published_or_final_version / Electrical Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

In Automotive Industries, to be confident regarding the success of a planned operation, performing accurate methods in order to detect abnormal operating conditions, known as faults, is crucial. An effective method for diagnosis and fault recognition ensures the safety of the operation, reduces manufacturing cost and any other potential impacts. In addition, mobile solutions have been widely adopted among automotive manufactures during recent years and they have taken full advantage of mobile strategies. Accordingly, it is necessary for there to be a future-proof plan to control the diagnostic operations in advance. In this thesis, the immediate objective has been to offer a future-proof and user-friendly solution to assist engineers and service technicians in the monitoring, detecting, and diagnosing of faults on Toyota/BT/CESAB branded trucks. A mobile cross-platform framework is used to develop the diagnostic mobile solution which is not only able to be deployed on Android and iOS mobile platforms, but also provides wireless communication between truck machines and mobile devices through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi ad hoc technologies. The diagnostic mobile tool is capable of processing real-time controller area network messages and visualizing the condition of different sensors in a more user-friendly way through rich hybrid and client-side web user interfaces. The experience of evaluating a cross-platform diagnostic tool on different mobile operating systems proved that cross-platform mobile development methodology can be a reliable technique for developing projects that essentially require real-time data processing. In addition, it indicates that Apple iOS offers a better runtime performance than Google Android for the current tool.

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty 0/ Engineering, University 0/ Lite Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfilment 0/ the requirements /01' the Degree 0/ Doctor 0/ Philosophy. Johannesburg 1990. / This thesis studies fault tolerant strategies for real-time distributed computer control systems so as to propose an error recovery technique that renders individual processors on the network resistant to soft failures. The technique is effective for soft failures which have as certain maximum duration, and does not require the use of specialised hardware. Attention is focused on achieving resistance to soft failures in environments which have demanding time constraints such as those found in computer systems for process control, materials handling and automated manufacturing. [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version]

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering / A multi-layered expert system shell that specifically addresses real-time issues is designed and implemented. The architecture of this expert system shell supports the concepts of parallelism, concurrent computation and competitive reasoning in that it allows several alternatives to be explored simultaneously. An inference engine driven by a hybrid of forward and backward chanining methods is used to achieve real-time response, and certainty factors are used for uncertainty management. Real-time responsiveness is improved by allowing the coexistence of procedural and declarative knowledge within the same system. A test bed that was set up in order to investigate the performance of the implemented shell is described. It was found in the performance analysis that the proposed system meets the real-time requirements as specified in this research. / Andrew Chakane 2018

A project report submitted to the Faculty of Erlglncerlng, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science In Engineering Johannesburg 1993 / This Project Repolt r ''"lorts on the study of an approach to building integrated real-time software systems based on re-usable object-oriented components. The basis of the approach is the development of a a-layered structure of components, where each layer is built on the underlying layer of components, The lower layer of components consists of generic re-usable building blocks that may be re-used for building and integrating other real-time applications. The middle layer consists of components that are generic to the application domain, and the top layer consists of components that are specific to each application of that application domain. The Report includes researching and developing methods of communicating between these building blocks using an OSI/CMIP-conformant 'software highway" and in this regard particular attention is given to the formal and de facto industry standards. With this approach, it is argued that the application engineer can effectively build new applications using the re-usable components. This is demonstrated by reporting on the implementation of a large real-world Telecommunications Network Management application. The Project Report contains a critical analysis of the technical, organisational and project management issues of this Object-oriented component approach as compared to the traditional development approach. The Report concludes that despite certain technical and organisational concerns, the object-oriented approach does indeed yield several worthwhile benefits for developing real-time software systems. These benefits include genuine re-usability, and l"1proved productivity, testability and maintainability.

Natural matte extraction is a difficult and generally unsolved problem. Generating a matte from a nonuniform background traditionally requires a tediously hand drawn matte. This thesis studies recent methods requiring the user to place only modest scribbles identifying the foreground and the background. This research demonstrates a new GPU-based implementation of the recently introduced Fuzzy- Matte algorithm. Interactive matte extraction was achieved on a CUDA enabled G80 graphics processor. Experimental results demonstrate improved performance over the previous CPU based version. In depth analysis of experimental data from the GPU and the CPU implementations are provided. The design challenges of porting a variant of Dijkstra's shortest distance algorithm to a parallel processor are considered. / by Joel Gibson. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

by Zhao Lei. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-85). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgments --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Agents --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Deliberative Agents --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Reactive Agents --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Interacting Agents --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Hybrid Architectures --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2 --- Real-time Artificial Intelligence --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3 --- Real-Time Agents --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- The Subsumption Architecture --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- The InterRAP Architecture --- p.15 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- The 3T Architecture --- p.16 / Chapter 2.4 --- On-line Scheduling in Real-Time Agents --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- A Real-Time Agent Architecture --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1 --- Human Cognition Model --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Perception --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Cognition --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Action --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2 --- Real-Time Message Passing Primitives and Process Structuring --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Message Passing as IPC --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Administrator and Worker Processes --- p.28 / Chapter 3.3 --- Agent Architecture --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Sensor Workers and the Sensor Administrator --- p.30 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- The Cognition Workers --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- "The Task Administrator, the Scheduler Worker and Ex- ecutor Workers" --- p.32 / Chapter 3.4 --- An Agent-Based Real-time Arcade Game --- p.34 / Chapter 4 --- A Multiple Method Approach to Task Scheduling --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1 --- Task Scheduling Mechanism --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Task and Action --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Task Administrator --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Task Scheduler --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2 --- A Task Scheduling Model --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3 --- Combination Rules and Special Cases --- p.46 / Chapter 4.4 --- Scheduling Algorithms --- p.49 / Chapter 5 --- Task Scheduling Model: Analysis and Experiments --- p.53 / Chapter 5.1 --- Goodness Measure --- p.53 / Chapter 5.2 --- Theoretical Analysis --- p.54 / Chapter 5.3 --- Implementation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Task Generator Implementation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Executor Workers Implementation --- p.61 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.62 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Hybrid Mechanism and Individual Algorithms --- p.63 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Effect of Average Execution Time --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4.3 --- Effect of the Greedy Algorithm --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4.4 --- Effect of the Advanced Algorithm --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4.5 --- Effect of Actions and Relations Among Them --- p.68 / Chapter 5.4.6 --- Effect of Deadline --- p.71 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.73 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of Contributions --- p.73 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.75