Search results for "Electrical Circuits"
showing 10 items of 91 documents
Evaluating Infrastructure Alternatives for Regional Water Supply Systems by Model-assisted Cost-benefit Analysis – A Case Study from Apulia, Italy
2014
The main challenge associated to regional water supply systems planning lies in understanding the best infrastructure alternatives to improve service given a certain configuration of the resources system. While cost-effectiveness assessments are still widespread in this type of analyses, they do not account for the fact that, especially in mature systems, service improvements tend to follow the law of marginal diminishing returns, so that a cost – benefit assessment should be preferable. Both costs and benefits can be organized into a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) framework. In a complex system, a model reproducing its topology and characteristics better describes the impacts of the alternati…
A Network Tomography Approach for Traffic Monitoring in Smart Cities
2018
Traffic monitoring is a key enabler for several planning and management activities of a Smart City. However, traditional techniques are often not cost efficient, flexible, and scalable. This paper proposes an approach to traffic monitoring that does not rely on probe vehicles, nor requires vehicle localization through GPS. Conversely, it exploits just a limited number of cameras placed at road intersections to measure car end-to-end traveling times. We model the problem within the theoretical framework of network tomography, in order to infer the traveling times of all individual road segments in the road network. We specifically deal with the potential presence of noisy measurements, and t…
Short-Term Sensory Data Prediction in Ambient Intelligence Scenarios
2014
Predicting data is a crucial ability for resource-constrained devices like the nodes of a Wireless Sensor Network. In the context of Ambient Intelligence scenarios, in particular, short-term sensory data prediction becomes a key enabler for more difficult tasks such as prolonging network lifetime, reducing the amount of communication required and improving user-environment interaction. In this chapter we propose a software module designed for clustered wireless sensor networks, able to predict various environmental quantities, namely temperature, humidity and light. The software module is supported by an ontology that describes the topology of the AmI scenario and the effects of the actuato…
Simulated Annealing Technique for Fast Learning of SOM Networks
2011
The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a popular unsupervised neural network able to provide effective clustering and data visualization for multidimensional input datasets. In this paper, we present an application of the simulated annealing procedure to the SOM learning algorithm with the aim to obtain a fast learning and better performances in terms of quantization error. The proposed learning algorithm is called Fast Learning Self-Organized Map, and it does not affect the easiness of the basic learning algorithm of the standard SOM. The proposed learning algorithm also improves the quality of resulting maps by providing better clustering quality and topology preservation of input multi-dimensi…
Dynamic Regret Analysis for Online Tracking of Time-varying Structural Equation Model Topologies
2020
Identifying dependencies among variables in a complex system is an important problem in network science. Structural equation models (SEM) have been used widely in many fields for topology inference, because they are tractable and incorporate exogenous influences in the model. Topology identification based on static SEM is useful in stationary environments; however, in many applications a time-varying underlying topology is sought. This paper presents an online algorithm to track sparse time-varying topologies in dynamic environments and most importantly, performs a detailed analysis on the performance guarantees. The tracking capability is characterized in terms of a bound on the dynamic re…
Random Feature Approximation for Online Nonlinear Graph Topology Identification
2021
Online topology estimation of graph-connected time series is challenging, especially since the causal dependencies in many real-world networks are nonlinear. In this paper, we propose a kernel-based algorithm for graph topology estimation. The algorithm uses a Fourier-based Random feature approximation to tackle the curse of dimensionality associated with the kernel representations. Exploiting the fact that the real-world networks often exhibit sparse topologies, we propose a group lasso based optimization framework, which is solve using an iterative composite objective mirror descent method, yielding an online algorithm with fixed computational complexity per iteration. The experiments con…
Online Non-linear Topology Identification from Graph-connected Time Series
2021
Estimating the unknown causal dependencies among graph-connected time series plays an important role in many applications, such as sensor network analysis, signal processing over cyber-physical systems, and finance engineering. Inference of such causal dependencies, often know as topology identification, is not well studied for non-linear non-stationary systems, and most of the existing methods are batch-based which are not capable of handling streaming sensor signals. In this paper, we propose an online kernel-based algorithm for topology estimation of non-linear vector autoregressive time series by solving a sparse online optimization framework using the composite objective mirror descent…
Impact of centrality on cooperative processes
2016
The solution of today's complex problems requires the grouping of task forces whose members are usually connected remotely over long physical distances and different time zones. Hence, understanding the effects of imposed communication patterns (i.e., who can communicate with whom) on group performance is important. Here, we use an agent-based model to explore the influence of the betweenness centrality of the nodes on the time the group requires to find the global maxima of NK-fitness landscapes. The agents cooperate by broadcasting messages, informing on their fitness to their neighbors, and use this information to copy the more successful agents in their neighborhood. We find that for ea…
Topology of correlation-based minimal spanning trees in real and model markets
2003
We present here a topological characterization of the minimal spanning tree that can be obtained by considering the price return correlations of stocks traded in a financial market. We compare the minimal spanning tree obtained from a large group of stocks traded at the New York Stock Exchange during a 12-year trading period with the one obtained from surrogated data simulated by using simple market models. We find that the empirical tree has features of a complex network that cannot be reproduced, even as a first approximation, by a random market model and by the one-factor model.
Geography versus topology in the European Ownership Network
2011
In this paper, we investigate the network of ownership relationships among European firms and its embedding in the geographical space. We carry out a detailed analysis of geographical distances between pairs of nodes, connected by edges or by shortest paths of varying length. In particular, we study the relation between geographical distance and network distance in comparison with a random spatial network model. While the distribution of geographical distance can be fairly well reproduced, important deviations appear in the network distance and in the size of the largest strongly connected component. Our results show that geographical factors allow us to capture several features of the netw…