The automotive industry is inevitably experiencing a paradigm shift from fossil fuels to electric powertrain with significant technological breakthroughs in vehicle electrification. Emerging hybrid electric vehicles were one of the first steps towards cleaner and greener vehicles with a higher fuel economy and lower emission levels. The energy management strategy in hybrid electric vehicles determines the power flow pattern and significantly affects vehicle performance. Therefore, in this thesis, a learning-based strategy is proposed to address the energy management problem of a hybrid electric vehicle in various driving conditions. The idea of a deep recurrent neural network-based energy management strategy is proposed, developed, and evaluated. Initially, a hybrid electric vehicle model with a rule-based supervisory controller is constructed for this case study to obtain training data for the deep recurrent neural network and to evaluate the performance of the proposed energy management strategy. Secondly, due to its capabilities to remember historical data, a long short-term memory recurrent neural network is designed and trained to estimate the powertrain control variables from vehicle parameters. Extensive simulations are conducted to improve the model accuracy and ensure its generalization capability. Also, several hyper-parameters and structures are specifically tuned and debugged for this purpose. The novel proposed energy management strategy takes sequential data as input to capture the characteristics of both driver and controller behaviors and improve the estimation/prediction accuracy. The energy management controller is defined as a time-series problem, and a network predictor module is implemented in the system-level controller of the hybrid electric vehicle model. According to the simulation results, the proposed strategy and prediction model demonstrated lower fuel consumption and higher accuracy compared to other learning-based energy management strategies. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a method to detect blood volume changes in every heartbeat. The peaks in the PPG signal corresponds to the electrical impulses sent by the heart. The duration between each heartbeat varies, and these variances are better known as heart rate variability (HRV). Thus, finding peaks correctly from PPG signals provides the opportunity to measure an accurate HRV. Additional research indicates that deep learning approaches can extract HRV from a PPG signal with significantly greater accuracy compared to other traditional methods. In this study, deep learning classifiers were built to detect peaks in a noise-contaminated PPG signal and to recognize the performed activity during the data recording. The dataset used in this study is provided by the PhysioBank database consisting of synchronized PPG-, acceleration- and gyro data. The models investigated in this study were limited toa one-layer LSTM network with six varying numbers of neurons and four different window sizes. The most accurate model for the peak classification was the model consisting of 256 neurons and a window size of 15 time steps, with a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.74. The model consisted of64 neurons and a window duration of 1.25 seconds resulted in the most accurate activity classification, with an MCC score of 0.63. Concludingly, more optimization of a deep learning approach could lead to promising accuracy on peak detection and thus an accurate measurement of HRV. The probable cause for the low accuracy of the activity classification problem is the limited data used in this study.

Software prediction is a complex area as there are no accurate models to represent reliability throughout the use of software, unlike hardware reliability. In the context of the software reliability of on-board train systems, ensuring good software reliability over time is all the more critical given the current density of rail traffic and the risk of accidents resulting from a software malfunction. This thesis proposes to use soft computing methods and historical failure data to predict the software reliability of on-board train systems. For this purpose, four machine learning models (Multi-Layer Perceptron, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm Multi-Layer Perceptron, Long Short-Term Memory Network and Convolutional Neural Network) are compared to determine which has the best prediction performance. We also study the impact of having one or more features represented in the dataset used to train the models. The performance of the different models is evaluated using the Mean Absolute Error, Mean Squared Error, Root Mean Squared Error and the R Squared. The report shows that the Long Short-Term Memory Network is the best performing model on the data used for this project. It also shows that datasets with a single feature achieve better prediction. However, the small amount of data available to conduct the experiments in this project may have impacted the results obtained, which makes further investigations necessary. / Att förutsäga programvara är ett komplext område eftersom det inte finns några exakta modeller för att representera tillförlitligheten under hela programvaruanvändningen, till skillnad från hårdvarutillförlitlighet. När det gäller programvarans tillförlitlighet i fordonsbaserade tågsystem är det ännu viktigare att säkerställa en god tillförlitlighet över tiden med tanke på den nuvarande tätheten i järnvägstrafiken och risken för olyckor till följd av ett programvarufel. I den här avhandlingen föreslås att man använder mjuka beräkningsmetoder och historiska data om fel för att förutsäga programvarans tillförlitlighet i fordonsbaserade tågsystem. För detta ändamål jämförs fyra modeller för maskininlärning (Multi-Layer Perceptron, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm Mult-iLayer Perceptron, Long Short-Term Memory Network och Convolutional Neural Network) för att fastställa vilken som har den bästa förutsägelseprestandan. Vi undersöker också effekten av att ha en eller flera funktioner representerade i den datamängd som används för att träna modellerna. De olika modellernas prestanda utvärderas med hjälp av medelabsolut fel, medelkvadratfel, rotmedelkvadratfel och R-kvadrat. Rapporten visar att Long Short-Term Memory Network är den modell som ger bäst resultat på de data som använts för detta projekt. Den visar också att dataset med en enda funktion ger bättre förutsägelser. Den lilla mängd data som fanns tillgänglig för att genomföra experimenten i detta projekt kan dock ha påverkat de erhållna resultaten, vilket gör att ytterligare undersökningar är nödvändiga.

With the accessibility to generous spectrum and development of high gain antenna arrays, wireless communication in higher frequency bands providing multi-gigabit short range wireless access has become a reality. The directional antennas have proven to reduce losses due to interfering signals but are still exposed to blockage events. These events impede the overall user connectivity and throughput. A mobile blocker such as a moving vehicle amplifies the blockage effect. Modelling the blockage effects helps in understanding these events in depth and in maintaining the user connectivity. This thesis proposes the use of a four state channel model to describe blockage events in high-frequency communication. Two deep learning architectures are then designed and evaluated for two possible tasks, the prediction of the signal strength and the classification of the channel state. The evaluations based on simulated traces show high accuracy, and suggest that the proposed models have the potential to be extended for deployment in real systems. / Med tillgängligheten till generöst spektrum och utveckling av antennmatriser med hög förstärkning har trådlös kommunikation i högre frekvensband som ger multi-gigabit kortdistans trådlös åtkomst blivit verklighet. Riktningsantennerna har visat sig minska förluster på grund av störande signaler men är fortfarande utsatta för blockeringshändelser. Dessa händelser hindrar den övergripande användaranslutningen och genomströmningen. En mobil blockerare såsom ett fordon i rörelse förstärker blockeringseffekten. Modellering av blockeringseffekter hjälper till att förstå dessa händelser på djupet och bibehålla användaranslutningen. Denna avhandling föreslår användning av en fyrstatskanalmodell för att beskriva blockeringshändelser i högfrekvent kommunikation. Två djupinlärningsarkitekturer designas och utvärderas för två möjliga uppgifter, förutsägelsen av signalstyrkan och klassificeringen av kanalstatusen. Utvärderingarna baserade på simulerade spår visar hög noggrannhet och föreslår att de föreslagna modellerna har potential att utökas för distribution i verkliga system.

<p dir="ltr">Detecting anomalies in spacecraft time-series data is a high priority, especially considering the harshness of the spacecraft operating environment. These anomalies often function as precursors for system failure. Traditionally, the time-series data channels are monitored manually by domain experts, which is time-consuming. Additionally, there are thousands of channels to monitor. Machine learning methods have proven to be useful for automatic anomaly detection, but a unique model must be trained from scratch for each time-series. This thesis proposes three approaches for reducing training costs. First, a transfer learning approach that finetunes a general pre-trained model to reduce training time and the number of unique models required for a given spacecraft. The second and third approaches both use online learning to reduce the amount of training data and time needed to identify anomalies. The second approach leverages an ensemble of extreme learning machines while the third approach uses deep learning models. All three approaches are shown to achieve reasonable anomaly detection performance with reduced training costs.</p><p dir="ltr">Measuring the phenotypes, or observable traits, of a plant enables plant scientists to understand the interaction between the growing environment and the genetic characteristics of a plant. Plant phenotyping is typically done manually, and often involves destructive sampling, making the entire process labor-intensive and difficult to replicate. In this thesis, we use image processing for characterizing two different disease progressions. Tar spot disease can be identified visually as it induces small black circular spots on the leaf surface. We propose using a Mask R-CNN to detect tar spots from RGB images of leaves, thus enabling rapid non-destructive phenotyping of afflicted plants. The second disease, bacteria-induced wilting, is measured using a visual assessment that is often subjective. We design several metrics that can be extracted from RGB images that can be used to generate consistent wilting measurements with a random forest. Both approaches ensure faster, replicable results, enabling accurate, high-throughput analysis to draw conclusions about effective disease treatments and plant breeds.</p>