A High-confidence Cyber-Physical Alarm System: Design and Implementation

Most traditional alarm systems cannot address security threats in a satisfactory manner. To alleviate this problem, we developed a high-confidence cyber-physical alarm system (CPAS), a new kind of alarm systems. This system establishes the connection of the Internet (i.e. TCP/IP) through GPRS/CDMA/3G. It achieves mutual communication control among terminal equipments, human machine interfaces and users by using the existing mobile communication network. The CPAS will enable the transformation in alarm mode from traditional one-way alarm to two-way alarm. The system has been successfully applied in practice. The results show that the CPAS could avoid false alarms and satisfy residents' security needs.Comment: IEEE/ACM Internet of Things Symposium (IOTS), in conjunction with GreenCom 2010, IEEE, Hangzhou, China, December 18-20, 201

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Smart Homes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become indispensable to the realization of smart homes. The objective of this paper is to develop such a WSN that can be used to construct smart home systems. The focus is on the design and implementation of the wireless sensor node and the coordinator based on ZigBee technology. A monitoring system is built by taking advantage of the GPRS network. To support multi-hop communications, an improved routing algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm is presented. Preliminary simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.Comment: International Workshop on Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems (MobiCPS 2010), in conjunction with UIC2010, IEEE, Xi'an, China, 26 - 29 October, 201

Persistent Flows in Deterministic Chains

This paper studies the role of persistent flows in the convergence of infinite backward products of stochastic matrices of deterministic chains over networks with non-reciprocal interactions between agents. An arc describing the interaction strength between two agents is said to be persistent if its weight function has an infinite l1 norm; convergence of the infinite backward products to a rank-one matrix of a deterministic chain of stochastic matrices is equivalent to achieving consensus at the node states. We discuss two balance conditions on the interactions between agents which generalize the arc-balance and cut-balance conditions in the literature, respectively. The proposed conditions require that such a balance should be satisfied over each time window of a fixed length instead of at each time instant. We prove that in both cases global consensus is reached if and only if the persistent graph, which consists of all the persistent arcs, contains a directed spanning tree. The convergence rates of the system to consensus are also provided in terms of the interactions between agents having taken place. The results are obtained under a weak condition without assuming the existence of a positive lower bound of all the nonzero weights of arcs and are compared with the existing results. Illustrative examples are provided to validate the results and show the critical importance of the nontrivial lower boundedness of the self-confidence of the agents

Optimal Order Strategy in Uncertain Demands with Free Shipping Option

Free shipping with conditions has become one of the most effective marketing tools; more and more companies especially e-business companies prefer to offer free shipping to buyers whenever their orders exceed the minimum quantity specified by them. But in practice, the demands of buyers are uncertain, which are affected by weather, season, and many other factors. Firstly, we model the centralization ordering problem of retailers who face stochastic demands when suppliers offer free shipping, in which limited distributional information such as known mean, support, and some deviation measures of the random data is needed only. Then, based on the linear decision rule mainly for stochastic programming, we analyze the optimal order strategies of retailers and discuss the approximate solution. Further, we present the core allocation between all retailers via dual and cooperative game theory. The existence of core shows that each retailer is pleased to cooperate with others in the centralization problem. Finally, a numerical example is implemented to discuss how uncertain data and parameters affect the optimal solution

Pressure-induced alpha-to-omega transition in titanium metal: A systematic study of the effects of uniaxial stress

We investigated the effects of uniaxial stress on the pressure-induced alpha-to-omega transition in pure titanium (Ti) by means of angle dispersive x-ray diffraction in a diamond-anvil cell. Experiments under four different pressure environments reveal that: (1) the onset of the transition depends on the pressure medium used, going from 4.9 GPa (no pressure medium) to 10.5 GPa (argon pressure medium); (2) the a and w phases coexist over a rather large pressure range, which depends on the pressure medium employed; (3) the hysteresis and quenchability of the w phase is affected by differences in the sample pressure environment; and (4) a short term laser-heating of Ti lowers the alpha-to-omega transition pressure. Possible transition mechanisms are discussed in the light of the present results, which clearly demonstrated the influence of uniaxial stress in the alpha-to-omega transition.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

An Enhanced Differential Evolution Algorithm Based on Multiple Mutation Strategies

Differential evolution algorithm is a simple yet efficient metaheuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces. However, there is a shortcoming of premature convergence in standard DE, especially in DE/best/1/bin. In order to take advantage of direction guidance information of the best individual of DE/best/1/bin and avoid getting into local trap, based on multiple mutation strategies, an enhanced differential evolution algorithm, named EDE, is proposed in this paper. In the EDE algorithm, an initialization technique, opposition-based learning initialization for improving the initial solution quality, and a new combined mutation strategy composed of DE/current/1/bin together with DE/pbest/bin/1 for the sake of accelerating standard DE and preventing DE from clustering around the global best individual, as well as a perturbation scheme for further avoiding premature convergence, are integrated. In addition, we also introduce two linear time-varying functions, which are used to decide which solution search equation is chosen at the phases of mutation and perturbation, respectively. Experimental results tested on twenty-five benchmark functions show that EDE is far better than the standard DE. In further comparisons, EDE is compared with other five state-of-the-art approaches and related results show that EDE is still superior to or at least equal to these methods on most of benchmark functions

Allergenicity and oral tolerance of enzymatic cross-linked tropomyosin evaluated using cell and mouse models

The enzymatic cross-linking of proteins to form high-molecular-weight compounds may alter their sensitization potential. The IgG-/IgE-binding activity, digestibility, allergenicity, and oral tolerance of cross-linked tropomyosin with tyrosinase (CTC) or horseradish peroxidase (CHP) were investigated. ELISA results demonstrated CTC or CHP reduced its IgE-binding activity by 34.5 ± 1.8 and 63.5 ± 0.6%, respectively. Compared with native tropomyosin or CTC, CHP was more easily digested into small fragments; CHP decreased the degranulation of RBL-2H3 cells and increased endocytosis by dendritic cells. CHP can induce oral tolerance and reduce allergenicity in mice by decreasing IgE and IgG1 levels in serum, the production of T-cell cytokines, and the percentage composition of dendritic cells. These findings demonstrate CHP has more potential of reducing the allergenicity than CTC via influencing the morphology of protein, changing the original method of antigen presentation, modulating the Th1/Th2 immunobalance, and inducing the oral tolerance of the allergen tropomyosin