Search results for "1707"
showing 10 items of 274 documents
Reliability-based design optimization of trusses under dynamic shakedown constraints
2019
A reliability-based design optimization problem under dynamic shakedown constraints for elastic perfectly plastic truss structures subjected to stochastic wind actions is presented. The simultaneous presence of quasi-static (cyclic) thermal loads is also considered. As usual in the shakedown theory, the quasi-statical loads will be defined as variable within a deterministic domain, while the dynamic problem will be treated considering an extended Ceradini-Gavarini approach. Some sources of uncertainties are introduced in the structural system and in the load definition. The reliability-optimization problem is formulated as the minimization of the volume of the structure subjected to determi…
model reduction for continuous-time Markovian jump systems with incomplete statistics of mode information
2013
This paper investigates the problem of model reduction for a class of continuous-time Markovian jump linear systems with incomplete statistics of mode information, which simultaneously considers the exactly known, partially unknown and uncertain transition rates. By fully utilising the properties of transition rate matrices, together with the convexification of uncertain domains, a new sufficient condition for performance analysis is first derived, and then two approaches, namely, the convex linearisation approach and the iterative approach, are developed to solve the model reduction problem. It is shown that the desired reduced-order models can be obtained by solving a set of strict linear…
Parametric and nonparametric methods to generate time-varying surrogate data.
2009
We present both nonparametric and parametric approaches to generating time-varying surrogate data. Nonparametric and parametric approaches are based on the use of the short-time Fourier transform and a time-varying autoregressive model, respectively. Time-varying surrogate data (TVSD) can be used to determine the statistical significance of the linear and nonlinear coherence function estimates. Two advantages of the TVSD are that it keeps one from having to make an arbitrary decision about the significance of the coherence value, and it properly takes into account statistical significance levels, which may change with time. Our simulation examples and experimental results on blood pressure …
Preface
2015
This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science is devoted to the fourteenth Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS) held at University of Palermo, Italy, from 9th to 11th September 2013. ICTCS is the conference of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and covers a wide spectrum of topics in Theoretical Computer Science, ranging from computational complexity to logic, from algorithms and data structure to programming languages, from combinatorics on words to distributed computing. For this reason, the contributions here included come from very different areas of Theoretical Computer Science. In fact this special…
Towards farm-level health management of offshore wind farms for maintenance improvements
2015
This paper studies a conceptual architecture for health management of offshore wind farms. To this aim, various necessary enablers of a health management sys- tem are presented to improve reliability and availability while optimizing maintenance costs. The main focus lies on improving existing condition monitoring systems based on concepts of condition-based maintenance and relia- bility centered maintenance. A brief review of the rel- evant state-of-the-art is presented and gaps to be filled towards realization of such health management system are discussed.
Testing two temporal upscaling schemes for the estimation of the time variability of the actual evapotranspiration
2015
Temporal availability of grapes actual evapotranspiration is an emerging issue since vineyards farms are more and more converted from rainfed to irrigated agricultural systems. The manuscript aims to verify the accuracy of the actual evapotranspiration retrieval coupling a single source energy balance approach and two different temporal upscaling schemes. The first scheme tests the temporal upscaling of the main input variables, namely the NDVI, albedo and LST; the second scheme tests the temporal upscaling of the energy balance output, the actual evapotranspiration. The temporal upscaling schemes were implemented on: i) airborne remote sensing data acquired monthly during a whole irrigatio…
Metallothionein Gene Family in the Sea Urchin Paracentrotus lividus: Gene Structure, Differential Expression and Phylogenetic Analysis
2017
Metallothioneins (MT) are small and cysteine-rich proteins that bind metal ions such as zinc, copper, cadmium, and nickel. In order to shed some light on MT gene structure and evolution, we cloned seven Paracentrotus lividus MT genes, comparing them to Echinodermata and Chordata genes. Moreover, we performed a phylogenetic analysis of 32 MTs from different classes of echinoderms and 13 MTs from the most ancient chordates, highlighting the relationships between them. Since MTs have multiple roles in the cells, we performed RT-qPCR and in situ hybridization experiments to understand better MT functions in sea urchin embryos. Results showed that the expression of MTs is regulated throughout de…
Micelles, Rods, Liposomes, and Other Supramolecular Surfactant Aggregates: Computational Approaches
2017
Surfactants are an interesting class of compounds characterized by the segregation of polar and apolar domains in the same molecule. This peculiarity makes possible a whole series of microscopic and macroscopic effects. Among their features, their ability to segregate particles (fluids or entire domains) and to reduce the surface/interfacial tension is the utmost important. The interest in the chemistry of surfactants never weakened; instead, waves of increasing interest have occurred every time a new field of application of these molecules has been discovered. All these special characteristics depend largely on the ability of surfactants to self-assemble and constitute supramolecular struc…
Enhanced query processing for NoSQL crowdsourcing systems
2014
In this paper, we provide a novel approach for effectively and efficiently support query processing tasks in novel NoSQL crowdsourcing systems. The idea of our method is to exploit the social knowledge available from reviews about products of any kind, freely provided by customers through specialized web sites. We thus define a NoSQL database system for large collections of product reviews, where queries can be expressed in terms of natural language sentences whose answers are modeled as lists of products ranked based on the relevance of reviews w.r.t. the natural language sentences. The best ranked products in the result list can be seen as the best hints for the user based on crowd opinio…
Assessing directional interactions among multiple physiological time series: The role of instantaneous causality
2012
This paper deals with the assessment of frequency domain causality in multivariate (MV) time series with significant instantaneous interactions. After providing different causality definitions, we introduce an extended MV autoregressive modeling approach whereby each definition is described in the time domain in terms of the model coefficients, and is quantified in the frequency domain by means of novel measures of directional connectivity. These measures are illustrated in a theoretical example showing how they reduce to known indexes when instantaneous causality is trivial, while they describe peculiar aspects of directional interaction in the presence of instantaneous causality. The appl…