In this study, the authors study the problem of smart meter deployment optimisation for appliance load monitoring, that is, to monitor a number of devices without any ambiguity using the minimum number of low-cost smart meters. The importance of this problem is due to the fact that the number of meters should be reduced to decrease the deployment cost, improve reliability and decrease congestion. In this way, in future, smart meters can provide additional information about the type and number of distinct devices connected, besides their normal functionalities concerned with providing overall energy measurements and their communication. The authors present two exact smart meter deployment optimisation algorithms, one based on exhaustive search and the other based on efficient implementation of the exhaustive search. They formulate the problem mathematically and present computational complexity analysis of their algorithms. Simulation scenarios show that for a typical number of home appliances, the efficient search method is significantly faster compared to the exhaustive search and can provide the same optimal solution. The authors also show the dependency of their method on the distribution of the load pattern that can potentially be in a typical household.

In this paper, a simplified Chua's circuit is realised by bridging a diode pair between a passive LC (inductance and capacitance in parallel connection - LC) oscillator and an active RC (resistance and capacitance in parallel connection - RC) filter. The dynamical behaviours of the circuit are investigated by numerical simulations and verified by experimental measurements. It is found that the simplified Chua's circuit generates Chua's attractors similarly and demonstrates complex non-linear phenomena including coexisting bifurcation modes and coexisting attractors in particular.

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a burgeoning technology at the nano-scale range, with the potential for lower power consumption, smaller size and faster speed than conventional complementary metal–oxide semiconductor-based technology. Because of its ultra-density integration and its inherent physical properties, fault-tolerance is an important property to consider in the research and manufacture of QCA. In this paper, one type of defect, in which displacement and misalignment occur coinstantaneously, is investigated in detail on rudimentary QCA devices (majority voter (MV), inverter, wire) with QCADesigner. Another MV with rotated cells is also proposed, and it is more robust than the original one. Simulation results present the defect-tolerance of these devices, that is, the maximum precise region the defective cell can be moved moreover, with correct logical function. These conclusions have a meaningful guiding significance for QCA physical implementation and fault-tolerance research.

A study to understand the relationships between seismic attributes extracted from 2D high-resolution seismic data and the seafloor's sediments of the surveyed area. As seismic attributes are features highly influenced by the medium through which the seismic waves are propagated, the authors can assume that it would be possible to characterise the geological nature of the seafloor by using these attributes. Herein, a survey was performed on the continental margin of the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica, where both 2D high-resolution seismic data and sediment gravity cores samples were simultaneously acquired. A computational script was written to extract the seismic attributes from the data, which have been statistically analysed with clustering analyses, such as principal components analysis, dendrograms and k-means classification. The extracted seismic attributes are the amplitude, the instantaneous phase, the instantaneous frequency, the envelope, the time derivative of the envelope, the second derivative of the envelope and the acceleration of phase. Statistical evaluation showed that geological classification of the seafloor's sediments is possible by associating these attributes according to their coherence. The methodologies here developed seem to be appropriate for glacio-marine environment and coarse-to-medium silt sediment found in the study area and may be applied to other regions in the same geological conditions.

The main aim of this study is to establish an efficient platform for fingerprint matching for low-quality images. Generally, fingerprint matching approaches use the minutiae points for authentication. However, it is not such a reliable authentication method for low-quality images. To overcome this problem, the current study proposes a fingerprint matching methodology based on normalised cross-correlation, which would improve the performance and reduce the miscalculations during authentication. It would decrease the computational complexities. The error rate of the proposed method is 5.4%, which is less than the two-dimensional (2D) dynamic programming (DP) error rate of 5.6%, while Lee's method produces 5.9% and the combined method has 6.1% error rate. Genuine accept rate at 1% false accept rate is 89.3% but at 0.1% value it is 96.7%, which is higher. The outcome of this study suggests that the proposed methodology has a low error rate with minimum computational effort as compared with existing methods such as Lee's method and 2D DP and the combined method.

In this study, uncertainty and disturbance compensations are addressed for non-linear systems by an integral sliding mode (ISM) design. It is divided into two steps for implementation of the ISM control. First, an ISM switching surface in quadratic form is designed to construct the attractiveness and reachability. Then, the control law design ensures the stability of the sliding mode on the switching surface. The compensation design is applicable for both matched and mismatched perturbations. Preliminary results show that more relaxed design assumptions of this design, compared with other methods. In the end, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with simulation results.

A method for rotation-invariant lying-pose human body detection in overlooking images is proposed. The rotation-invariant histogram of oriented gradient using Fourier analysis in polar coordinate is exploited as descriptor for lying-pose human body. And then the authors used the exhaustive sliding window search strategy with multiple scale scan to localise human body. Finally, principal component analysis (PCA) is used to determine the rotation angle of the exhaustive sliding window based on the classifier output scores. Experiments on their built XiaMen University Lying-Pose Dataset (XMULP) show the effectiveness of their proposed method.

This study presents automatic generation control (AGC) of interconnected power systems comprising of two thermal and one hydro area having integral controllers. Emphasis is given to a delay in the area control error for the actuation of the supplementary controller and to examine its impact on the dynamic response against no delay which is usually the practice. Analysis is based on 50% loading condition in all the areas. The system performance is examined considering 1% step load perturbation. Results reveal that delayed mode operation provides a better system dynamic performance compared with that obtained without delay and has several distinct merits for the governor. The delay is linked with reduction in wear and tear of the secondary controller and hence increases the life of the governor. The controller gains are optimised by particle swarm optimisation. The performance of delayed mode operation of AGC at other loading conditions is also analysed. An attempt has also been made to find the impact of weights for different components in a cost function used to optimise the controller gains. A modified cost function having different weights for different components when used for controller gain optimisation improves the system performance.