Volumen 29 (2019): Heft 2 (June 2019)
Advances in Complex Cloud and Service Oriented Computing (special section, pp. 213-274), Anna Kobusińska, Ching-Hsien Hsu, Kwei-Jay Lin (Eds.)

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) for human and autonomous self-driving aims to achieve active safe driving that avoids vehicle accidents or traffic jam by exchanging the road traffic information (e.g., traffic flow, traffic density, velocity variation, etc.) among neighbor vehicles. However, in CACC, the butterfly effect is encountered while exhibiting asynchronous brakes that easily lead to backward shock-waves and are difficult to remove. Several critical issues should be addressed in CACC, including (i) difficulties with adaptive steering of the inter-vehicle distances among neighbor vehicles and the vehicle speed, (ii) the butterfly effect, (iii) unstable vehicle traffic flow, etc. To address the above issues in CACC, this paper proposes the mobile edge computing-based vehicular cloud of the cooperative adaptive driving (CAD) approach to avoid shock-waves efficiently in platoon driving. Numerical results demonstrate that the CAD approach outperforms the compared techniques in the number of shock-waves, average vehicle velocity, average travel time and time to collision (TTC). Additionally, the adaptive platoon length is determined according to the traffic information gathered from the global and local clouds.

The wide adoption of cloud computing by businesses is due to several reasons, among which the elasticity of the cloud virtual infrastructure is the definite leader. Container technology allows increasing the flexibility of an application by adding another layer of virtualization. The containers can be dynamically created and terminated, and also moved from one host to another. A company can achieve a significant cost reduction and increase the manageability of its applications by allowing the running of containerized microservice applications in the cloud. Scaling for such solutions is conducted on both the virtual infrastructure layer and the container layer. Scaling on both layers needs to be synchronized so that, for example, the virtual machine is not terminated with containers still running on it. The synchronization between layers is enabled by multilayered cooperative scaling, implying that the autoscaling solution of the virtual infrastructure layers is aware of the decisions of the autoscaling solution on the container layer and vice versa. In this paper, we introduce the notion of cooperative multilayered scaling and the performance of multilayered autoscaling solutions evaluated using the approach implemented in ScaleX (previously known as Autoscaling Performance Measurement Tool, APMT). We provide the results of the experimental evaluation of multilayered autoscaling performance for the combination of virtual infrastructure autoscaling of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine with pods horizontal autoscaling of Kubernetes by using ScaleX with four distinct load patterns. We also discuss the effect of the Docker container image size and its pulling policy on the scaling performance.

Gait velocity has been considered the sixth vital sign. It can be used not only to estimate the survival rate of the elderly, but also to predict the tendency of falling. Unfortunately, gait velocity is usually measured on a specially designed walk path, which has to be done at clinics or health institutes. Wearable tracking services using an accelerometer or an inertial measurement unit can measure the velocity for a certain time interval, but not all the time, due to the lack of a sustainable energy source. To tackle the shortcomings of wearable sensors, this work develops a framework to measure gait velocity using distributed tracking services deployed indoors. Two major challenges are tackled in this paper. The first is to minimize the sensing errors caused by thermal noise and overlapping sensing regions. The second is to minimize the data volume to be stored or transmitted. Given numerous errors caused by remote sensing, the framework takes into account the temporal and spatial relationship among tracking services to calibrate the services systematically. Consequently, gait velocity can be measured without wearable sensors and with higher accuracy. The developed method is built on top of WuKong, which is an intelligent IoT middleware, to enable location and temporal-aware data collection. In this work, we present an iterative method to reduce the data volume collected by thermal sensors. The evaluation results show that the file size is up to 25% of that of the JPEG format when the RMSE is limited to 0.5◦.

We introduce a new parallel and distributed algorithm for the solution of the satisfiability problem. It is based on an algorithm portfolio and is intended to be used for servicing requests in a distributed cloud. The core of our contribution is the modeling of the optimal resource sharing schedule in parallel executions and the proposition of heuristics for its approximation. For this purpose, we reformulate a computational problem introduced in a prior work. The main assumption is that it is possible to learn optimal resource sharing from traces collected on past executions on a representative set of instances. We show that the learning can be formalized as a set coverage problem. Then we propose to solve it by approximation and dynamic programming algorithms based on classical greedy algorithms for the maximum coverage problem. Finally, we conduct an experimental evaluation for comparing the performance of the various algorithms proposed. The results show that some algorithms become more competitive if we intend to determine the trade-off between their quality and the runtime required for their computation.

This investigation is concerned with robust analysis and control of uncertain nonlinear systems with parametric uncertainties. In contrast to the methodologies from the field of linear parameter varying systems, which employ convex structures of the state space representation in order to perform analysis and design, the proposed approach makes use of a polytopic form of a generalisation of the characteristic polynomial, which proves to outperform former results on the subject. Moreover, the derived conditions have the advantage of being cast as linear matrix inequalities under mild assumptions.

Torsional vibrations induced in drilling systems are detrimental to the condition of the machine and to the effectiveness of the engineering process. The cause of vibrations is a nonlinear and unknown friction between a drill string and the environment, containing jumps in its characteristics. Nonlinear behaviour of the friction coefficient results in self-excited vibration and causes undesirable stick-slip oscillations. The aim of this paper is to present a novel adaptive technique of controlling vibrating systems. The scheme is based on the linear quadratic regulator and uses direct measurements of the friction torque to synthesize its linear dynamic approximation. This approach allows generating a control law that takes into account the impact of the friction on the system dynamics and optimally steers the system to the desired trajectory. The controller’s performance is examined via numerical simulations of the stabilization of the drilling system. The proposed solution outperforms the comparative LQG regulator in terms of the minimization of the assumed cost functional and the overall stability of the control system under the nonlinear disturbance.

The positivity of fractional descriptor linear discrete-time systems is investigated. The solution to the state equation of the systems is derived. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the positivity of fractional descriptor linear discrete-time systems are established. The discussion is illustrated with numerical examples.

Fractional-order PID (FOPID) controllers have been used extensively in many control applications to achieve robust control performance. To implement these controllers, curve fitting approximation techniques are widely employed to obtain integer-order approximation of FOPID. The most popular and widely used approximation techniques include the Oustaloup, Matsuda and Cheraff approaches. However, these methods are unable to achieve the best approximation due to the limitation in the desired frequency range. Thus, this paper proposes a simple curve fitting based integer-order approximation method for a fractional-order integrator/differentiator using frequency response. The advantage of this technique is that it is simple and can fit the entire desired frequency range. Simulation results in the frequency domain show that the proposed approach produces better parameter approximation for the desired frequency range compared with the Oustaloup, refined Oustaloup and Matsuda techniques. Furthermore, time domain and stability analyses also validate the frequency domain results.

A stage-structured population model with unknown parameters is considered. Our purpose is to study the identifiability of the model and to develop a parameter estimation procedure. First, we analyze whether the parameter vector can or cannot uniquely be determined with the knowledge of the input-output behavior of the model. Second, we analyze how the information in the experimental data is translated into the parameters of the model. Furthermore, we propose a process to improve the recursive values of the parameters when successive observation data are considered. The structure of the state matrix leads to an analysis of the inverse of a sum of rank-one matrices.

In this paper, we are concerned with drive-response synchronization for a class of fuzzy cellular neural networks with time varying delays. Based on the exponential dichotomy of linear differential equations, the Banach fixed point theorem and the differential inequality technique, we obtain the existence of almost periodic solutions of this class of networks. Then, we design a state feedback and an impulsive controller, and construct a suitable Lyapunov function to study the problem of global exponential almost periodic synchronization for the drive-response systems considered. At the end of the paper, we provide an example to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

Reinforcement learning (RL) constitutes an effective method of controlling dynamic systems without prior knowledge. One of the most important and difficult problems in RL is the improvement of data efficiency. Probabilistic inference for learning control (PILCO) is a state-of-the-art data-efficient framework that uses a Gaussian process to model dynamic systems. However, it only focuses on optimizing cumulative rewards and does not consider the accuracy of a dynamic model, which is an important factor for controller learning. To further improve the data efficiency of PILCO, we propose its active exploration version (AEPILCO) that utilizes information entropy to describe samples. In the policy evaluation stage, we incorporate an information entropy criterion into long-term sample prediction. Through the informative policy evaluation function, our algorithm obtains informative policy parameters in the policy improvement stage. Using the policy parameters in the actual execution produces an informative sample set; this is helpful in learning an accurate dynamic model. Thus, the AEPILCO algorithm improves data efficiency by learning an accurate dynamic model by actively selecting informative samples based on the information entropy criterion. We demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for several challenging controller problems involving a cart pole, a pendubot, a double pendulum, and a cart double pendulum. The AEPILCO algorithm can learn a controller using fewer trials compared to PILCO. This is verified through theoretical analysis and experimental results.

Network models aim to explain patterns of empirical relationships based on mechanisms that operate under various principles for establishing and removing links. The principle of preferential attachment forms a basis for the well-known Barabási–Albert model, which describes a stochastic preferential attachment process where newly added nodes tend to connect to the more highly connected ones. Previous work has shown that a wide class of such models are able to recreate power law degree distributions. This paper characterizes the cumulative degree distribution of the Barabási–Albert model as an invariant set and shows that this set is not only a global attractor, but it is also stable in the sense of Lyapunov. Stability in this context means that, for all initial configurations, the cumulative degree distributions of subsequent networks remain, for all time, close to the limit distribution. We use the stability properties of the distribution to design a semi-supervised technique for the problem of anomalous event detection on networks.

In the light of regularized dynamic time warping kernels, this paper re-considers the concept of a time elastic centroid for a set of time series. We derive a new algorithm based on a probabilistic interpretation of kernel alignment matrices. This algorithm expresses the averaging process in terms of stochastic alignment automata. It uses an iterative agglomerative heuristic method for averaging the aligned samples, while also averaging the times of their occurrence. By comparing classification accuracies for 45 heterogeneous time series data sets obtained by first nearest centroid/medoid classifiers, we show that (i) centroid-based approaches significantly outperform medoid-based ones, (ii) for the data sets considered, our algorithm, which combines averaging in the sample space and along the time axes, emerges as the most significantly robust model for time-elastic averaging with a promising noise reduction capability. We also demonstrate its benefit in an isolated gesture recognition experiment and its ability to significantly reduce the size of training instance sets. Finally, we highlight its denoising capability using demonstrative synthetic data. Specifically, we show that it is possible to retrieve, from few noisy instances, a signal whose components are scattered in a wide spectral band.

Automatic classification methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and self-organizing maps (SOMs), are applied to allophone analysis based on recorded speech. A list of 650 words was created for that purpose, containing positionally and/or contextually conditioned allophones. For each word, a group of 16 native and non-native speakers were audio-video recorded, from which seven native speakers’ and phonology experts’ speech was selected for analyses. For the purpose of the present study, a sub-list of 103 words containing the English alveolar lateral phoneme /l/ was compiled. The list includes ‘dark’ (velarized) allophonic realizations (which occur before a consonant or at the end of the word before silence) and 52 ‘clear’ allophonic realizations (which occur before a vowel), as well as voicing variants. The recorded signals were segmented into allophones and parametrized using a set of descriptors, originating from the MPEG 7 standard, plus dedicated time-based parameters as well as modified MFCC features proposed by the authors. Classification methods such as ANNs, the kNN and the SOM were employed to automatically detect the two types of allophones. Various sets of features were tested to achieve the best performance of the automatic methods. In the final experiment, a selected set of features was used for automatic evaluation of the pronunciation of dark /l/ by non-native speakers.

The aim of this paper is to investigate dense linear algebra algorithms on shared memory multicore architectures. The design and implementation of a parallel tiled WZ factorization algorithm which can fully exploit such architectures are presented. Three parallel implementations of the algorithm are studied. The first one relies only on exploiting multithreaded BLAS (basic linear algebra subprograms) operations. The second implementation, except for BLAS operations, employs the OpenMP standard to use the loop-level parallelism. The third implementation, except for BLAS operations, employs the OpenMP task directive with the depend clause. We report the computational performance and the speedup of the parallel tiled WZ factorization algorithm on shared memory multicore architectures for dense square diagonally dominant matrices. Then we compare our parallel implementations with the respective LU factorization from a vendor implemented LAPACK library. We also analyze the numerical accuracy. Two of our implementations can be achieved with near maximal theoretical speedup implied by Amdahl’s law.