Miltos Petridis

Smartfire: an Intelligent Cfd Based Fire Model:

This paper describes a project aimed at making Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based fire simulation accessible to members of the fire safety engineering community. Over the past few years, the practise of CFD based fire simulation has begun the transition from the confines of the research laboratory to the desk of the fire safety engineer. To a certain extent, this move has been driven by the demands of performance based building codes. However, while CFD modelling has many benefits over other forms of fire simulation, it requires a great deal of expertise on the user’s part to obtain reasonable simulation results. The project described in this paper, SMARTFIRE, aims to relieve some of this dependence on expertise so that users are less concerned with the details of CFD analysis and can concentrate on results. This aim is achieved by the use of an expert system component as part of the software suite which takes some of the expertise burden away from the user. SMARTFIRE also makes use of the latest developments in CFD technology in order to make the CFD analysis more efficient. This paper describes design considerations of the SMARTFIRE software, emphasising its open architecture, CFD engine and knowledge based systems.

Intelligent design assistant (IDA): a case base reasoning system for material and design

This paper describes the approach to the modelling of experiential knowledge in an industrial application of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). The CBR involves retrieval techniques in conjunction with a relational database. The database is especially designed as a repository of experiential knowledge, and includes qualitative search indices. The system is intended to help design engineers and material engineers in the submarine cable industry. It consists of three parts: a materials database; a database of experiential knowledge; and a CBR system used to retrieve similar past designs based upon component and material qualitative descriptions. The system is currently undergoing user testing at the Alcatel Submarine Networks site in Greenwich.

Deadline Aware Virtual Machine Scheduler for Grid and Cloud Computing

Virtualization technology has enabled applications to be decoupled from the underlying hardware providing the benefits of portability, better control over execution environment and isolation. It has been widely adopted in scientific grids and commercial clouds. Since virtualization, despite its benefits incurs a performance penalty, which could be significant for systems dealing with uncertainty such as High Performance Computing (HPC) applications where jobs have tight deadlines and have dependencies on other jobs before they could run. The major obstacle lies in bridging the gap between performance requirements of a job and performance offered by the virtualization technology if the jobs were to be executed in virtual machines. In this paper, we present a novel approach to optimize job deadlines when run in virtual machines by developing a deadline-aware algorithm that responds to job execution delays in real time, and dynamically optimizes jobs to meet their deadline obligations. Our approaches borrowed concepts both from signal processing and statistical techniques, and their comparative performance results are presented later in the paper including the impact on utilization rate of the hardware resources.

Enabling and optimizing pilot jobs using xen based virtual machines for the HPC grid applications

The primary motivation for uptake of virtualization have been resource isolation, capacity management and resource customization: isolation and capacity management allow providers to isolate users from the site and control their resources usage while customization allows end-users to easily project the required environment onto a variety of sites. Various approaches have been taken to integrate virtualization with Grid technologies. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines virtualization on the existing software infrastructure such as Pilot Jobs with minimum change on the part of resource providers. We also present a standard API to enable a wider set of applications including Batch systems to deploy virtual machines on-demand as isolated job sandboxes. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach, we also evaluate the impact of Xen virtualization on memory and compute intensive tasks, and present our results that how memory and scheduling parameters could be tweaked to optimize job performance.

Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing 2010

th The purpose of the 11 Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2010) held on June 9 11, 2010 in London, United Kingdom was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science, and to share ideas and information in a meaningful way. Our conference officers selected the best 15 papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference in order to publish them in this volume. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee, and underwent further rounds of rigorous review. In Chapter 1, Cai Luyuan et al. Present a new method of shape decomposition based on a refined morphological shape decomposition process. In Chapter 2, Kazunori Iwata et al. propose a method for reducing the margin of error in effort and error prediction models for embedded software development projects using artificial neural networks (ANNs). In Chapter 3, Viliam imko et al. describe a model-driven tool that allows system code to be generated from use-cases in plain English. In Chapter 4, Abir Smiti and Zied Elouedi propose a Case Base Maintenance (CBM) method that uses machine learning techniques to preserve the maximum competence of a system. In Chapter 5, Shagufta Henna and Thomas Erlebach provide a simulation based analysis of some widely used broadcasting schemes within mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and propose adaptive extensions to an existing broadcasting algorithm.

Towards the Design of a Portal Framework for Web Services Integration

Web services based systems have recently found their way into many applications such as e-commerce, corporate integration and e-learning. Construction of new services or introducing new functions to existing services requires composition of web services. Current approaches to service composition often require major programming effort; this is time consuming and requires considerable developer expertise. In this paper, we explore the real and rich scenarios found in e-learning where education services are offered through the Internet by networked universities to potentially millions in the world. These services are derived from existing/emerging business operation processes and commonly offered through a web interface, combined with other services such as email and ftp services, to support partial/full business processes. We identify the requirements for a generic portal framework for easy integration of existing expertise and services of individual institutions (enterprises). We examine the existing technologies and standards, and point out the gaps to be filled in designing the architecture of the framework.

Case-based retrieval of 3-dimensional shapes for the design of metal castings

This paper describes research into retrieval based on 3-dimensional shapes for use in the metal casting industry. The purpose of the system is to advise a casting engineer on the design aspects of a new casting by reference to similar castings which have been prototyped and tested in the past. The key aspects of the system are the orientation of the shape within the mould, the positions of feeders and chills, and particular advice concerning special problems and solutions, and possible redesign. The main focus of this research is the effectiveness of similarity measures based on 3-dimensional shapes. The approach adopted here is to construct similarity measures based on a graphical representation deriving from a shape decomposition used extensively by experienced casting design engineers. The paper explains the graphical representation and discusses similarity measures based on it. Performance measures for the CBR system are given, and the results for trials of the system are presented. The competence of the current case-base is discussed, with reference to a representation of cases as points in an n-dimensional feature space, and its principal components visualization. A refinement of the case base is performed as a result of the competence analysis and the performance of the case-base before and after refinement is compared.

Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXIX

This paper presents a speaker verification system that uses a self organising map composed of spiking neurons. The architecture of the system is inspired by the biomechanical mechanism of the human auditory system which converts speech into electrical spikes inside the cochlea. A spike-based rank order coding input feature vector is suggested that is designed to be representative of the real biological spike trains found within the human auditory nerve. The Spiking Self Organising Map (SSOM) updates its winner neuron only when its activity exceeds a specified threshold. The algorithm is evaluated using 50 speakers from the Centre for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU2002) speaker verification database and shows a speaker verification performance of 90.1%. This compares favorably with previous non-spiking self organising map that used Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT)-based input feature vector with the same dataset.

Maintenance of a Case-Base for the Retrieval of Rotationally Symmetric Shapes for the Design of Metal Castings

In this paper, we discuss the problem of maintenance of a CBR system for retrieval of rotationally symmetric shapes. The special feature of this system is that similarity is derived primarily from graph matching algorithms. The special problem of such a system is that it does not operate on search indices that may be derived from single cases and then used for visualisation and principle component analyses. Rather, the system is built on a similarity metric defined directly over pairs of cases. The problems of efficiency, consistency, redundancy, completeness and correctness are discussed for such a system. Performance measures for the CBR system are given, and the results for trials of the system are presented. The competence of the current case-base is discussed, with reference to a representation of cases as points in an n-dimensional feature space, and a Gramian visualisation. A refinement of the case base is performed as a result of the competence analysis and the performance of the case-base before and after refinement is compared.

CBE-Conveyor : a case-based reasoning system to assist engineers in designing conveyor systems

In this paper, we address the use of CBR in collaboration with numerical engineering models. This collaborative combination has a particular application in engineering domains where numerical models are used. We term this domain “Case Based Engineering” (CBE), and present the general architecture of a CBE system. We define and discuss the general characteristics of CBE and the special problems which arise. These are: the handling of engineering constraints of both continuous and nominal kind; interpolation over both continuous and nominal variables, and conformability for interpolation. In order to illustrate the utility of the method proposed, and to provide practical examples of the general theory, the paper describes a practical application of the CBE architecture, known as CBE-CONVEYOR, which has been implemented by the authors.Pneumatic conveying is an important transportation technology in the solid bulks conveying industry. One of the major industry concerns is the attrition of powders and granules during pneumatic conveying. To minimize the fraction of particles during pneumatic conveying, engineers want to know what design parameters they should use in building a conveyor system. To do this, engineers often run simulations in a repetitive manner to find appropriate input parameters. CBE-Conveyor is shown to speed up conventional methods for searching for solutions, and to solve problems directly that would otherwise require considerable intervention from the engineer.