Semantically-Enhanced Online Configuration of Feedback Control Schemes

Recent progress toward the realization of the ``Internet of Things'' has improved the ability of physical and soft/cyber entities to operate effectively within large-scale, heterogeneous systems. It is important that such capacity be accompanied by feedback control capabilities sufficient to ensure that the overall systems behave according to their specifications and meet their functional objectives. To achieve this, such systems require new architectures that facilitate the online deployment, composition, interoperability, and scalability of control system components. Most current control systems lack scalability and interoperability because their design is based on a fixed configuration of specific components, with knowledge of their individual characteristics only implicitly passed through the design. This paper addresses the need for flexibility when replacing components or installing new components, which might occur when an existing component is upgraded or when a new application requires a new component, without the need to readjust or redesign the overall system. A semantically enhanced feedback control architecture is introduced for a class of systems, aimed at accommodating new components into a closed-loop control framework by exploiting the semantic inference capabilities of an ontology-based knowledge model. This architecture supports continuous operation of the control system, a crucial property for large-scale systems for which interruptions have negative impact on key performance metrics that may include human comfort and welfare or economy costs. A case-study example from the smart buildings domain is used to illustrate the proposed architecture and semantic inference mechanisms

Exploring Semantic Mediation Techniques in Feedback Control Architectures

Modern control systems implementations, especially in large–scale systems, assume the interoperation of different types of sensors, actuators, controllers and software algorithms, being physical or cyber. In most cases, the scalability and interoperability of the control system are compromised by its design, which is based on a fixed configuration of specific components with certain knowledge of their specific characteristics. This work presents an innovative feedback control architecture framework, in which classical and modern feedback control techniques can be combined with domain knowledge (thematic, location and time) in order to enable the online plugging of components in a feedback control system and the subsequent reconfiguration and adaptation of the system

Joint Estimation and Control for Multi-Target Passive Monitoring with an Autonomous UAV Agent

This work considers the problem of passively monitoring multiple moving targets with a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) agent equipped with a direction-finding radar. This is in general a challenging problem due to the unobservability of the target states, and the highly non-linear measurement process. In addition to these challenges, in this work we also consider: a) environments with multiple obstacles where the targets need to be tracked as they manoeuvre through the obstacles, and b) multiple false-alarm measurements caused by the cluttered environment. To address these challenges we first design a model predictive guidance controller which is used to plan hypothetical target trajectories over a rolling finite planning horizon. We then formulate a joint estimation and control problem where the trajectory of the UAV agent is optimized to achieve optimal multi-target monitoring

Data-efficient Online Classification with Siamese Networks and Active Learning

An ever increasing volume of data is nowadays becoming available in a streaming manner in many application areas, such as, in critical infrastructure systems, finance and banking, security and crime and web analytics. To meet this new demand, predictive models need to be built online where learning occurs on-the-fly. Online learning poses important challenges that affect the deployment of online classification systems to real-life problems. In this paper we investigate learning from limited labelled, nonstationary and imbalanced data in online classification. We propose a learning method that synergistically combines siamese neural networks and active learning. The proposed method uses a multi-sliding window approach to store data, and maintains separate and balanced queues for each class. Our study shows that the proposed method is robust to data nonstationarity and imbalance, and significantly outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both learning speed and performance. Importantly, it is effective even when only 1% of the labels of the arriving instances are available.Comment: 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Glasgow, UK, 202

3D Ray Tracing for device-independent fingerprint-based positioning in WLANs

We study the use of 3D Ray Tracing (RT) to construct radiomaps for WLAN Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint-based positioning, in conjunction with calibration techniques to make the overall process device-independent. RSS data collection might be a tedious and time-consuming process and also the measured radiomap accuracy and applicability is subject to potential changes in the wireless environment. Therefore, RT becomes a more attractive and efficient way to generate radiomaps. Moreover, traditional fingerprint-based methods lead to radiomaps which are restricted to the device used to generate the radiomap and fail to provide acceptable performance when different devices are considered. We address both challenges by exploiting 3D RT-generated radiomaps and using linear data transformation to match the characteristics of various devices. We evaluate the efficiency of this approach in terms of the time spent to create the radiomap, the amount of data required to calibrate the radiomap for different devices and the positioning error which is compared against the case of using dedicated radiomaps collected with each device

Semantic Mediation in Smart Water Networks

Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are the infrastructures responsible for delivering drinking water to consumers. The effective monitoring and control of these systems is of vital importance since malfunction may significantly affect the health, safety, security and/or economic well-being of people. The advancements in coupling WDN with the ICT infrastructure, combined with the more recent introduction of smart sensing and actuation technologies, have enabled the enhancement of "Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA)"-based applications. These applications in current water systems assume pre-defined configuration and characteristics of the involved components (sensors, actuators, controllers, etc.). This work explores how semantic mediation techniques may contribute to the online configuration of the monitoring and control architectures by exploiting and reasoning over the capabilities of deployed devices

Semantically-enhanced Configurability in State Estimation Structures of Power Systems

The estimation of the states of an electric power system, that is, the magnitude and angle of the voltage at all buses, is a very critical input to many monitoring and control functions of power systems. The recently witnessed rapid deployment of synchronized measurement technology (SMT) in power systems, has led to research advancements in the state estimation technology that introduce the notion of hybrid state estimation. These techniques incorporate the synchrophasors provided by the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) in the state estimation process, thus improving the state estimation accuracy. However, both the traditional as well as the hybrid techniques, assume a pre-defined configuration and characteristics of the measurement devices. This work explores how semantic modelling and reasoning techniques may contribute to the online configuration of the state estimation architectures given the available measurement capabilities at each moment

Cooperative Simultaneous Tracking and Jamming for Disabling a Rogue Drone

This work investigates the problem of simultaneous tracking and jamming of a rogue drone in 3D space with a team of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We propose a decentralized estimation, decision and control framework in which a team of UAVs cooperate in order to a) optimally choose their mobility control actions that result in accurate target tracking and b) select the desired transmit power levels which cause uninterrupted radio jamming and thus ultimately disrupt the operation of the rogue drone. The proposed decision and control framework allows the UAVs to reconfigure themselves in 3D space such that the cooperative simultaneous tracking and jamming (CSTJ) objective is achieved; while at the same time ensures that the unwanted inter-UAV jamming interference caused during CSTJ is kept below a specified critical threshold. Finally, we formulate this problem under challenging conditions i.e., uncertain dynamics, noisy measurements and false alarms. Extensive simulation experiments illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.Comment: 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS