Search

This paper proposes a parallel recommendation engine, PRECOM, for traffic control operations to mitigate congestion of road traffic in the metropolitan area. The recommendation engine can provide, in real-time, effective and optimal control plans to traffic engineers, who are responsible for manually calibrating traffic signal plans especially when a road network suffers from heavy congestion due to disruptive events. With the idea of incorporating expert knowledge in the operation loop, the PRECOM system is designed to include three conceptual components: an artificial system model, a computational experiment module, and a parallel execution module. Meanwhile, three essential algorithmic steps are implemented in the recommendation engine: a candidate generator based on a graph model, a spatiotemporal ranker, and a context-aware re-ranker. The PRECOM system has been deployed in the city of Hangzhou, China, through both offline and online evaluation. The experimental results are promising, and prove that the recommendation system can provide effective support to the current human-in-the-loop control scheme in the practice of traffic control, operations, and management.

Background: Fast and reliable fault detection methods are the main technical challenges faced by photovoltaic grid-connected systems through Modular Multilevel Converters (MMC) during the development. Objective: Existing fault detection methods have many problems, such as the inability of non-linear elements to form accurate analytical expressions, the difficulty of setting protection thresholds, and the long detection time. Method: Aiming at the problems above, this paper proposes a rapid fault detection method for photovoltaic grid-connected systems based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Results: The phase-to-mode transformation is used to extract the fault feature quantity to get the RNN input data. The hidden layer unit of the RNN is trained through a large amount of simulation data, and the opening instruction is given to the DC circuit breaker. Conclusion: The simulation verification results show that the proposed fault detection method has the advantage of faster detection speed without difficulties in setting and complicated calculation.

Drying is a widespread concept in the food industry, typically used to convert a surplus crop into a shelf-stable commodity. With advancement of technology, however, there is interest in moving forward from the traditional convective air drying that is most widely used today for foods, to maintain at a very high level the nutritional and organoleptical properties of the initial fresh product. Freeze-drying (FD) produces the highest quality food product obtainable by any drying method, but it is considered the most expensive operation for manufacturing a dehydrated product owing to high energy consumption and high costs of both operation and maintenance. Microwave freeze-drying (MFD) and atmospheric freeze-drying (AFD) have been developed to reduce the FD energy consumption. The product quality of these two drying methods is similar to FD, due to removal of water content in materials by sublimation in both MFD and AFD. Although a significant amount of scientific research has been carried out in the...

Microencapsulation is widely used to minimize the oxidation of fish oil products. This study compared the effects of different drying methods, for example, spray drying (SD), freeze drying (FD), and spray freeze drying (SFD) on the microencapsulation of fish oil. Spray drying (SD) is the most common method for producing fish oil microcapsules, and it has low operation cost and short processing time, while the product yield and quality are poor. Freeze drying (FD) can be used to produce oil microcapsules with high quality, but it takes long time and high overall cost for drying. Spray freeze drying (SFD) is a new method for the preparation of microcapsules, which combines the SD and FD processes to obtain high quality powder. The yield of powder reached 95.07% along with porous structure by SFD. The stability and slow-release property of SFD products were better than those of SD and FD, which showed that SFD improved product storage stability and potential digestibility.