C. K. Ng

An RFID-Enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Monitoring System for Biological and Pharmaceutical Products

Biological and pharmaceutical (B&P) products are essential and important for human being. In current era, the demand and requirement of these products are dramatically growing, product quality and integrity then become the most concerning part. As a key factor for ensuring the quality and integrity, the current product status monitoring system needs to be enhanced in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way. This research aims to design a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) monitoring system for B&P products supply chain management. In this study, the basic design factors of a WSN are reviewed. It is found that battery capacity causes a bottle neck in the WSN. Therefore, system architecture is presented based on the proposed framework. The framework aims to develop a common approach to improve the energy efficiency of the WSN. It consists of three processes, the first one is to generate a WSN with full coverage, the second one is to determine the optimal position of the sink, and the last process is to add additional relay nodes for recharging or replacing the battery-exhausted nodes without affecting the network operation. Finally, a simulated case about B&P product storage in a hospital is conducted to show the overall procedures of the framework.

A real time quality monitoring system for the lighting industry : a practical and rapid approach using computer vision and image processing (CVIP) tools

In China, the manufacturing of lighting products is very labour intensive. The approach used to check quality and control production relies on operators who test using various types of fixtures. In order to increase the competitiveness of the manufacturer and the efficiency of production, the authors propose an integrated system. This system has two major elements: a computer vision system (CVS) and a real-time monitoring system (RTMS). This model focuses not only on the rapid and practical application of modern technology to a traditional industry, but also represents a process innovation in the lighting industry. This paper describes the design and development of the prototyped lighting inspection system based on a practical and fast approach using computer vision and imaging processing (CVIP) tools. LabVIEW with IMAQ Vision Builder is the chosen tool for building the CVS. Experimental results show that this system produces a lower error rate than humans produce in the quality checking process. The whole integrated manufacturing strategy, aimed at achieving a better performance, is most suitable for a China and other labour intensive environments such as India.

Network Topology Management Optimization of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Network topology management is one of the critical concerns when designing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In this research, four basic factors including the total production cost, sensing coverage, network connectivity and fault tolerance are considered. A mathematical model is proposed to optimize four optimization metrics corresponding to the four design factors. This approach attaches a weighting coefficient to each optimization metric to adjust their importance in the optimization model. To solve the proposed model, an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based metaheuristics method, called MAX–MIN Ant System (MMAS) is used. In the experiment, Greedy algorithm (Greedy) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) are also adopted to solve the proposed model. The results indicate that MMAS shows a satisfactory performance on solving the proposed model, which there is an improvement on the number of sensor nodes comparing to the result of Greedy, and a better fitness value than the result of GA.

Design of a wireless sensor network monitoring system for biological and pharmaceutical products

Biological and pharmaceutical (B&P) products are essential in modern life. Currently, the demand and requirements of these products are dramatically growing; product quality and integrity then become crucial. As a key factor for ensuring quality and integrity, the current product status monitoring system needs to be enhanced in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way. This research describes the design of a wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring system for B&P products supply chain management. In this study, the system architecture is presented based on the proposed framework. The framework consists of three processes: the first one is to generate a WSN with full coverage, the second one is to determine the optimal position of the sink, and the last process is to add additional relay nodes for providing fault tolerance to the network. Finally, a feasibility test on B&P product storage in a hospital is conducted. The proposed system provides a systematic approach for the deployment of sensor nodes and relay nodes. It also provides a relatively simple and rapid method for industries in general to follow and implement when designing a WSN system.

A semantic similarity analysis of Internet of Things

ABSTRACT Internet of Things (IoT) has gradually become one of the most popular topics among both academia and industry, and it is considered as a crucial part of future Internet. However, very few objective and systematic review was conducted to address high-value articles and summarize the intellectual components from journals for examination and identification of the intellectual core and structure of IoT. Therefore, this study conducted a co-citation analysis for IoT by using 68 high-value articles retrieved within 1457 source papers from Web of Science online database. By using factor analysis, ten critical factors were identified, which includes (1) frameworks and challenges of IoT; (2) current situation of IoT in different applications; (3) interactions of IoT; (4) security issues of IoT; (5) application domains of IoT; (6) data management of IoT; (7) IoT in product lifecycle management; (8) enabling technologies of IoT; (9) IoT in smart cities; (10) IoT in recommender systems. Hierarchical Custer Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling were used to graphically illustrate the intellectual elements of IoT. In the current findings, fundamental elements of IoT including architectural framework, enabling technologies, network communication, data management, and IoT interactions were discussed with a series of challenges for wider and deeper IoT applications.

An improved Huffman coding with encryption for Radio Data System (RDS) for smart transportation

ABSTRACT As the development of Radio Data System (RDS) technology and its applications are getting more and more attention and promotion, people concern their personal privacy and communication efficiency, and therefore compression and encryption technologies are being more important for transferring RDS data. Unlike most of the current approaches which contain two stages, compression and encryption, we proposed a new algorithm called Swapped Huffman Table (SHT) based on Huffman algorithm to realise compression and encryption in a single process. In this paper, a good performance for both compression and encryption is obtained and a possible application of RDS with the proposed algorithm in smart transportation is illustrated.

A feasibility study of stateful automaton packet inspection for streaming application detection systems

ABSTRACT The rapid development of the internet has brought huge benefits and social impacts; however, internet security has also become a great problem for users, since traditional approaches to packet classification cannot achieve satisfactory detection performance due to their low accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, a new stateful packet inspection method is introduced, which can be embedded in the network gateway and used by a streaming application detection system. This new detection method leverages the inexact automaton approach, using part of the header field and part of the application layer data of a packet. Based on this approach, an advanced detection system is proposed for streaming applications. The workflow of the system involves two stages: the training stage and the detection stage. In the training stage, the system initially captures characteristic patterns from a set of application packet flows. After this training is completed, the detection stage allows the user to detect the target application by capturing new application flows. This new detection approach is also evaluated using experimental analysis; the results of this analysis show that this new approach not only simplifies the management of the state detection system, but also improves the accuracy of data flow detection, making it feasible for real-world network applications.

An effective motion-blurred image restoration approach for automated optical inspection

This paper presents a real-time restoration method for linear local motion-blurred images in automated optical inspection (AOI). The proposed approach is to firstly divide such an image into many sub-images and then detect the blurred sub-image by the gradient distribution and the cepstrum maximum. For a blurred sub-image, the blur direction and blur length are estimated in order to calculate the parameters of the point spread function (PSF). The Richardson–Lucy deconvolution algorithm and Wiener filtering are employed to restore this blurred sub-image. Through experimentation, the proposed algorithm produces good results on blurred images caused by the linear motion AOI equipment. To test its performance, the proposed algorithm is compared with other approaches by using a real captured printed circuit board (PCB) image, and it is proven to be superior to the others in terms of accuracy.

Design of a EHS Module for an Intelligent Automobile Parking Platform

Wireless Sensor Actuator Network (WSAN) has potential to improve the current application, especially environment monitoring. This paper illustrates an interface study and a design of Environment-Health-Safety (EHS) Module for the Car Park Industry by using a 2-step approach. The approach presents the application of Object-oriented (OO) Paradigm and Unified Modelling Language (UML) to monitor the environment, health and safety.

Single Machine Problem with Multi-Rate-Modifying Activities under a Time-Dependent Deterioration

The single machine scheduling problem with multi-rate-modifying activities under a time-dependent deterioration to minimize makespan is studied. After examining the characteristics of the problem, a number of properties and a lower bound are proposed. A branch and bound algorithm and a heuristic algorithm are used in the solution, and two special cases are also examined. The computational experiments show that, for the situation with a rate-modifying activity, the proposed branch and bound algorithm can solve situations with 50 jobs within a reasonable time, and the heuristic algorithm can obtain the near-optimal solution with an error percentage less than 0.053 in a very short time. In situations with multi-rate-modifying activities, the proposed branch and bound algorithm can solve the case with 15 jobs within a reasonable time, and the heuristic algorithm can obtain the near-optimal with an error percentage less than 0.070 in a very short time. The branch and bound algorithm and the heuristic algorithm are both shown to be efficient and effective.