in soil extracts using a multi-syringe flow injection system

In the last decade, significant advances in flow analysis have been reported, namely the extensive use of computer-controlled devices to enhance the autonomy and performance of analysers. In the present work, computer-controlled multi-syringe flow injection systems are proposed to perform the spectrophotometric determination of available iron and boron in soil extracts. The methodologies were based on the formation of ferroin complex (determination of iron) and azomethine-H reaction (determination of boron). Both determinations were performed in manifolds with similar configurations by changing the reagents present in the different syringes. In the determination of iron, elimination of Schlieren effect in the detection system was achieved through the binary sampling approach, where a three-way valve was actuated to intercalate small slugs of sample and reagent, promoting better mixing conditions for solutions with different values of refractive index. In the determination of boron, in-line sample blank measurement was attained by omitting the introduction of reagent through software control, without manifold reconfiguration. Linear calibration curves were established between 0.50 and 10.0 mg Fe l−1 and between 0.20 and 4.0 mgBl−1. No systematic difference was found when soil extracts were analysed by the proposed methodologies and compared to the respective reference procedures.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio