Digital Commons Network^™

Home Automation Proposal, Paul Parham, Nathan James, Bonnie Bachman

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

1.1 Objectives The objective for Phase 2 of the Motorola project is to propose a comprehensive home automation system that can be launched in the next one to two years. Currently, there are many entertainment, security, and home control devices on the market but no device that ties these systems together for consumers. The goal is to develop a system that can be easily installed, cost efficient, and able to provide genuine home automation to consumers.

Decentralized State Feedback And Near Optimal Adaptive Neural Network Control Of Interconnected Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems, Shahab Mehraeen, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, first a novel decentralized state feedback stabilization controller is introduced for a class of nonlinear interconnected discrete-time systems in affine form with unknown subsystem dynamics, control gain matrix, and interconnection dynamics by employing neural networks (NNs). Subsequently, the optimal control problem of decentralized nonlinear discrete-time system is considered with unknown internal subsystem and interconnection dynamics while assuming that the control gain matrix is known. For the near optimal controller development, the direct neural dynamic programming technique is utilized to solve the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation forward-in-time. The decentralized optimal controller design for each subsystem utilizes the critic-actor structure …

A Novel Real-Time Approach To Unified Power Flow Controller Validation, Keyou Wang, Mariesa Crow, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Stan Atcitty

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents the development of a real-time hardware/software laboratory to interface a soft real-time power system simulator with multiple unified power flow controllers (UPFC) via hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to study their dynamic responses and validate control and placement approaches. This paper describes a unique laboratory facility that enables large-scale, soft real-time power system simulation coupled with the true physical behavior of a UPFC as opposed to the controller response captured by many other real-time simulators. The HIL line includes a synchronous machine, a UPFC, and a programmable load to reproduce the physical dynamics of the UPFC sub-network.

Distributed Power Balancing For The Freedm System, Rav Akella, Fanjun Meng, Derek Ditch, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Mariesa Crow

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The FREEDM microgrid is a test bed for a smart grid integrated with Distributed Grid Intelligence (DGI) to efficiently manage the distribution and storage of renewable energy. Within the FREEDM system, DGI applies distributed algorithms in a unique way to achieve economically feasible utilization and storage of alternative energy sources in a distributed fashion. The FREEDM microgrid consists of residential or industrial nodes with each node running a portion of the DGI process called Intelligent Energy Management (IEM). Such IEM nodes within FREEDM coordinate among themselves to efficiently and economically manage their power generation, utility and storage. Among a variety …

Technical Target Setting In Qfd For Web Service Systems Using An Artificial Neural Network, Lianzhang Zhu, Xiaoqing Frank Liu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

There are at least two challenges with quality management of service-oriented architecture based web service systems: 1) how to link its technical capabilities with customer's needs explicitly to satisfy customers' functional and nonfunctional requirements; and 2) how to determine targets of web service design attributes. Currently, the first issue is not addressed and the second one is dealt with subjectively. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a quality management system, has found its success in improving quality of complex products although it has not been used for developing web service systems. In this paper, we analyze requirements for web services and their …

Nonlinear Control Of Facts Controllers For Damping Interarea Oscillations In Power Systems, Mahyar Zarghami, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper introduces a new nonlinear control of flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) controllers for the purpose of damping interarea oscillations in power systems. FACTS controllers consist of series, shunt, or a combination of series-shunt devices which are interfaced with the bulk power system through injection buses. Controlling the angle of these buses can effectively damp low frequency interarea oscillations in the system. The proposed control method is based on finding an equivalent reduced affine nonlinear system for the network from which the dominant machines are extracted based on dynamic coherency. It is shown that if properly selected, measurements obtained …

Environmental Obfuscation Of A Cyber Physical System - Vehicle Example, Jason Madden, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Anik Sinha

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are deeply embedded infrastructures that have significant cyber and physical components that interact with each other in complex ways. These interactions can violate a system's security policy, leading to unintended information flow. The physical portion of such systems is inherently observable, and, as such, many methods of preserving confidentiality are not applicable. This fundamental property of CPSs presents new security challenges. To illustrate this, a vehicle composed of an embedded computer system, its operator, and its environment show how information is disclosed to an observer that is watching from the outside. The example is made of up …

Enforcing Information Flow Security Properties In Cyber-Physical Systems: A Generalized Framework Based On Compensation, Thoshitha T. Gamage, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Thomas P. Roth

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a general theory of event compensation as an information flow security enforcement mechanism for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). The fundamental research problem being investigated is that externally observable events in modern CPSs have the propensity to divulge sensitive settings to adversaries, resulting in a confidentiality violation. This is a less studied yet emerging concern in modern system security. A viable method to mitigate such violations is to use information flow security based enforcement mechanisms since access control based security models cannot impose restrictions on information propagation. Further, the disjoint nature of security analysis is not appropriate for systems …

A Framework For Automated Enrichment Of Functionally Significant Inverted Repeats In Whole Genomes, Cyriac Kandoth, Fikret ErçAl, Ronald L. Frank

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: RNA transcripts from genomic sequences showing dyad symmetry typically adopt hairpin-like, cloverleaf, or similar structures that act as recognition sites for proteins. Such structures often are the precursors of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) sequences like microRNA (miRNA) and small-interfering RNA (siRNA) that have recently garnered more functional significance than in the past. Genomic DNA contains hundreds of thousands of such inverted repeats (IRs) with varying degrees of symmetry. But by collecting statistically significant information from a known set of ncRNA, we can sort these IRs into those that are likely to be functional.

Results: A novel method was developed to …

A Novel Approach To Interarea Oscillation Damping By Unified Power Flow Controllers Utilizing Ultracapacitors, Mahyar Zarghami, Mariesa Crow, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Yilu Liu, Stan Atcitty

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper discusses a novel approach for damping interarea oscillations in a bulk power network using multiple unified power flow controllers (UPFCs) utilizing ultracapacitors, also known more generally as electrochemical capacitors (ECs). In this paper, a new control is introduced to mitigate interarea oscillations by directly controlling the UPFCs' sending and receiving bus voltages that better utilizes the stored energy in the ECs. The results of this controller are compared with and without ECs. The proposed control provides better interarea oscillation mitigation when applied to multiple UPFCs in the 118-bus IEEE test system.

Design, Construction And Load Testing Of The Bridge On Arnault Branch, Washington County, Missouri Using Innovative Technologies, Dongming Yan, Genda Chen, Nestore Galati, Sahra Sedigh

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The superstructure and instrumentation designs of a three-span bridge are presented in this report. The three spans include a precast box-girder bridge, a precast deck on steel girder and a precast deck on concrete girder. They were designed to compare the performance of various bridge decks reinforced with fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) through field instrumentations. A wireless monitoring system was designed to facilitate the collection of field data after the completion of bridge construction. The collected data will allow the study of FRP bars and stay-in-place FRP grid systems.

Contribution-Based Priority Assessment In A Web-Based Intelligent Argumentation Network For Collaborative Software Development, Maithili Satyavolu

Masters Theses

"Decision making is an important aspect of the collaborative software development process which usually involves complex process of conflict resolution. Stakeholders approach decision making process from multiple perspectives and their priorities play a vital role in it. The priority assessment methods used in the argumentation process so far are usually static. Priorities remain constant throughout the decision making process. In order to make the collaborative system more closely replicate real-world scenarios, this work incorporates dynamic priority assessment into a web-based collaborative system which is based on intelligent computational argumentation. It evaluates priorities dynamically for each cycle of decision process based …

Novel Dynamic Representation And Control Of Power Systems With Facts Devices, Shahab Mehraeen, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

FACTS devices have been shown to be useful in damping power system oscillations. However, in large power systems, the FACTS control design is complex due to the combination of differential and algebraic equations required to model the power system. In this paper, a new method to generate a nonlinear dynamic representation of the power network is introduced to enable more sophisticated control design. Once the new representation is obtained, a back stepping methodology for the UPFC is utilized to mitigate the generator oscillations. Finally, the neural network approximation property is utilized to relax the need for knowledge of the power …

Impact Of Management Status, Gender, And Level Of Project Involvement On Corporate Governance In A Role-Based Enterprise Portal Environment, Daniel Augusto Pereira Brás Sequeira

Masters Theses

"The underlying objective of this research project is to investigate the impact of management status, gender, and level of project involvement on corporate governance in a role-based enterprise portal environment. This is achieved through a case study which included the development of a role-based enterprise portal site prototype assessed through surveys targeted at different stakeholders at the case company. Six hypotheses were formulated addressing the core research question. The outcomes of the hypotheses testing suggest employees' perceptions of role-based enterprise portal's effectiveness, usability, and corporate identity design are, in general, not influenced by the employees' management role, gender, and project …

Representation And Validation Of Domain And Range Restrictions In A Relational Database Driven Ontology Maintenance System, Patrick Garrett. Edgett

Masters Theses

"An ontology can be used to represent and organize the objects, properties, events, processes, and relations that embody an area of reality [1]. These knowledge bases may be created manually (by individuals or groups), and/or automatically using software tools, such as those developed for information retrieval and data mining. Recently, the National Science Foundation funded a large collaborative development project for the semi-automated construction of an ontology of amphibian anatomy (AmphibAnat [2]). To satisfy the extensive community curation requirements of that project, a generic, Web-based, multi-user, relational database ontology management system (RDBOM [3]) was constructed, based upon a novel theoretical …

Computational Methods For The Discovery And Analysis Of Genes And Other Functional Dna Sequences, Cyriac Kandoth

Doctoral Dissertations

"The need for automating genome analysis is a result of the tremendous amount of genomic data. As of today, a high-throughput DNA sequencing machine can run millions of sequencing reactions in parallel, and it is becoming faster and cheaper to sequence the entire genome of an organism. Public databases containing genomic data are growing exponentially, and hence the rise in demand for intuitive automated methods of DNA analysis and subsequent gene identification. However, the complexity of gene organization makes automation a challenging task, and smart algorithm design and parallelization are necessary to perform accurate analyses in reasonable amounts of time. …

Minimize End-To-End Delay Through Cross-Layer Optimization In Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks, Yibo Xu

Masters Theses

"End-to-end delay plays a very important role in wireless sensor networks. It refers to the total time taken for a single packet to be transmitted across a network from source to destination. There are many factors could affect the end-to-end delay, among them the routing path and the interference level along the path are the two basic elements that could have significant influence on the result of the end-to-end delay. This thesis presents a transmission scheduling scheme that minimizes the end-to-end delay when the node topology is given. The transmission scheduling scheme is designed based on integer linear programming and …

Content Based Image Retrieval For Bio-Medical Images, Vikas Nahar

Masters Theses

"Content Based Image Retrieval System (CBIR) is used to retrieve images similar to the query image. These systems have a wide range of applications in various fields. Medical subject headings, key words, and bibliographic references can be augmented with the images present within the articles to help clinicians to potentially improve the relevance of articles found in the querying process. In this research, image feature analysis and classification techniques are explored to differentiate images found in biomedical articles which have been categorized based on modality and utility. Examples of features examined in this research include: features based on different histograms …

Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Blast And Relaxed Threshold Rule Induction From Coverings, Leong Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

"Protein structure prediction has always been an important research area in bioinformatics and biochemistry. Despite the recent breakthrough of combining multiple sequence alignment information and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein secondary structure, the Q₃ accuracy of various computational prediction methods rarely has exceeded 75%; this status has changed little since 2003 when Rost stated that "the currently best methods reach a level around 77% three-state per-residue accuracy." The application of artificial neural network methods to this problem is revolutionary in the sense that those techniques employ the homologues of proteins for training and prediction. In this dissertation, a different …

Structure And Content Semantic Similarity Detection Of Extensible Markup Language Documents Using Keys, Waraporn Viyanon

Doctoral Dissertations

"XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) has become the fundamental standard for efficient data management and exchange. Due to the widespread use of XML for describing and exchanging data on the web, XML-based comparison is central issues in database management and information retrieval. In fact, although many heterogeneous XML sources have similar content, they may be described using different tag names and structures. This work proposes a series of algorithms for detection of structural and content changes among XML data. The first is an algorithm called XDoI (XML Data Integration Based on Content and Structure Similarity Using Keys) that clusters XML documents …

Etherannotate: A Transparent Malware Analysis Tool For Integrating Dynamic And Static Examination, Joshua Michael Eads

Masters Theses

"Software security researchers commonly reverse engineer and analyze current malicious software (malware) to determine what the latest techniques malicious attackers are utilizing and how to protect computer systems from attack. The most common analysis methods involve examining how the program behaves during execution and interpreting its machine-level instructions. However, modern malicious applications use advanced anti-debugger, anti-virtualization, and code packing techniques to obfuscate the malware's true activities and divert security analysts. Malware analysts currently do not have a simple method for tracing malicious code activity at the instruction-level in a highly undetectable environment. There also lacks a simple method for combining …

2-D Path Planning For Direct Laser Deposition Process, Swathi Routhu

Masters Theses

"The zigzag and offset path have been the two most popular path patterns for tool movement in machining process. Different from the traditional machining processes, the quality of parts produced by the metal deposition process is much more dependent upon the choice of deposition paths. Due to the nature of the metal deposition processes, various tool path patterns not only change the efficiency but also affect the deposition height, a critical quality for metal deposition process. This thesis presents the research conducted on calculating zigzag pattern to improve efficiency by minimizing the idle path. The deposition height is highly dependent …

A Pilot Study In An Application Of Text Mining To Learning System Evaluation, Nitsawan Katerattanakul

Masters Theses

"Text mining concerns discovering and extracting knowledge from unstructured data. It transforms textual data into a usable, intelligible format that facilitates classifying documents, finding explicit relationships or associations between documents, and clustering documents into categories. Given a collection of survey comments evaluating the civil engineering learning system, text mining technique is applied to discover and extract knowledge from the comments. This research focuses on the study of a systematic way to apply a software tool, SAS Enterprise Miner, to the survey data. The purpose is to categorize the comments into different groups in an attempt to identify "major" concerns from …

An Artificial Life Approach To Evolutionary Computation: From Mobile Cellular Algorithms To Artificial Ecosystems, Shivakar Vulli

Masters Theses

"This thesis presents a new class of evolutionary algorithms called mobile cellular evolutionary algorithms (mcEAs). These algorithms are characterized by individuals moving around on a spatial population structure. As a primary objective, this thesis aims to show that by controlling the population density and mobility in mcEAs, it is possible to achieve much better control over the rate of convergence than what is already possible in existing cellular EAs. Using the observations and results from this investigation into selection pressure in mcEAs, a general architecture for developing agent-based evolutionary algorithms called Artificial Ecosystems (AES) is presented. A simple agent-based EA …

Cloud Security Requirements Analysis And Security Policy Development Using A High-Order Object-Oriented Modeling Technique, Kenneth Kofi Fletcher

Masters Theses

"Security continues to be a major challenge for cloud computing, and it is one that must be addressed if cloud computing is to be fully accepted. Most technological means of securing non-cloud computing systems can be either applied directly or modified to secure a cloud; however, no integrated model-based methodology is yet available to analyze cloud security requirements and develop policy to deal with both internal and external security challenges. This work proposes just such a methodology and demonstrates its application with specific cases. Cloud assets are represented by high order object models, and misuse cases together with malactivity swimlane …

Event Detection From Click-Through Data Via Query Clustering, Prabhu Kumar Angajala

Masters Theses

"The web is an index of real-world events and lot of knowledge can be mined from the web resources and their derivatives. Event detection is one recent research topic triggered from the domain of web data mining with the increasing popularity of search engines. In the visitor-centric approach, the click-through data generated by the web search engines is the start up resource with the intuition: often such data is event-driven. In this thesis, a retrospective algorithm is proposed to detect such real-world events from the click-through data. This approach differs from the existing work as it: (i) considers the click-through …

Population Control In Evolutionary Algorithms, Jason Edward Cook

Masters Theses

"Traditional evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are powerful robust problem solvers that have several fixed parameters which require prior specification. Having to determine good values for any of these parameters can be problematic, as the performance of EAs is generally very sensitive to these parameters, requiring expert knowledge to set optimally without extensive use of trial and error. Parameter control is a promising approach to achieving this automation and has the added potential of increasing EA performance based on both theoretical and empirical evidence that the optimal values of EA strategy parameters change during the course of executing an evolutionary run. While …

Multi Axis Slicing For Rapid Prototyping, Divya Kanakanala

Masters Theses

"With multi-axis capability, direct laser deposition process can produce a metal part without the usage of support structures. In order to fully utilize such a capability, a slicing method for multi-axis metal deposition process is discussed. Using the geometry information of adjacent layers, the slicing direction and layer thickness can be changed as needed. A hierarchy structure is designed to manage the topological information which is used to determine the slicing sequence. The parallel slicing process is studied to build hollow type structure. With such a character, the hole like feature can be deposited directly to save the required machining …

Intelligent Computational Argumentation For Evaluating Performance Scores In Multi-Criteria Decision Making, Rubal Wanchoo

Masters Theses

"Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a discipline aimed at assisting multiple stakeholders in contemplating a decision paradigm in an uncertain environment. The decision analysis to be performed involves numerous alternative positions assessed under varied criterion. A performance score is assigned for each alternative in terms of every criterion and it represents satisfaction of the criteria by that alternative. In a collaborative decision making environment, performance scores are either obtained when a consensus can be reached among stakeholders on a particular score or in some cases or controversial when stakeholders do not agree with each other about them. In the …

Dynamic Ant Colony Optimization For Globally Optimizing Consumer Preferences, Pavitra Dhruvanarayana

Masters Theses

"Consumer preference for any product or product feature can be expressed in the form of a utility function. Many such utility functions form a part of a preference map, where each of these are expressed in terms of the attributes defining the product or the product feature. In order to optimize the design, it is required to optimize the overall utility function obtained by a mathematical combination of individual utility functions defined in the preference map. The objective of this research is to devise and implement an algorithm to optimize all the individual utility functions comprised in a preference map …