Smart-meter data presents an opportunity for utilities to improve their database records, and develop a low-voltage (LV) model which may be useful for outage management and fault detection, isolation and response, phase balancing, and network planning. In addition, impact assessment studies on new technologies can be performed. This study presents several contributions in the area of determining the topology of the LV distribution system. This is in terms of identifying the transformer a particular installation control point is connected to, and the phase if that customer is single-phase. First, harmonic voltage correlation is proposed as it is more robust to noise and missing records than the prior algorithm of voltage correlation. Second, it is demonstrated that smart-meter data can be used to determine the transformer/phase to which a customer is connected and update database records in this regard. To achieve this, a new algorithm based on correlation analysis with the Fisher Z transform is developed. Third, a method to estimate LV feeder and service main impedances is presented. Further work is necessary; however, the results from trials in Auckland, New Zealand are highly promising.

Aiming at solving the colour union, variation and loss problems during cross-media reproduction in the layer-tinted map, this study proposes a colour gamut mapping model for the preservation of visual differentials in layer-tinted maps. First, many layer-tinted maps are collected for analysis and the colouring rules are concluded. Then, the dominant and non-dominant colours are extracted based on the colour gamut characteristics of the maps. For the mapping of dominant colours, the corresponding Munsell's three colour dimensions are calculated by establishing the transformational relation between CIELAB colour space and Munsell's colour system and then the colour gamut mapping of dominant colours is achieved in the Munsell's colour order system. On the other hand, the mapping of non-dominant colours is achieved by hue-angle preserving minimum ΔE clipping. The experimental results indicate that compared with the four colour gamut mapping methods recommended by the International Color Consortium, the proposed algorithm in this study can more easily distinguish the hierarchical information in the maps and perfectly remain the visual differentials among the layered colours.

Cloud computing is a growing computing paradigm that provides Internet-based computer services on-demand basis. Adoption of cloud infrastructure promises enterprises numerous benefits. In particular, hybrid cloud, a combination of both public and private clouds, offers benefits of both the public and private clouds. The objective of this study is to identify the critical challenges, faced by client organisations in the adoption of hybrid cloud computing. The authors have reviewed the literature through systematic literature review (SLR) process. We have followed all the SLR steps by developing SLR protocol first which was then validated and implemented. We have identified a list of ten challenges, by extracting data from a sample of 120 papers, in the adoption of hybrid cloud. The identified challenges include three critical challenges such as: ‘public cloud security concern’, ‘efficient management issue’, and ‘integration complexity’. We have further analysed the identified challenges with respect to time and study strategy. Clients should address all the identified challenges in general and the critical challenges in particular. Our next phase of the study is validation of the identified challenges through industry practitioners and to find solutions/practices for addressing these challenges, which will be published in future.

In this study, simple and compact novel-shape planar monopole antenna for multi-band operation such as DCS, Bluetooth, and ultra-wide-band (UWB) is proposed. Proposed antenna comprises of circular ring with extended rectangular monopole antenna in one of the arm of the circular ring and inverted L-shape monopole antenna at the centre of the structure is placed to generate multiple resonances at different frequencies. In this structure, Bluetooth frequency band generates due to extended rectangular patch, DCS band by inverted L-patch, and UWB bands due to circular ring. Easily available FR4 substrate with permittivity 4.4 and loss tangent 0.02 is used for fabrication with antenna dimensions (35.5 × 24.5 × 1.6) mm³. Antenna structure is fed through 50 Ω micro-strip line and terminated by SMA connector. Measured return loss of the antenna is ≤−10 dB with effective control over the three operating frequency bands. In addition, some selected key parameters which affect the impedance bandwidth are analysed and results are discussed.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of advance warning in-vehicle systems. Under real-time driving settings, the abilities to respond appropriately to unsafe conditions were reviewed for a homogeneous group of drivers. Using differential global positioning system equipped probe vehicles, individual vehicle speeds as well as its speed change rates were collected based on the corresponding vehicle trajectory. The driver's response was evaluated under two different types of warning systems, emergency warning and general warning, by combining various modalities. Study results showed that for emergency alerts, the most effective warning information was transmitted by integrating ‘voice, graphic, and text’ or ‘repeated computer tone and text’. In the case of a general warning alert, the ‘repeated computer tone, voice, graphic, and text’ combination indicated to be the most effective. The results of this research look to provide insights in developing and designing an effective in-vehicle warning system.

This study presents subblocks interleaving partial transmit sequence (SBI-PTS) technique having low complexity for reducing the peak-to-average power ratio in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. In this technique, a new subblocks interleaver is proposed, in which each subblock is interleaved with the others. Moreover, a new optimisation scheme is introduced, in which the number of iterations is made to be equal to the number of subblocks only which results in reduced processing time and less computation that leads to reduced complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the new technique can effectively reduce the complexity by up to 99.95% (for subblocks number M = 16, inverse fast Fourier transform size N = 256) compared with the conventional PTS and new existing PTS techniques and yield good bit error rate performance. The other salient feature of this scheme is that it does not require side information and thus it offers increased transmission efficiency.

Researchers have leveraged modern day sensor rich smartphones to collect crowdsourced data and analyse it for different phenomenon of interests. Crowdsensing applications must bear with the limited energy, sensing, and computational resources available on the phone. To relief some burden from the smartphones, the authors envision a new crowdsourcing architecture where low-cost, low-energy sensors embedded in objects around us, i.e. walls, traffic lights, and billboards, providing a variety of sensors depending on their context, e.g. AirQuality, temperature. These devices would carry on the sensing, processing, and broadcasting of sensor data using wireless interfaces. Smartphones on the other hand, would opportunistically discover and collect data from these devices to provide a much better, richer, and energy-efficient sensing infrastructure. They discuss the usage of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) as a new energy-efficient sensing resource for crowdsensing. They focus on defining a unified BLE sensing framework, which provides a number of smart sensing schemes to ease the development of energy efficient and context aware crowdsensing applications. They also provide an open-source library that allows developers to utilise this framework and acts as a layer to support opportunistic crowdsensing out of the box.

This study presents an optimisation technique, called krill herd algorithm (KHA), for the effectiveness and performance analysis of an interconnected automatic generation control (AGC) system. A two-area multi-unit hydro–hydro (HH–HH) power system equipped with classical I-controller and two other test systems: namely, thermal–thermal, thermal–hydro which are widely available in literature are considered for design and analysis purpose. Eigenvalues analysis assesses that HH–HH power system is highly unstable under small load perturbation. To stabilise this power system, different frequency stabilisers such as superconducting magnetic energy storage, thyristor control phase shifter, static synchronous series compensator etc. are proposed in AGC system. Optimum gains of the controller and frequency stabiliser are evaluated using KHA. Integral square error criterion is used to minimise the area control error, which is considered as an objective function. The superiority of the proposed algorithm is checked by means of an extensive comparative analysis with the results published in recent research algorithms such as craziness-based-particle swarm optimisation and real coded genetic algorithm etc. for the same test system.