Computational Methods in Engineering

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Recently, image processing technique and robotic vision are widely applied in fault detection of industrial products as well as document reading. In order to compare the captured images from the target, it is necessary to prepare a perfect image, then matching should be applied. A preprocessing must therefore, be done to correct the samples’ and or camera’s movement which can occur during the capturing of images. The Radon Transform technique is applied in this study which is inherently invariant to any movement, such as dislocation and rotation which leads to scale changing. According to this technique, simple methods are proposed to determine the degree of movement. Results of computer simulation show the priority of the proposed method to other techniques. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm is less than 0.1 degree and is applicable to different segments such as texts, tables, drawings, …, which are prepared in different writing languages by different devices such as digital camera, scanner, fax, and printer. Keywords: Image processing, Image matching, Radon Transform, Skew detection documents, Computer application in industry.

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Methods for calculating Available Transfer Capability (ATC) of the transmission systems may be grouped under Static and Dynamic methods. This paper presents a fast dynamic method for ATC calculations, which considers both Transient Stability Limits and Voltage Stability Limits as terminating criteria. A variation of Energy Function Method is used to determine the transient stability limit and the determinant of the Jacobian matrix of the system is used as an index to determine the voltage stability limit. A novel method is used to approximately calculate this determinant. Combining these two methods, an algorithm that calculates ATC, based on both voltage and angle dynamic stability is presented. The advantage of this algorithm, besides considering both voltage and angle dynamic stability, is its high speed. This speed of calculation makes the algorithm a perfect candidate to be used in screening contingencies and to determine those cases that need to be further analyzed. To demonstrate the validity, efficiency, and the speed of the new method, it is employed in the calculation of ATC for numerical examples with 2, 3, 7 (CIGREE), 10, 30 (IEEE) and 145 (Iowa State) buses.

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In this paper, the problem of batch scheduling in a flexible flow shop environment is studied. It is assumed that machines in some stages are able to process a number of jobs simultaneously. The applications of this problem can be found in various industries including spring and wire manufacturing and in auto industry. A mixed integer programming formulation of the problem is presented and it is shown that the problem is NP-Hard. Three heuristics will then be developed to solve the problem and a lower bound is also developed for evaluating the performance of the proposed heuristics. Results show that heuristic H3 gives better results compared to the others.

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In this paper, a robust control law is proposed, based on Lyapunov’s theory and sliding mode control theory, in
order to track the angle of attack in nonlinear longitudinal dynamics of a missile. It is assumed that there are unmatched
uncertainties in the nonlinear systems. In the proposed algorithm, the controller gains are optimized by Particle Swarm
Optimization (PSO) algorithm. For this purpose, a cost function is extracted from the output tracking error. Simulation results
show that the proposed algorithm has better performance than conventional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller in
the presence of unmatched uncertainties.

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Scheduling in production environments is used as a competitive tool to improve efficiency and respond to customer requests. In this paper, a scheduling problem is investigated in a three-stage flexible flowshop environment with the consideration of blocking and batch processing. This problem has been inspired by the charging and packaging line of a large battery manufacturer. In this environment, the first and third stages involve a single processor machine, and the second one consists of m identical parallel batch processing machines. The objective is to minimize the total weighted tardiness of the received orders.Given the lack of consideration of this problem in the literature, first, a mathematical programming model is presented for the problem. Also, due to the NP-hardness of the problem, a variable neighborhood search algorithm and a memetic algorithm are developed to solve it. The computational results show that the variable neighborhood search algorithm can solve instances up to 1200 orders and 15 machines with an average deviation of about 1.9%, relative to the best solution of the two algorithms, and the memetic algorithm can solve instances up to 1200 orders and 15 machines with an average deviation of about 7.8%, as compared e to the best solution of the two algorithms. In general, computational results show the better performance of the variable neighborhood search algorithm in comparison to the memetic algorithm.