A novel mechanistic modelling approach for microbial selection dynamics: Towards improved design and control of raceway reactors for purple bacteria.

Purple phototrophic bacteria (PPB) show an underexplored potential for resource recovery from wastewater. Raceway reactors offer a more affordable full-scale solution on wastewater and enable useful additional aerobic processes. Current mathematical models of PPB systems provide useful mechanistic insights, but do not represent the full metabolic versatility of PPB and thus require further advancement to simulate the process for technology development and control. In this study, a new modelling approach for PPB that integrates the photoheterotrophic, and both anaerobic and aerobic chemoheterotrophic metabolic pathways through an empirical parallel metabolic growth constant was proposed. It aimed the modelling of microbial selection dynamics in competition with aerobic and anaerobic microbial community under different operational scenarios. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to identify the most influential parameters within the model and calibrate them based on experimental data. Process perturbation scenarios were simulated, which showed a good performance of the model.

PRISMA: A novel approach for deriving probabilistic surrogate safety measures for risk evaluation.

Surrogate Safety Measures (SSMs) are used to express road safety in terms of the safety risk in traffic conflicts. Typically, SSMs rely on assumptions regarding the future evolution of traffic participant trajectories to generate a measure of risk, restricting their applicability to scenarios where these assumptions are valid. In response to this limitation, we present the novel Probabilistic RISk Measure derivAtion (PRISMA) method. The objective of the PRISMA method is to derive SSMs that can be used to calculate in real time the probability of a specific event (e.g., a crash). The PRISMA method adopts a data-driven approach to predict the possible future traffic participant trajectories, thereby reducing the reliance on specific assumptions regarding these trajectories. Since the PRISMA is not bound to specific assumptions, the PRISMA method offers the ability to derive multiple SSMs for various scenarios. The occurrence probability of the specified event is based on simulations and combined with a regression model, this enables our derived SSMs to make real-time risk estimations. To illustrate the PRISMA method, an SSM is derived for risk evaluation during longitudinal traffic interactions. Since there is no known method to objectively estimate risk from first principles, i.e., there is no known risk ground truth, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to objectively compare the relative merits of two SSMs. Instead, we provide a method for benchmarking our derived SSM with respect to expected risk trends. The application of the benchmarking illustrates that the SSM matches the expected risk trends. Whereas the derived SSM shows the potential of the PRISMA method, future work involves applying the approach for other types of traffic conflicts, such as lateral traffic conflicts or interactions with vulnerable road users.

Fuzzy Adaptive Zero-Error-Constrained Tracking Control for HFVs in the Presence of Multiple Unknown Control Directions.

This article attempts to realize zero-error constrained tracking for hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) subject to unknown control directions and asymmetric flight state constraints. The main challenges of reaching such goals consist in that addressing multiple unknown control directions requires novel conditional inequalities encompassing the summation of multiple Nussbaum integral terms, and in that the summation of conditional inequality may be bounded even when each term approaches infinity individually, but with opposite signs. To handle this challenge, novel Nussbaum functions that are designed in such a way that their signs keep the same on some periods of time are incorporated into the control design, which not only ensures the boundedness of multiple Nussbaum integral terms but preserves that velocity and altitude tracking errors eventually converge to zero. Fuzzy-logic systems (FLSs) are exploited to approximate model uncertainties. Asymmetric integral barrier Lyapunov functions (IBLFs) are adopted to handle the fact that the operating regions of flight state variables are asymmetric in practice, while ensuring the validity of fuzzy-logic approximators. Comparative simulations validate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology in guaranteeing convergence, smoothness, constraints satisfaction, and in handling unknown control directions.

Safety assessment of automated vehicles: how to determine whether we have collected enough field data?

Objective: The amount of collected field data from naturalistic driving studies is quickly increasing. The data are used for, among others, developing automated driving technologies (such as crash avoidance systems), studying driver interaction with such technologies, and gaining insights into the variety of scenarios in real-world traffic. Because data collection is time consuming and requires high investments and resources, questions like "Do we have enough data?," "How much more information can we gain when obtaining more data?," and "How far are we from obtaining completeness?" are highly relevant. In fact, deducing safety claims based on collected data-for example, through testing scenarios based on collected data-requires knowledge about the degree of completeness of the data used. We propose a method for quantifying the completeness of the so-called activities in a data set. This enables us to partly answer the aforementioned questions. Method: In this article, the (traffic) data are interpreted as a sequence of different so-called scenarios that can be grouped into a finite set of scenario classes. The building blocks of scenarios are the activities. For every activity, there exists a parameterization that encodes all information in the data of each recorded activity. For each type of activity, we estimate a probability density function (pdf) of the associated parameters. Our proposed method quantifies the degree of completeness of a data set using the estimated pdfs. Results: To illustrate the proposed method, 2 different case studies are presented. First, a case study with an artificial data set, of which the underlying pdfs are known, is carried out to illustrate that the proposed method correctly quantifies the completeness of the activities. Next, a case study with real-world data is performed to quantify the degree of completeness of the acquired data for which the true pdfs are unknown. Conclusion: The presented case studies illustrate that the proposed method is able to quantify the degree of completeness of a small set of field data and can be used to deduce whether sufficient data have been collected for the purpose of the field study. Future work will focus on applying the proposed method to larger data sets. The proposed method will be used to evaluate the level of completeness of the data collection on Singaporean roads, aimed at defining relevant test cases for the autonomous vehicle road approval procedure that is being developed in Singapore.

A Big Data Analysis Approach for Rail Failure Risk Assessment.

Railway infrastructure monitoring is a vital task to ensure rail transportation safety. A rail failure could result in not only a considerable impact on train delays and maintenance costs, but also on safety of passengers. In this article, the aim is to assess the risk of a rail failure by analyzing a type of rail surface defect called squats that are detected automatically among the huge number of records from video cameras. We propose an image processing approach for automatic detection of squats, especially severe types that are prone to rail breaks. We measure the visual length of the squats and use them to model the failure risk. For the assessment of the rail failure risk, we estimate the probability of rail failure based on the growth of squats. Moreover, we perform severity and crack growth analyses to consider the impact of rail traffic loads on defects in three different growth scenarios. The failure risk estimations are provided for several samples of squats with different crack growth lengths on a busy rail track of the Dutch railway network. The results illustrate the practicality and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Cross-entropy optimization of control policies with adaptive basis functions.

This paper introduces an algorithm for direct search of control policies in continuous-state discrete-action Markov decision processes. The algorithm looks for the best closed-loop policy that can be represented using a given number of basis functions (BFs), where a discrete action is assigned to each BF. The type of the BFs and their number are specified in advance and determine the complexity of the representation. Considerable flexibility is achieved by optimizing the locations and shapes of the BFs, together with the action assignments. The optimization is carried out with the cross-entropy method and evaluates the policies by their empirical return from a representative set of initial states. The return for each representative state is estimated using Monte Carlo simulations. The resulting algorithm for cross-entropy policy search with adaptive BFs is extensively evaluated in problems with two to six state variables, for which it reliably obtains good policies with only a small number of BFs. In these experiments, cross-entropy policy search requires vastly fewer BFs than value-function techniques with equidistant BFs, and outperforms policy search with a competing optimization algorithm called DIRECT.