Piracy and armed robbery against ships today

This paper sets out the nature, scale and geographical locations of attacks against vessels today. Numerous examples in the paper highlight the worldwide nature of these attacks, the violence and differences in modus operandi and targets. The information is drawn from the International Maritime Bureau’s (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur. Against this background, it briefly discusses issues of definition and response, including some technological devices, which can help locate hijacked vessels and deter unlawful boarding. The paper concludes with some practical thoughts on dealing with international crime, the victims of which, through the nature of their work have to travel beyond national boundaries, and so do not always attract the support of and commitment from national governments and law enforcement agencies where the attacks take place.     

Design and Evaluation of Robust Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Systems in Parameter Space

This paper is on the design of cooperative adaptive cruise control systems for automated driving of platoons of vehicles in the longitudinal direction. Longitudinal models of vehicles with simple dynamics, an uncertain first order time constant and vehicle to vehicle communication with a communication delay are used in the vehicle modeling. A robust parameter space approach is developed and applied to the design of the cooperative adaptive cruise control system. D-stability is chosen as the robust performance goal and the feedback PD controller is designed in controller parameter space to achieve this D-stability goal for a range of possible longitudinal dynamics time constants and different values of time gap. Preceding vehicle acceleration is sent to the ego vehicle using vehicle to vehicle communication and a feedforward controller is used in this inter-vehicle loop to improve performance. Simulation results of an eight vehicle platoon of heterogeneous vehicles are presented and evaluated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed design method. Also, the proposed method is compared with a benchmark controller and the feedback only controller. Time gap regulation and string stability are used to assess performance and the effect of the vehicle to vehicle communication frequency on control system performance is also investigated.     

Nonlinear Model-Based Multivariable Control for Air & Charging System of Diesel Engine with Short and Long Route EGR Valves

The objective of this study is to investigate a nonlinear model-based multivariable (MIMO, Multi Input Multi Output) technique to decouple actuators interaction and to reduce the calibration effort, while increasing control performances, above all in transient conditions, and robustness with respect to model uncertainties and system parameter variations. The presented control technique is based on the development of a nonlinear dynamical physical model of the diesel air and charging system. Feedback Linearization control is then applied to decouple actuators’ interactions and compensate for nonlinearities. A new set of virtual inputs are defined inverting the system differential equations. Relation among the new virtual inputs and the outputs is purely linear and decoupled, meaning that each virtual input affects linearly only one output. Moreover, a linear control block is added to guarantee transient and steady state performances and closed loop robustness. The proposed control approach has been validated through small diesel engine dyno and vehicle activities. Transient test bench maneuvers show that the control is able to coordinate the actuators in order to fulfill the targets and to guarantee similar performances in different operating points. In addition the robustness to environmental changes has been demonstrated by vehicle tests at different ambient conditions.     

Lubrication and tribology in seawater hydraulic piston pump

Water hydraulic systems have provoked major interest because of the human friendly and environmental safety aspects. Piston pump is one of the most frequently used hydraulic units in recent engineering technique. In water hydraulic piston pump, poor lubrication is more likely to happen than in oil hydraulic one because of difference in properties between water and oil. So there are some key problems such as corrosive wear and erosion, which are investigated briefly. Many new materials have been developed, which give longer life expectancies with water without corrosion and erosion. A new type of seawater hydraulic piston pumps with better suction characteristics had been developed at HUST. Much of this research has concentrated on new materials, structure and experiments, which are also specially introduced.     

Research on Motion Estimation Algorithm of Star Point Based on Nonlinear Gaussian Fitting

The energy distribution model of motion blurred star point is analyzed. The distribution of the star point approximates to a two-dimensional (2D) Gaussian distribution under degeneration. Two multi-parameter nonlinear Gaussian fitting methods (GFMs) are proposed, and the relationship between fitting parameters and motion blur parameters is analyzed. Estimation of the parameters of motion blur by fitting parameters is calculated to realize the error compensation of the motion blur. The simulation results show the effectiveness and accuracy.     

Constraint Mapping as a Means of Further Refining Saltmarsh Re-Creation Opportunities for the UK Solent Region

Based on geomorphological criteria, the Coastal Habitat Management Plan (CHaMP) for the Solent identified some 4,800 hectares of land potentially suitable for the creation of intertidal habitat, principally saltmarsh, through the use of managed realignment. Using “constraint mapping,” this study set out to illustrate that limitations to habitat re-creation through inundation are not merely geomorphological in nature. Indeed, a broad range of social, political, legal, technical, and economic constraints exist and must be evaluated in conjunction with physical parameters if the objectives of the European Birds and Habitats Directives are to be met, and so that future coastal defense policies ensure maintenance of the “favorable conservation status” of designated sites. A numerical filter system has been used to re-evaluate individual sites to establish “realistic” opportunities for compensatory saltmarsh creation in the Solent. As a result of taking into account wider socioeconomic constraints, it is clear that fewer areas are available for habitat creation purposes than were initially identified in the Solent CHaMP study.     

The role of individual characteristics in car ownership shortly after relationship dissolution

The dissolution of a relationship is a life event that often coincides with many other changes in life, such as a decline in income level or household size or a change in place of residence. This study aims to provide more insight into the ways in which circumstances shortly following the disruption of a relationship affect travel behaviour. Register data that combines information on the Dutch population, income and vehicle registration are used to understand how personal situations that are closely related to relationship disruption affect car ownership. The study shows that several characteristics of singles and single partners shortly after a breakup negatively affect car ownership. For instance, a relatively low income level, unemployment, living in a city or a residential move all affect car ownership negatively. This study focuses on the role of circumstances shortly after relationship disruption, demonstrating the importance of such an event.     

Numeric-based XML labeling schema by generalized dynamic method

Most efficient indeces and query techniques over XML (extensible markup language) data are based on a certain labeling scheme, which can quickly determine ancestor-descendant and parent-child relationship between two nodes. The current basic labeling schemes such as containment scheme and prefix scheme cannot avoid relabeling when XML documents are updated. After analyzing the essence of existing dynamic XML labels such as compact dynamic binary string (CDBS) and vector encoding, this paper gives a common unifying framework for the numeric-based generalized dynamic label, which can be implemented into a variety of dynamic labels according to the different user-defined value comparison methods. This paper also proposes a novel dynamic labeling scheme called radical sign label. Extensive experiments show that the radical sign label performs well for the initialization, insertion and query operations, and especially for skewed insertion where the storage cost of the radical sign label is better than that of former methods.     

Skin detection method based on cascaded AdaBoost classifier

Skin detection has been considered as the principal step in many machine vision systems, such as face detection and adult image filtering. Among all these techniques, skin color is the most welcome cue because of its robustness. However, traditional color-based approaches poorly perform on the classification of skin-like pixels. In this paper, we propose a new skin detection method based on the cascaded adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) classifier, which consists of minimum-risk based Bayesian classifier and models in different color spaces such as HSV (hue-saturation-value), YCgCb (brightness-green-blue) and YCgCr (brightness-green-red). In addition, we have constructed our own database that is larger and more suitable for training and testing on filtering adult images than the Compaq data set. Experimental results show that our method behaves better than the state-of-the-art pixel-based skin detection techniques on processing images with skin-like background.     

Degradation of selected indoor air pollutants: Comparison study of photocatalytic,ozone-assisted photocatalytic and amine adsorption processes

Indoor air pollutants impact human health, comfort and productivity. The method of photocatalysis has been applied mainly in flow reactors and little information is available on indoor air pollutant removal in airtight reactors. In the paper, experiments were carried out to remove formaldehyde (HCHO), ammonia (NH₃) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the airtight and ventilated chambers. Results demonstrated that 90.4% of HCHO, 92.3% of NH₃ and 57.9% of VOCs were removed in the amine adsorption process, while 67.5% (hereinbefore, these are the mass fraction) of HCHO, 60.0% of NH₃, and 61.2% of VOCs were removed in the photocatalytic process. However, ozone-assisted photocatalytic process showed great potential to degrade indoor air pollutants in the ventilated chamber. Factors and mechanisms of the photocatalytic degradation of HCHO, NH₃ and VOCs were also discussed.