Volume 4 (2014): Edizione 3 (July 2014)

This work presents a Genetic Fuzzy Controller (GFC), called Genetic Programming Fuzzy Inference System for Control tasks (GPFIS-Control). It is based on Multi-Gene Genetic Programming, a variant of canonical Genetic Programming. The main characteristics and concepts of this approach are described, as well as its distinctions from other GFCs. Two benchmarks application of GPFIS-Control are considered: the Cart-Centering Problem and the Inverted Pendulum. In both cases results demonstrate the superiority and potentialities of GPFIS-Control in relation to other GFCs found in the literature.

Based on the area between the curve of the membership function of a fuzzy number and the horizontal real axis, a characteristic as a new numerical index, called the expansion center, for fuzzy numbers is proposed. An intuitive and reasonable ranking method for fuzzy numbers based on this characteristic is also established. The new ranking method is applicable for decision making and data analysis in fuzz environments. An important criterion of the goodness for ranking fuzzy numbers, the geometric intuitivity, is also introduced. It guarantees coinciding with the natural ordering of the real numbers.

Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) variants have become popular in recent years. The main idea of these adaptive PSO variants is that they adaptively change their search behavior during the optimization process based on information gathered during the run. Adaptive PSO variants have shown to be able to solve a wide range of difficult optimization problems efficiently and effectively. In this paper we propose a Repulsive Self-adaptive Acceleration PSO (RSAPSO) variant that adaptively optimizes the velocity weights of every particle at every iteration. The velocity weights include the acceleration constants as well as the inertia weight that are responsible for the balance between exploration and exploitation. Our proposed RSAPSO variant optimizes the velocity weights that are then used to search for the optimal solution of the problem (e.g., benchmark function). We compare RSAPSO to four known adaptive PSO variants (decreasing weight PSO, time-varying acceleration coefficients PSO, guaranteed convergence PSO, and attractive and repulsive PSO) on twenty benchmark problems. The results show that RSAPSO achives better results compared to the known PSO variants on difficult optimization problems that require large numbers of function evaluations.

Accurately forecasting the demand of critical stocks is a vital step in the planning of a military operation. Demand prediction techniques, particularly autocorrelated models, have been adopted in the military planning process because a large number of stocks in the military inventory do not have consumption and usage rates per platform (e.g., ship). However, if an impending military operation is (significantly) different from prior campaigns then these prediction models may under or over estimate the demand of critical stocks leading to undesired operational impacts. To address this, we propose an approach to improve the accuracy of demand predictions by combining autocorrelated predictions with cross-correlated demands of items having known per-platform usage rates. We adopt a data mining approach using sequence rule mining to automatically determine cross-correlated demands by assessing frequently co-occurring usage patterns. Our experiments using a military operational planning system indicate a considerable reduction in the prediction errors across several categories of military supplies.

In this work is presented a hybrid intelligent model of supervision based on Evolutionary Computation and Fuzzy Systems to improve the performance of the Oil Industry, which is used for Operational Diagnosis in petroleum wells based on the gas lift (GL) method. The model is composed by two parts: a Multilayer Fuzzy System to identify the operational scenarios in an oil well and a genetic algorithm to maximize the production of oil and minimize the flow of gas injection, based on the restrictions of the process and the operational cost of production.

Additionally, the first layers of the Multilayer Fuzzy System have specific tasks: the detection of operational failures, and the identification of the rate of gas that the well requires for production. In this way, our hybrid intelligent model implements supervision and control tasks.