Search results for "Convergence"
showing 10 items of 655 documents
Continuing Education in the Health Sciences in Spain
2008
<div class="ftSection"><span class="ftInlineSubsectionTitle">Background:</span><p>Employers have long been concerned about the professional qualifications of their employees. Decision makers in the health sciences are no exception, particularly now that they are seriously considering the improvement and full accreditation of continuing education as part of the planned European convergence.</p></div><div class="ftSection"><span class="ftInlineSubsectionTitle">Method:</span><p>Medical and nursing professionals were questioned about their views on continuing education, suitable content of possible programs, and implementation, in comp…
Highlighting numerical insights of an efficient SPH method
2018
Abstract In this paper we focus on two sources of enhancement in accuracy and computational demanding in approximating a function and its derivatives by means of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. The approximating power of the standard method is perceived to be poor and improvements can be gained making use of the Taylor series expansion of the kernel approximation of the function and its derivatives. The modified formulation is appealing providing more accurate results of the function and its derivatives simultaneously without changing the kernel function adopted in the computation. The request for greater accuracy needs kernel function derivatives with order up to the desidered …
DORA algorithm for network flow models with improved stability and convergence properties
2001
A new methodology for the solution of shallow water equations is applied for the computation of the unsteady-state flow in an urban drainage network. The inertial terms are neglected in the momentum equations and the solution is decoupled into one kinematic and one diffusive component. After a short presentation of the DORA (Double ORder Approximation) methodology in the case of a single open channel, the new methodology is applied to the case of a sewer network. The transition from partial to full section and vice versa is treated without the help of the Preissmann approximation. The algorithm also allows the computation of the diffusive component in the case of vertical topographic discon…
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Simulating Pedestrian Navigation
2012
In this paper we introduce a Multi-agent system that uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to learn local navigational behaviors to simulate virtual pedestrian groups. The aim of the paper is to study empirically the validity of RL to learn agent-based navigation controllers and their transfer capabilities when they are used in simulation environments with a higher number of agents than in the learned scenario. Two RL algorithms which use Vector Quantization (VQ) as the generalization method for the space state are presented. Both strategies are focused on obtaining a good vector quantizier that generalizes adequately the state space of the agents. We empirically state the convergence…
Optimizing PolyACO Training with GPU-Based Parallelization
2016
A central part of Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is the function calculating the quality and cost of solutions, such as the distance of a potential ant route. This cost function is used to deposit an opportune amount of pheromones to achieve an apt convergence, and in an active ACO implementation a significant part of the runtime is spent in this part of the code. In some cases, the cost function accumulates up towards 94 % in its run time making it a performance bottle neck.
A hybrid virtual–boundary element formulation for heterogeneous materials
2021
Abstract In this work, a hybrid formulation based on the conjoined use of the recently developed Virtual Element Method (VEM) and the Boundary Element Method (BEM) is proposed for the effective computational analysis of multi-region domains, representative of heterogeneous materials. VEM has been recently developed as a generalisation of the Finite Element Method (FEM) and it allows the straightforward employment of elements of general polygonal shape, maintaining a high level of accuracy. For its inherent features, it allows the use of meshes of general topology, including non-convex elements. On the other hand, BEM is an effective technique for the numerical solution of sets of boundary i…
High-resolution far-field integral-imaging camera by double snapshot
2012
In multi-view three-dimensional imaging, to capture the elemental images of distant objects, the use of a field-like lens that projects the reference plane onto the microlens array is necessary. In this case, the spatial resolution of reconstructed images is equal to the spatial density of microlenses in the array. In this paper we report a simple method, based on the realization of double snapshots, to double the 2D pixel density of reconstructed scenes. Experiments are reported to support the proposed approach.
Localization Based on Parallel Robots Kinematics as an Alternative to Trilateration
2022
In this article, a new scheme for range-based localization is proposed. The main goal is to estimate the position of a mobile point based on distance measurements from fixed devices, called anchors, and on inertial measurements. Due to the nonlinear nature of the problem, an analytic relation to compute the position starting from these measurements does not exist, and often trilateration methods are used, generally based on least-square algorithms. The proposed scheme is based on the modeling of the localization process as a parallel robot, thereby methodologies and control algorithms used in the robotic area can be exploited. In particular, a closed-loop control system is designed for trac…
Improving estimation of distribution genetic programming with novelty initialization
2021
Estimation of distribution genetic programming (EDA-GP) replaces the standard variation operations of genetic programming (GP) by learning and sampling from a probabilistic model. Unfortunately, many EDA-GP approaches suffer from a rapidly decreasing population diversity which often leads to premature convergence. However, novelty search, an approach that searches for novel solutions to cover sparse areas of the search space, can be used for generating diverse initial populations. In this work, we propose novelty initialization and test this new method on a generalization of the royal tree problem and compare its performance to ramped half-and-half (RHH) using a recent EDA-GP approach. We f…
Fast Implementation of Double-coupled Nonnegative Canonical Polyadic Decomposition
2019
Real-world data exhibiting high order/dimensionality and various couplings are linked to each other since they share some common characteristics. Coupled tensor decomposition has become a popular technique for group analysis in recent years, especially for simultaneous analysis of multi-block tensor data with common information. To address the multiblock tensor data, we propose a fast double-coupled nonnegative Canonical Polyadic Decomposition (FDC-NCPD) algorithm in this study, based on the linked CP tensor decomposition (LCPTD) model and fast Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares (Fast-HALS) algorithm. The proposed FDCNCPD algorithm enables simultaneous extraction of common components, i…