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Fault diagnosis of rotary machinery plays a significant role in the prognostic and health management system, which aims to identify the root causes of system failures and provide effective information for prognostics and maintenance. Recently, Lempel–Ziv complexity (LZC) method has been employed for fault diagnosis of rotary machinery. However, one actual problem is that LZC fails to account for the multiscale information inherent in measured vibration signals. We first introduce a method to compute the multi-scale LZC for a signal. However, the variance of LZC values becomes larger as the scale factor increases. To solve this actual problem, this paper proposes refined composite multi-scale Lempel-Ziv complexity (RCMLZC) to estimate the complexity. We find that the proposed RCMLZC method consistently yields better performance when analyzing three simulated noisy and impulsive signals. Based on RCMLZC, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method is designed to recognize various fault types of rotating machinery. Comparative experiments are performed to confirm the effectiveness of proposed method including single fault and compound fault working conditions. Experimental results indicate that RCMLZC is more accurate than multi-scale LZC, multi-scale entropy, and LZC in extracting fault features from vibration signal and that RCMLZC performs best to recognize the various fault types of rotary machinery.

In this article, a fault diagnosis scheme based on multiscale diversity entropy (MDE) and extreme learning machine (ELM) is presented. First, a novel entropy method called diversity entropy (DE) is proposed to quantify the dynamical complexity. DE utilizes the distribution of cosine similarity between adjacent orbits to track the inside pattern change, resulting in better performance in complexity estimation. Then, the proposed DE is extended to multiscale analysis called MDE for a comprehensive feature description by combining with the coarse gaining process. Third, the obtained features using MDE are fed into the ELM classifier for pattern identification of rotating machinery. The effectiveness of the proposed MDE method is verified using simulated signals and two experimental signals collected from the bearing test and the dual-rotator of the aeroengine test. The analysis results show that our proposed method has the highest classification accuracy compared with three existing approaches: sample entropy, fuzzy entropy, and permutation entropy.

To understand surrounding scenes accurately, the semantic segmentation of images is vital in autonomous driving tasks, such as navigation, and route planning. Currently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely employed in semantic segmentation to perform precise prediction in the dense pixel level. A recent trend in network design is the stacking of small convolution kernels. In this work, small convolution kernels (3 × 3) are decomposed into complementary convolution kernels (1 × 3 + 3 × 1, 3 × 1 + 1 × 3), the complementary small convolution kernels perform better in the classification and location tasks of semantic segmentation. Subsequently, a complementary convolution residual network (CCRN) is proposed to improve the speed and accuracy of semantic segmentation. To further locate the edge of objects precisely, A coupled Gaussian conditional random field (G-CRF) is utilized for CCRN post-processing. Proposal approach achieved 81.8% and 73.1% mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) on PASCAL VOC-2012 test set and Cityscapes test set, respectively.

In this article, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method based on multiscale symbolic Lempel-Ziv (MSLZ) is proposed to identify several faults of railway vehicle systems (RVSs). The proposed MSLZ is essentially for the purpose of estimating the irregularity of a given time series. In the proposed MSLZ method, the symbolization and multiscale techniques are combined with Lempel–Ziv (LZ) to enhance its feature extraction ability. First, the symbolization can facilitate LZ to remove the noises and reserve the fault information. Second, multiscale analysis can extend LZ to multiple time scales, which can further enhance the description ability of dynamic characteristics. Using numerical data and experimental signals collected from RVSs, the performance of the MSLZ method is demonstrated to be sensitive to periodical impulses and robust to environmental noise. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that MSLZ has superiority in extracting fault information of the RVS compared with LZ, symbolic LZ, and multiscale LZ methods.

An energy deviation settlement (EDS) mechanism has been proposed to settle the deviation between consumption and energy contracts in China's forward electricity market. Due to high EDS costs of electricity retailers, a deviation mutual insurance (DMI) mechanism is put forward, representing an option for electricity retailers to reduce the deviation through contract transfer. Given this background, an optimal alliance strategy is proposed to maximize the utility of different types of individual electricity retailers. The alliance income model considers the EDS cost reduction and the cooperation cost analyzed based on transaction cost theory (TCT). An improved income allocation method, which considers distribution indexes selected by game theory and resource dependence theory (RDT), is proposed to ensure the comprehensive and reasonable allocation of alliance income. Considering the expected income and financial risk, an evaluation model using conditional value at risk (CVaR) as the financial risk assessment indicator is presented to measure the stability of alliances. Simulations based on data from a provincial electricity market in China illustrate that the EDS costs of retailers can be reduced by selecting appropriate partners for alliance. In addition, the proposed alliance income allocation method is more reasonable and more targeted than the cooperative game-based methods.

Rotating machinery is widely applied in industrial applications. Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is vital in manufacturing system, which can prevent catastrophic failure and reduce financial losses. Recently, Deep Learning (DL)-based fault diagnosis method becomes a hot topic. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is an effective DL method to extract the features of raw data automatically. This paper develops a fault diagnosis method using CNN for InfRared Thermal (IRT) image. First, IRT technique is utilized to capture the IRT images of rotating machinery. Second, the CNN is applied to extract fault features from the IRT images. In the end, the obtained features are fed into the Softmax Regression (SR) classifier for fault pattern identification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using two different experimental data. Results show that the proposed method has a superior performance in identification various faults on rotor and bearings comparing with other deep learning models and traditional vibration-based method. Keywords: Convolutional neural network, Feature extraction, Infrared thermography (IRT), Intelligent fault diagnosis, Rotating machinery

A Data Processing Network (DPN) streams massive volumes of data collected and stored by the network to multiple processing units to compute desired results in a timely fashion. Due to ever-increasing traffic, distributed cache nodes can be deployed to store hot data and rapidly deliver them for consumption. However, prior work on caching policies has primarily focused on the potential gains in network performance, e.g., cache hit ratio and download latency, while neglecting the impact of cache on data processing and consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, DeepChunk, which leverages deep Q-learning for chunk-based caching in wireless DPN. We show that cache policies must be optimized for both network performance during data delivery and processing efficiency during data consumption. Specifically, DeepChunk utilizes a model-free approach by jointly learning limited network, data streaming, and processing statistics at runtime and making cache update decisions under the guidance of deep Q-learning. It enables a joint optimization of multiple objectives including chunk hit ratio, processing stall time, and object download time while being self-adaptive under the time-varying workload and network conditions. We build a prototype implementation of DeepChunk with Ceph, a popular distributed object storage system. Based on real-world Wifi and 4G traces, our extensive experiments and evaluation demonstrate significant improvement, i.e., 52% increase in total reward and 68% decrease in processing stall time, over a number of baseline caching policies.

Industries across the globe are under growing pressure to rethink and redesign their supply chain operations to maintain their competitive advantage. The supplier selection process in supply chain management holds a pivotal position in its exploration of new strategies to stay competitive in global markets. This study considers supplier selection with two different strategic perspectives, including lean and agile. Selecting suppliers based on their leagile practices helps the focal industries to make their supply chain operations healthier, especially if the focal industry is a major supplier of multinational companies. China is considered as a case context in this study with the application of textile sectors since this country occupies the top position with regard to exports. The common criteria involved in leagile supplier selection were collected from existing literature resources and were fine-tuned with insights from field experts. Further, the case industrial managers also assisted with the evaluation of the influential criteria for the leagile supplier selection process. Based on the replies and the assistance of a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory tool, the most influential criterion and interdependencies among other criteria were identified. This study helps industrial managers to evaluate their suppliers based on the resultant influential criterion and, further, it strengthens the global supply chains with agility and robustness.

In China, under the planning-market double-track mechanism implemented on the generation side of electricity, unreasonable market-oriented power generation proportion may lead to unnecessary vicious competition and market price changes, and it is against the will of power exchange (PX). Given this background, in this study, a bi-level model for planning-market electricity allocation that considers the bidding game of generation companies is proposed for a smooth transition of power system reform. In the upper level of the model, the proportion of planned electricity is optimized by PX to minimize the average social electricity purchase price. In the lower level of the model, considering the impact of market power on the bidding strategy of generation companies, the bidding strategy of generation companies set as price makers is proposed using the residual demand curve analysis method, while the price takers adopt the lowest bidding strategy. Simulations based on data from a provincial electricity market in China illustrate that the proposed model can effectively reflect the impact of market-oriented electricity proportion on market power and market-clearing price, thus providing a quantitative basis for PX to determine the proportion of market-oriented electricity in total electricity consumption.

On the basis of the idea that the injecting energy will improve the conditions for the formation of Cooper pairs, a smart meta-superconductor (SMSC) was prepared by doping luminescent nanocomposite Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag in MgB2. To improve the superconducting transition temperature (TC) of the MgB2-based superconductor, two types of Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag, which has the strong luminescence characteristic, with different sizes were prepared and marked as m-Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag and n-Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag. MgB2 SMSC was prepared through an ex situ process. Results show that when the dopant content was fixed at 2.0 wt.%, the TC of MgB2 SMSC increased initially then decreased with the increase in the Ag content in the dopant. When the Ag content is 5%, the TC of MgB2 SMSC was 37.2–38.0 K, which was similar to that of pure MgB2. Meanwhile, the TC of MgB2 SMSC doped with n-Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag increased initially then decreased basically with the increase in the content of n-Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag, in which the Ag content is fixed at 5%. The TC of MgB2 SMSC doped with 0.5 wt.% n-Y2O3:Eu3+/Ag was 37.6–38.4 K, which was 0.4 K higher than that of pure MgB2. It is thought that the doping luminescent nanocomposite into the superconductor is a new means to improve the TC of SMSC.

Accurately determining the network energy consumption of each software principal when multiple ones are active is the key to mobile energy optimization. Tail energy accounting, which attributes tail energy to individual software principals, remains an open problem. Besides, tail energy has also become a major energy drain, especially in mobile ad modules that generate frequent, intermittent network traffics by on-demand ad downloading. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for mobile ad prefetching and energy optimization, based on a novel tail energy accounting policy using cooperative game theory. In particular, we maximize the sum of deadline- and energy-aware ad utility, by jointly determining apps’ aggressiveness in ad prefetching. The proposed tail energy accounting not only characterizes the energy profile of each app's ad module, a crucial input in energy optimization, but also enables an efficient solution by decoupling decision making of individual apps. The proposed framework is implemented on Android with negligible performance/network overhead. Using real-world apps and usage traces, we demonstrate a significant reduction in mobile network energy consumption by up to 45 percent compared with existing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first fully implemented ad management system transparent to apps and ad ecosystem.

Superionic conductors, which exhibit liquid-like phonon transport but crystal-like carrier transport, have attracted great attention and broad research interest in the thermoelectric community. Ag2Te is a superionic conductor; however, its small band gap and large Ag vacancy formation energy impede its application as a prominent p-type thermoelectric material. In this work, synergistic optimization of the thermoelectric performance of Ag2Te through Cu substitution is realized through a combination of experimental and theoretical efforts. For the electrical transport, Cu substitution systematically increases the band gap of Ag2Te and reduces the cation vacancy formation energy. These two beneficial effects simultaneously increase the electrical conductivity and suppress the bipolar effect, thereby greatly enhancing the p-type electrical transport properties of Ag2Te. For the thermal transport, alloying Cu2Te with Ag2Te significantly reduces the thermal conductivity through not only point defect scattering but also softening of the interatomic interactions. The latter is attributed to the relatively small Cu atoms vibrating in the oversized 8c sites. This two-fold optimization results in maximum thermoelectric figure of merit zT values of over 1.3 at 773 K for both Ag1.2Cu0.8Te and AgCuTe, demonstrating the great potential of Ag2−xCuxTe as a promising p-type thermoelectric material system. Keywords: Ag2Te, Band gap, Carrier concentration, Thermoelectric material

Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is crucial to improve safety, enhance reliability and reduce maintenance cost. The manual feature extraction and selection of traditional fault diagnosis methods depend on signal processing skills and expert experience, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. As a typical intelligent fault diagnosis method, the convolutional neural network automatically learns features from original data, but it is extremely difficult to design and train a deep network architecture. This paper proposes a fault diagnosis scheme combined of hierarchical symbolic analysis (HSA) and convolutional neural network (CNN), which achieves laborsaving and timesaving preliminary feature extraction and accomplishes automatically feature learning with simplified network architecture. Firstly, hierarchical symbolic analysis is employed to extract features from original signals. The extracted features are able to identify different health conditions under various operating conditions. Then, convolutional neural network instead of human labor is used to learn the complex non-linear relationship between features and health conditions automatically. The architecture of CNN diagnosis model is simple and convenient to implement. Finally, a centrifugal pump dataset and a motor bearing dataset are adopted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The diagnosis results show that the proposed method exhibits superior performance compared with shallow methods and deep learning methods.

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the widely researched areas in transportation science, mainly due to the potential cost savings and service improvement opportunities which brings to organizations involved in physical distribution of goods. In this paper, we develop a multi-depot green vehicle routing problem (MDGVRP) by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs, time and emission, and then, apply an improved ant colony optimization (IACO) algorithm that aims to efficiently solve the problem. The IACO model developed in this research uses an innovative approach in updating the pheromone that results in better solutions. The results achieved through the IACO demonstrate satisfying performance, which have higher solution quality when compared to the conventional ACO. The IACO algorithm used in this paper demonstrated a good level of responsiveness and simplicity when solving MDGVRP with multiple objectives.

Vapor–liquid equilibrium (VLE) data for the systems 2-propanol + water + calcium chloride, 2-propanol + water + magnesium chloride, 2-propanol + water + calcium nitrate, and 2-propanol + water + ma...

This paper assesses the interrelationships between hazards/risks (considered as barriers) for the effective implementation of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) measures using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). We investigate within and among hazard/risk classes and formulate a structural model that identifies and prioritizes their levels. Mitigation strategies for the identified barriers make the research outcome more useful and applicable. Results reveal that insulation failure, barrier (B7), is the most influential hazard; hence, it must be addressed first for the effective implementation of OHS measures in coal-fired thermal power plants. The second barrier in the ISM hierarchy, (B6) fire (mill/pool/jet), and additional hazards and risks require further assessment.

This paper presents a novel signal processing scheme by combining an improved Vold-Kalman filter and the multi-scale sample entropy (IVKF-MSSE) for planetary gearboxes under non-stationary working conditions. In this scheme, we propose a method based on the characteristic frequency ratio (CFR) to select the VKF bandwidth. First, a CFR is adopted to select a VKF bandwidth with the largest CFR value as the optimal VKF bandwidth. Second, IVKF is used to extract fault-induced information under time-varying speed conditions. Because an optimal bandwidth is used in VKF, the feature extraction capability of VKF is enhanced. Then, the MSSE is applied to extract gearbox fault features. After that, the Laplacian score (LS) approach is introduced to refine the fault features by sorting the scale factors. At the end, the selected features are fed into the least square support vector machine (LSSVM) for effective fault pattern identification. Simulation and experimental vibration signals are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the auto-regressive AR-MSSE, VKF-MSSE and EEMD-MSSE in identifying fault types of planetary gearboxes.

A novel hybrid fault diagnosis method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition and weighted adaptive multi-scale morphological analysis (WAMMA) is proposed to detect the early damage of gearboxes. In this method, we propose a characteristic frequency ratio (CFR) method to determine the weighted coefficient for each scale of AMMA. First, multiple scales are obtained using the AMMA method. Second, the weighted coefficient of each scale in the AMMA method is calculated using the CFR. Third, the final results can be obtained by multiplying the weighted coefficients and filtering results with all scales. Since the performance of each scale of AMMA is evaluated using the CFR, the demodulation ability can be effectively improved. However, the WAMMA is easily disturbed by heavy noise when extracting early fault feature directly. A method combined EEMD with the WAMMA is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified using two experimental vibration signals of gearboxes. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has a superior performance in the extraction of weak fault characteristics of gearboxes in comparison with the WAMMA and EEMD-AMMA methods.

Data-driven fault diagnosis has been a hot topic in recent years with the development of machine learning techniques. However, the prerequisite that the training data and the test data should follow an identical distribution prevents the conventional data-driven diagnosis methods from being applied to the engineering diagnosis problems. To tackle this dilemma, cross-domain fault diagnosis using knowledge transfer strategy is becoming popular in the past five years. The diagnosis methods based on transfer learning aim to build models that can perform well on target tasks by leveraging knowledge from semantic related but distribution different source domains. This paper for the first time summarizes the state-of-art cross-domain fault diagnosis research works. The literatures are introduced from three different viewpoints: research motivations, cross-domain strategies, and application objects. In addition, the corresponding open-source fault datasets and several future directions are also presented. The survey provides readers a framework for better understanding and identifying the research status, challenges and future directions of cross-domain fault diagnosis.

Multiscale symbolic dynamic entropy (MSDE) has been recently proposed to characterize the dynamical behavior of time series, which has merits of high computational efficiency and robustness to noise comparing with multiscale sample entropy (MSE) and multiscale permutation entropy (MPE). However, the variance of the MSDE values increases as the length of a time series becomes shorter using multiscale analysis. To address this shortcoming, a new method, namely refined composite multi-scale symbolic dynamic entropy (RCMSDE), is proposed to extract the fault information of rotating machinery. Then, Laplacian score (LS) is utilized to reduce the dimension of eigenvectors. In the end, the selected features are taken as the input of the improved support vector machine based on binary tree (ISVM-BT) for fault type identification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using both the simulation and two experimental tests. Results demonstrate that the proposed method generates highest classification accuracy in comparison with existing methods such as MSDE, refined composite multiscale sample entropy (RCMSE) and refined composite multiscale permutation entropy (RCMPE).

A smart meta-superconductor Bi(Pb)SrCaCuO (B(P)SCCO) may increase the critical transition temperature (TC) of B(P)SCCO by electroluminescence (EL) energy injection of inhomogeneous phases. However, the increase amplitude ΔTC (ΔTC=TC−TC,pure) of TC is relatively small. In this study, a smart meta-superconductor B(P)SCCO with different matrix sizes was designed. Three kinds of raw materials with different particle sizes were used, and different series of Y2O3:Sm3+, Y2O3, Y2O3:Eu3+, and Y2O3:Eu3++Ag-doped samples and pure B(P)SCCO were prepared. Results indicated that the TC of the Y2O3 or Y2O3:Sm3+ non-luminescent dopant doping sample is lower than that of pure B(P)SCCO. However, the TC of the Y2O3:Eu3++Ag or Y2O3:Eu3+ luminescent inhomogeneous phase doping sample is higher than that of pure B(P)SCCO. With the decrease of the raw material particle size from 30 to 5 μm, the particle size of the B(P)SCCO superconducting matrix in the prepared samples decreases, and the doping content of the Y2O3:Eu3++Ag or Y2O3:Eu3+ increases from 0.2% to 0.4%. Meanwhile, the increase of the inhomogeneous phase content enhances the ΔTC. When the particle size of raw material is 5 μm, the doping concentration of the luminescent inhomogeneous phase can be increased to 0.4%. At this time, the zero-resistance temperature and onset transition temperature of the Y2O3:Eu3++Ag doped sample are 4 and 6.3 K higher than those of pure B(P)SCCO, respectively.

Three-dimensional hand detection from a single RGB-D image is an important technology which supports many useful applications. Practically, it is challenging to robustly detect human hands in unconstrained environments because the RGB-D channels can be affected by many uncontrollable factors, such as light changes. To tackle this problem, we propose a 3D hand detection approach which improves the robustness and accuracy by adaptively fusing the complementary features extracted from the RGB-D channels. Using the fused RGB-D feature, the 2D bounding boxes of hands are detected first, and then the 3D locations along the z-axis are estimated through a cascaded network. Furthermore, we represent a challenging RGB-D hand detection dataset collected in unconstrained environments. Different from previous works which primarily rely on either the RGB or D channel, we adaptively fuse the RGB-D channels for hand detection. Specifically, evaluation results show that the D-channel is crucial for hand detection in unconstrained environments. Our RGB-D fusion-based approach significantly improves the hand detection accuracy from 69.1 to 74.1 comparing to one of the most state-of-the-art RGB-based hand detectors. The existing RGB- or D-based methods are unstable in unseen lighting conditions: in dark conditions, the accuracy of the RGB-based method significantly drops to 48.9, and in back-light conditions, the accuracy of the D-based method dramatically drops to 28.3. Compared with these methods, our RGB-D fusion based approach is much more robust without accuracy degrading, and our detection results are 62.5 and 65.9, respectively, in these two extreme lighting conditions for accuracy.

The health condition monitoring of rotating machinery can avoid the disastrous failure and guarantee the safe operation. The vibration-based fault diagnosis shows the most attractive character for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery (FDRM). Recently, Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC) has been investigated as an effective tool for FDRM. However, the LZC only performs single-scale analysis, which is not suitable to extract the fault features embedded in vibrational signal over multiple scales. In this paper, a novel complexity analysis algorithm, called hierarchical Lempel-Ziv complexity (HLZC), was developed to extract the fault characteristics of rotating machinery. The proposed HLZC method considers the fault information hidden in both low-frequency and high-frequency components, resulting in a more accurate fault feature extraction. The superiority of the proposed HLZC method in detecting the periodical impulses was validated by using simulated signals. Meanwhile, two experimental signals were utilized to prove the effectiveness of the proposed HLZC method in extracting fault information. Results show that the proposed HLZC method had the best diagnosing performance compared with LZC and multi-scale Lempel-Ziv complexity methods.

The entropy-based method has been demonstrated to be an effective approach to extract the fault features by estimating the complexity of signals, but how to remove the strong background noises in analyzing early weak impulsive signal remains unexplored. To solve this problem, this paper proposes symbolic fuzzy entropy (SFE) based on symbolic dynamic filtering and fuzzy entropy to eliminate the noises and improve the calculation efficiency. The main idea of SFE is to use symbolic dynamic filtering to remove the noise-related fluctuations while significantly simplifying the circulation calculation, thereby, generating better performance in resisting the background noises and high computation efficiency. The superiority of SFE is verified via two simulated signals and other three entropy methods. For comprehensive feature description, we further extend SFE into multiscale analysis by incorporating with the coarse gaining process, called MSFE. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MSFE method has the best performance in extracting weak fault characteristics compared with three existing MSE, MFE, and MPE methods.

Hand detection is a crucial pre-processing procedure for many human hand related computer vision tasks, such as hand pose estimation, hand gesture recognition, human activity analysis, and so on. However, reliably detecting multiple hands from cluttering scenes remains to be a challenging task because of complex appearance diversities of dexterous human hands (e.g., different hand shapes, skin colors, illuminations, orientations, and scales, etc.) in color images. To tackle this problem, an accurate hand detection method is proposed to reliably detect multiple hands from a single color image using a hybrid detection/reconstruction convolutional neural networks (CNN) framework, in which regions of hands are detected and appearances of hands are reconstructed in parallel by sharing features extracted from a region proposal layer, and the proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, it is observed that the generative adversarial network (GAN) could further boost the detection performance by generating more realistic hand appearances. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on public challenging hand detection benchmarks.

Supply chain performance evaluation problems are evaluated using data envelopment analysis. This paper proposes a fuzzy network epsilon-based data envelopment analysis for supply chain performance evaluation. In the common data envelopment analysis models which are used for evaluation of decision-maker units efficiency, there are several inputs and outputs. One of the bugs of such models is that the intermediate products and linking activities are overlooked. Considering these intermediate activities and products, the current study evaluates the performance of decision-maker units in an automotive supply chain. There are ten decision-maker units in the supply chain in which there are three suppliers, two manufacturers, two distributors, and four customers. Moreover, the overall efficiency of input-oriented (input-based) model and input-oriented divisional efficiency are calculated. In order to improve the efficiencies, the projections onto the frontiers are obtained by using the outputs of the solved model and Lingo software. In order to show the applicability of the proposed model, it is applied on automotive industry, as a case study, to evaluate supply chain performance. Then, the overall efficiencies of DMUs and each sections (divisions) of DMUs were calculated separately. Therefore, every organization can apply this evaluation method for improving the performance of alternative factors.

Early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is crucial to operating and maintenance cost reduction of the equipment with bearings. This paper aims to propose a novel early fault feature extraction method based on the proposed hierarchical symbol dynamic entropy (HSDE) and the binary tree support vector machine (BT-SVM). Multiscale symbolic dynamic entropy (MSDE) has been recently proposed to characterize the dynamical behavior of time series. MSDE has several merits comparing with multiscale sample entropy (MSE) and multiscale permutation entropy (MPE), such as high computational efficiency and robustness to noise. However, MSDE only utilizes the fault information in the low frequency components and consequently the fault information hidden in the high frequency components is discarded. To address this shortcoming, a new method, namely HSDE, is proposed to extract the fault information in the high frequency components. Then, the BT-SVM is utilized to automatically complete the fault type identification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using simulated and experimental vibration signals. Meanwhile, a comparison is conducted between MPE, hierarchical permutation entropy (HPE), MSE, hierarchical sample entropy (HSE), MSDE and HSDE. Results show that the proposed method performs best to recognize the early fault types of rolling bearings.

In this study, four 1/3-scale bridge column specimens were investigated both experimentally and numerically. The specimens consisted of two cast-in-place (CIP) reference columns and two pre...

The fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes is crucial to reduce the maintenance costs and economic losses. This paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis method based on adaptive multi-scale morphological filter (AMMF) and modified hierarchical permutation entropy (MHPE) to identify the different health conditions of planetary gearboxes. In this method, AMMF is firstly adopted to remove the fault-unrelated components and enhance the fault characteristics. Second, MHPE is utilized to extract the fault features from the denoised vibration signals. Third, Laplacian score (LS) approach is employed to refine the fault features. In the end, the obtained features are fed into the binary tree support vector machine (BT-SVM) to accomplish the fault pattern identification. The proposed method is numerically and experimentally demonstrated to be able to recognize the different fault categories of planetary gearboxes.

Product recovery, accompanied by cradle to cradle policies from the contemporary supply chain, becomes an essential element in meeting environmental compliance and waste management policies. Incorporation of reverse logistics into the traditional supply chains becomes a complementary factor for efficient product recovery. To begin with product recovery, consumers are encouraged to return their end-of-use/end-of-life products, and the steps of collecting and planning the movement of returned products are crucial decisions. The efficient planning of a cost effective recovery process in reverse logistics requires dealing with the uncertainty underlying in the quantity and quality of the returned products. In this paper, we propose establishing an initial collection point within a permissible radius of the customer zones to overcome some of the issues of uncertainty. The uncertainty in the quantity and quality of the returned products are modelled using fuzzy triangular numbers. To capture the real world conditions of the proposed problem, our model aims at maximizing the profit incurred in the recovery process in an uncertain environment. The model was solved with the help of fuzzy mathematical programming. The model is validated by a company case belonging to the manufacturing of electronic products. To increase the applicability of the product recovery process in the industry, we propose a recovery process for the planning horizon consisting of multi periods and multi products. The outcomes of the proposed model indicate that for the successful realisation of such network, customers need to be legally enforced to return their end of used products in the channels established for value recovery.

The inhomogeneous phase of a smart meta-superconductor has a great effect on its superconductivity. In this paper, the effect of concentration, dimensions, electroluminescence (EL) intensity, and distribution of the inhomogeneous phase on the superconducting critical temperature $$(T_{C})$$ has been systematically investigated. An ex situ solid sintering was utilized to prepare smart meta-superconducting $$\hbox {MgB}_{2}$$ doped with six kinds of electroluminescent materials, such as $$\hbox {YVO}_{4}{:}\hbox {Eu}^{3+}$$ and $$\hbox {Y}_{2}\hbox {O}_{3}{:}\hbox {Eu}^{3+}$$ flakes. Elemental mappings through energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) show that the inhomogeneous phase is comparatively uniformly dispersed around the $$\hbox {MgB}_{2}$$ particles; thus V, Y, and Eu were accumulated at a small area. The measurement results show that the optimum doping concentration of the meta-superconducting $$\hbox {MgB}_{2}$$ is 2.0 wt%. The offset temperature ( $$T_{C}^{{ off}}$$ ) of the sample doped with 2.0 wt% dopant A is 1.6 K higher than that of pure $$\hbox {MgB}_{2}$$ . The improvement in $$T_{C}^{{ off}}$$ is likely related to the sizes, thickness, and EL intensity of the inhomogeneous phase of $$\hbox {MgB}_{2}$$ smart meta-superconductor. This experiment provides a novel approach to enhance $$T_{C}$$ .

Despite rapid advances in the field of image denoising, heavy noise removal has remained an under-explored area. When the strength of noise becomes comparable to or even more dominating than that of signal, restoration of important structures from such heavily-contaminated images becomes more challenging. Existing model-based and learning-based image denoising techniques often cannot delivery satisfactory results, which call for new insights and algorithmic tools. In this paper, we propose to remove heavy noise with the help of similar images retrieved from datasets, which leads to a hybrid approach combining sparsity-based and learning-based methods. Specifically, the parametric sparse prior of underlying clean image is learned from the retrieved reference images and the input noisy image. Leveraging prior from the reference images, the estimated parametric model contains much more accurate information of image details. When compared against existing conventional methods, the proposed hybrid approach is more capable of restoring fine-detailed structures in the presence of heavy noise. Experimental results show that the proposed method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-art image denoising methods both subjectively and objectively.

Rolling bearings' operation under variable speed conditions exhibits complex time-varying modulations and spectral structures, resulting in difficulty in the fault diagnosis. In order to effectively remove the influence of the rotational speed and extract the fault characteristics, this paper develops a fault diagnosis scheme based on the Vold-Kalman filter (VKF), refined composite multi-scale fuzzy entropy (RCMFE), and Laplacian score (LS). In the proposed method, the VKF is first adopted to remove the fault-unrelated components and give a clear representation of the fault symptoms. Second, the RCMFE is applied to extract fault features from the denoised vibration signal. Third, the LS approach is introduced to refine the fault features by sorting the scale factors. In the end, the selected features are fed into the logistic regression to automatically complete the fault pattern identifications. The proposed method is experimentally demonstrated to be able to recognize the localized defect on the inner race, outer race, and rolling element under variable speed conditions.

Rotating machines have been widely used in industrial engineering. The fault diagnosis of rotating machines plays a vital important role to reduce the catastrophic failures and heavy economic loss. However, the measured vibration signal of rotating machinery often represents non-linear and non-stationary characteristics, resulting in difficulty in the fault feature extraction. As a statistical measure, entropy can quantify the complexity and detect dynamic change through taking into account the non-linear behavior of time series. Therefore, entropy can be served as a promising tool to extract the dynamic characteristics of rotating machines. Recently, many studies have applied entropy in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. This paper aims to investigate the applications of entropy for the fault characteristics extraction of rotating machines. First, various entropy methods are briefly introduced. Its foundation, application, and some improvements are described and discussed. The review is divided into eight parts: Shannon entropy, Rényi entropy, approximate entropy, sample entropy, fuzzy entropy, permutation entropy, and other entropy methods. In each part, we will review the applications using the original entropy method and the improved entropy methods, respectively. In the end, a summary and some research prospects are given.

The problem of industrial pollution has increased globally at presently. Countries across the globe are aware of the concept of sustainable implementation in industries from a local to the global level to reduce pollution. Recent research supported this by focusing on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) rather than Multinational Corporations (MNC). Sustainability development is a key to ensure control of the hazards and pollution in traditional activities. In India, many SMEs are involved in manufacturing varied products and services for customers. The auto component manufacturing sector is playing as an important role in the Indian economy by creating numerous job opportunities. Based on this, researchers gave special attention to auto components SMEs in sustainable development (SD) because of pollution which harms the environment. Analysis of SD is an essential activity for industries to ensure environmental improvement. Analyzing the indicators for SD helps confirm the development of sustainability in industries. However, analyzing the indicators for SD is a challenge for managers and needs detailed analysis and significant effort. Indicator analysis is a vague concept for managers who lack alternatives to evaluate SD in their industry. The aim of this present paper is to develop a set of measurement indicators for SD from literature. This paper, with the help of discussions with experts and Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) methodology analyzes sustainable development indicators in the auto components sectors. Fifteen SD indicators were considered for this study from a relevant literature background. These SD indicators indicate the industries’ sustainable development. Based on their interest, a questionnaire for this study was circulated among 35 leading auto components manufacturing SMEs in North India. This study will identify the influential indicator for SD based on experts' judgments through a pairwise comparison matrix. The results from the study clearly states that Indian auto component manufacturing industries believe that among the fifteen listed indicators, carbon management indicator helps in measuring sustainable development. Due to this reason, embedded or embodied carbon (SI2) indicator plays an influential role. Finally, the study concludes with insights about the future path of sustainability performance in a developing country like India.

The size and shape of functional micro/nanomaterials have crucial influence on their physical and chemical properties. The monoclinic Y4O(OH)9NO3 with nanosheets, submicrospheres, and microrods have been successfully prepared by a non-aqueous solvothermal method. The precursors Y4O(OH)9NO3 decompose into cubic Y2O3:Eu3+ phosphors after sintering at 800 °C for 2 h. The morphologies and sizes of Y2O3:Eu3+ particles can be easily controlled by changing the growth rates of various crystallographic facets during solvothermal process. With the increment of the rare-earth nitrates concentration, the morphologies transform from 2D nanosheets to sub-microspheres, and eventually to microrods. The bright red emission, owing to Eu3+ f-orbital transitions, can be easily observed under ultraviolet excitation. Furthermore, the dependence of Y2O3:Eu3+ luminescence performances on different morphologies are discussed in the present work.

First, an improved local mean decomposition (LMD) method called differential rational spline-based LMD (DRS) is developed for signal decomposition. Differential and integral operations are introduced in LMD, which can weaken the mode mixing problem. Meanwhile, an optimized rational spline interpolation is proposed to calculate the envelope functions aiming to reduce the large errors caused by moving average in the traditional LMD. A series of product functions (PFs) is obtained after the application of the proposed DRS-LMD. Then, Kullback–Leibler (K–L) divergence is adopted to select main PF components that contain most fault information. The machine fault can be easily identified from the amplitude spectrum of the selected PF component. The effectiveness of the proposed DRS-LMD and K–L strategy is tested on simulated vibration signals and experimental vibration signals. Results show that the proposed method can increase the decomposition accuracy of the signals and can be used to detect early faults on the gears and rolling bearings.

The non-contact alternating current (AC) impedance method is widely used in the study of electrochemical properties of cement-based materials,the instrument of this paper provide a new way for the study of pore structure of cement-based materials. Due to the loss of magnetic materials and the parasitic capacitance of measuring circuit, the ratio difference and phase difference of current sensor inevitably exit. Traditionally the standard resistor calibration method is used to determine the ratio error and phase error under different frequencies based on polynomial fitting (FT). In this paper, a machine-learning support vector machine (SVM) model is used to predict the calibration data with a small test sample. For the accuracy assessment, SVM model has the best comprehensive performance among FT, artificial neural network (ANN). The actual impedance test of typical cement-based materials under different frequencies is given and the results verify the excellent performance of SVM.

This paper presents a novel signal processing scheme, bandwidth empirical mode decomposition, and adaptive multiscale morphological analysis (BEMD-AMMA) for early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. In this scheme, we propose a bandwidth based method to select the best envelope interpolation method. First, multiple envelope algorithms are defined and separately subtracted from the original data to obtain the preintrinsic mode functions (PIMFs). Second, an IMF with the smallest frequency bandwidth is selected to be the optimal IMF (OIMF). Third, this OIMF is subtracted from the original signal, and then repeat the sifting process until the residual is a constant or monotonic. Since the OIMF has the smallest frequency bandwidth, the mode mixing phenomenon can be significantly weakened. After that the OIMFs with clear fault information are used to construct the main component of the original signal. Then, the AMMA is introduced to demodulate the constructed main component. Simulation and experimental vibration signals are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method outperforms EMD-AMMA, ensemble empirical mode decomposition-AMMA, and generalized empirical mode decomposition-empirical envelope demodulation in detecting early inner race fault.

Percussive-rotary drilling is an effective method for the hard rock drilling. As hydraulic and pneumatic hammers have many problems especially in the deep core drilling, a new electromagnetic hammer driven by a tube linear motor is introduced in this study. The study mainly covers the mechanical structure and electromagnetic design of the hammer, respectively. Due to the direct use of electric power, the electromagnetic hammer has the advantage of high efficiency while it must meet the minimal percussive energy requirement under the limitation of drill pipe diameter. In this study, the validity of electromagnetic design is verified through the finite-element analysis software Ansoft/Maxwell 2D and numerical calculation of electromagnetic force. The working temperature in deep down-hole is relatively high, the influence of high temperature in deep hole on the electromagnetic thrust of the linear motor is then analysed. A motion model of linear motor hammer is established to calculate and analyse the impact power and frequency under different conditions. The results show that the performance of linear motor hammer can reach or even exceed the one of same diameter hydraulic hammer, especially in the low-frequency range. The prototype test also confirms the validity of the design.

Health condition identification of planetary gearboxes is crucial to reduce the downtime and maximize productivity. This paper aims to develop a novel fault diagnosis method based on modified multi-scale symbolic dynamic entropy (MMSDE) and minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) to identify the different health conditions of planetary gearbox. MMSDE is proposed to quantify the regularity of time series, which can assess the dynamical characteristics over a range of scales. MMSDE has obvious advantages in the detection of dynamical changes and computation efficiency. Then, the mRMR approach is introduced to refine the fault features. Lastly, the obtained new features are fed into the least square support vector machine (LSSVM) to complete the fault pattern identification. The proposed method is numerically and experimentally demonstrated to be able to recognize the different fault types of planetary gearboxes.

Enhancing the critical temperature (T C ) is important not only to widen the practical applications but also to expand the theories of superconductivity. Inspired by the meta-material structure, we designed a smart meta-superconductor consisting of MgB2 microparticles and Y2O3/Eu3+ nanorods. In the local electric field, Y2O3/Eu3+ nanorods generate an electroluminescence (EL) that can excite MgB2 particles, thereby improving the T C by strengthening the electron–phonon interaction. An MgB2-based superconductor doped with one of four dopants of different EL intensities was prepared by an ex situ process. Results showed that the T C of MgB2 doped with 2 wt% Y2O3, which is not an EL material, is 33.1 K. However, replacing Y2O3 with Y2O3/Eu3+II, which displays a strong EL intensity, can improve the T C by 2.8 to 35.9 K, which is even higher than that of pure MgB2. The significant increment in T C results from the EL exciting effect. Apart from EL intensity, the micromorphology and degree of dispersion of the dopants also affected the T C . This smart meta-superconductor provides a new method to increase T C .

This paper presents a semantics-aware rule recommendation and enforcement (SARRE) system for taming information leakage on Android. SARRE leverages statistical analysis and a novel application of minimum path cover algorithm to identify system event paths from dynamic runtime monitoring. Then, an online recommendation system is developed to automatically assign a fine-grained security rule to each event path, capitalizing on both known security rules and application semantic information. The proposed SARRE system is prototyped on Android devices and evaluated using real-world malware samples and popular apps from Google Play spanning multiple categories. Our results show that SARRE achieves 93.8% precision and 96.4% recall in identifying the event paths, compared with tainting technique. Also, the average difference between rule recommendation and manual configuration is less than 5%, validating the effectiveness of the automatic rule recommendation. It is also demonstrated that by enforcing the recommended security rules through a camouflage engine, SARRE can effectively prevent information leakage and enable fine-grained protection over private data with very small performance overhead.

We consider the problem of optimally mapping an edge computing service that is modeled as a tree with multiple processing sub-tasks and data flows onto the underlying physical network. As new computing and data analytics applications require more complicated data processing structures, and different types of data (e.g., images, videos, and numbers) sensed at geographically distributed locations must be collected and processed to obtain a complex and comprehensive result, highly intelligent algorithms are needed to solve this challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a learning-based hierarchical service tree placement strategy that aims to optimize the net utility, defined as achieved utility minus network congestion. The key idea is to decouple a service tree into appropriate sub-trees each containing a single computing sub-task as well as associated data flows and to recursively leverage Q-learning to place each sub-tree while maintaining the dependencies of sub-tasks in the service tree structure. It enables a scalable solution for large networks with unknown arrival statistics and complex service structures. Numerical results show that our solution can significantly outperform baseline heuristics in online service tree placement.

Diagnosis of gearbox is crucial to prevent catastrophic failure and reduce financial losses. In this study, we introduce a novel fault diagnosis technique using the infrared thermography (IRT). The IRT-based techniques have merits of non-contact measurement and high-scalability. Since the convolutional neural network (CNN) is proven to be powerful in image processing, a fault diagnosis strategy is designed by combining the IRT and CNN. Then, the pattern identification is achieved by using softmax regression (SR) classifier. One experimental data is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results demonstrate that this diagnosis strategy can recognize gearbox with various oil-level faults. Furthermore, some important distinguishable areas of IRT images are marked for further focused research field.

A Data Processing Network (DPN) streams massive volumes of data collected and stored by the network to multiple processing units to compute desired results in a timely fashion. Due to ever-increasing traffic, distributed cache nodes can be deployed to store hot data and rapidly deliver them for consumption. However, prior work on caching policies has primarily focused on the potential gains in network performance, e.g., cache hit ratio and download latency, while neglecting the impact of cache on data processing and consumption.In this paper, we propose a novel framework, DeepChunk, which leverages deep Q-learning for chunk-based caching in DPN. We show that cache policies must be optimized for both network performance during data delivery and processing efficiency during data consumption. Specifically, DeepChunk utilizes a model-free approach by jointly learning limited network, data streaming, and processing statistics at runtime and making cache update decisions under the guidance of powerful deep Q-learning. It enables a joint optimization of multiple objectives including chunk hit ratio, processing stall time, and object download time while being self-adaptive under the time-varying workload and network conditions. We build a prototype implementation of DeepChunk with Ceph, a popular distributed object storage system. Our extensive experiments and evaluation demonstrate significant improvement, i.e., 43% in total reward and 39% in processing stall time, over a number of baseline caching policies.

Hand pose estimation is a critical technology of computer vision and human-computer interaction. Deep-learning methods require a considerable amount of tagged data. Accordingly, numerous labeled training data are required. This paper aims to generate depth hand images. Given a ground-truth 3D hand pose, the developed method can generate depth hand images. To be specific, a ground truth can be 3D hand poses with the hand structure contained, while the synthesized image has an identical size to that of the training image and a similar visual appearance to the training set. The developed method, inspired by the progress in the generative adversarial network (GAN) and image-style transfer, helps model the latent statistical relationship between the ground-truth hand pose and the corresponding depth hand image. The images synthesized using the developed method are demonstrated to be feasible for enhancing performance. On public hand pose datasets (NYU, MSRA, ICVL), comprehensive experiments prove that the developed method outperforms the existing works.

As an important machine component, the gearbox is widely used in industry for power transmission. Condition monitoring (CM) of a gearbox is critical to provide timely information for undertaking necessary maintenance actions. Massive research efforts have been made in the last two decades to develop vibration-based techniques. However, vibration-based methods usually include several inherent shortages including contact measurement, localized information, noise contamination, and high computation costs, making it difficult to be a cost-effective CM technique. In this paper, infrared thermal (IRT) images, which can contain information covering a large area and acquired remotely, are based on developing a cost-effective CM method. Moreover, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed to automatically process the raw IRT images for attaining more comprehensive feature parameters, which avoids the deficiency of incomplete information caused by various feature-extraction methods in vibration analysis. Thus, an IRT&ndash, CNN method is developed to achieve online remote monitoring of a gearbox. The performance evaluation based on a bevel gearbox shows that the proposed method can achieve nearly 100% correctness in identifying several common gear faults such as tooth pitting, cracks, and breakages and their compounds. It is also especially robust to ambient temperature changes. In addition, IRT also significantly outperforms its vibration-based counterparts.

Multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE) is a statistic indicator to detect nonlinear dynamic changes in time series, which has merits of high calculation efficiency, good robust ability, and independence from prior knowledge, etc. However, the performance of MPE is dependent on the parameter selection of embedding dimension and time delay. To complete the automatic parameter selection of MPE, a novel parameter optimization strategy of MPE is proposed, namely optimized multi-scale permutation entropy (OMPE). In the OMPE method, an improved Cao method is proposed to adaptively select the embedding dimension. Meanwhile, the time delay is determined based on mutual information. To verify the effectiveness of OMPE method, a simulated signal and two experimental signals are used for validation. Results demonstrate that the proposed OMPE method has a better feature extraction ability comparing with existing MPE methods.

A novel systematic framework, infrared thermography- (IRT-) based method, for rotating machinery fault diagnosis under nonstationary running conditions is presented in this paper. In this framework, IRT technique is first applied to obtain the thermograph. Then, the fault features are extracted using bag-of-visual-word (BoVW) from the IRT images. In the end, support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to automatically identify the fault patterns of rotating machinery. The effectiveness of proposed method is evaluated using lab experimental signal of rotating machinery. The diagnosis results show that the IRT-based method has certain advantages in classification rotating machinery faults under nonstationary running conditions compared with the traditional vibration-based method.