Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Dementia occurs in every country of the world, especially in developed nations. Since such spatially and cognitive impaired people lack the ability to grasp positional relationship between landmarks, we have developed a walk navigation system using photographs of landmarks to benefit them and their families. Our system provides a photograph of the next target landmark to the mobile devices of cognitive impaired people. It can also identify points where cognitive impaired are likely to get lost. Our system can also support such tasks as taking tickets by photographs and animations.

The range of tasks for Search And Rescue (SAR) services is very comprehensive and requires extensive experience in addition to detailed knowledge. Actual and extended incident data, tactical information and technical knowledge are significant issues in this field. Within research projects information systems are designed to provide relevant information with the required/desired detail depth to the individual user groups. Mobile information processing instruments in combination with an internet based access to a modular knowledge database are predestined to improve the handling of emergencies as well as the data management for operation controls and fire-fighting forces. Emerging data transfer technologies like UMTS as well as WLAN are applied in order to access the database independent of the location. Semantic methods provide new possibilities to interlink information which accelerates the data preparation and retrieval. This paper describes the information and knowledge availability and adaptation.

1,4-Dichlorobenzene (DCB), widely used as a moth repellent and a space deodorant, is one kind of chlorobenzene that is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer among chemicals possibly carcinogenic to humans on the basis of a sufficient evidence for carcinogenicity to rodents. DCB has been found to cause renal tubular-cell adenocarcinomas in rats and hepatocellular carcinomas in mice but without their clastogenic and genotoxic effects. In this study, we investigated the health risk of DCB workers from three steps. Firstly, we investigated the cytotoxicity of 1,4-dichlorobenzene and its metabolite 2,5-dichlorophenol in human lymphoma Jurkat cells, human colon adenocarcinoma cells and human hepatocellular carcinoma cells. The LD50 of DCB were 1.34 mM, 5 mM and 2 mM in Human lymphoma Jurkat cells, human colon adenocarcinoma cells and human hepatocellular carcinoma cells respectively. DCB was found to cause apoptosis itself and reduced the staurosporine-induced apoptosis in all three cells. Secondly, works in four factories were investigated to examine their blood cells. Two items, their apoptosis rate and their anti-apoptosis rate, were investigated on the work’s blood. In an investigation on Dec, 2004, we found a significant higher apoptosis rate of exposure workers comparing with non-exposure workers. The blood cells of workers were significantly resistant to the staurosporine-induced apoptosis. In the other three investigations in 2005, we found similar phenomenon that the blood cells of exposure workers had higher apoptosis rate and higher resistant rate to staurosporine-induced apoptosis. Thirdly, the DCB content in the urine and blood of workers were analyzed. Based on the low to high level of DCB content, the workers were grouped into 10 degrees. The correlation of the level of DCB and apoptosis rate and anti apoptosis rate was analyzed by Pearson Correlation Program. The apoptosis rate and anti-apoptosis rate of worker’s blood were both significant negatively correlated with the DCB content in their urine and air. Based on this computer program analysis, we suggest that the exposure of DCB induced significant changes of the blood cell of exposure workers and need to be concerned.

The economic assessment of industrial accidents caused by abnormal behaviors can not only improve the risk assessment results but also serve as a crucial criterion for prioritizing the correction plans. Three stages of works are designed to derive the loss figures from assessing the standard operation procedure. The objective of stage one is to identify potential abnormal behaviors through analysis of activities. The objective of stage 2 is to identify cost types initiated by different accident losses. The objective of stage 3 is to establish the accident cost bank through analyzing the historical accident data. Two industrial cases, including one semiconductor and one steel company, were studies to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in both high-tech and traditional industry. This study proposes a framework to develop abnormal behavior identification and cost estimation model.

In robotic applications, there is a growing trend for developing human-like real-time interaction capabilities. A good example can be found in Simultaneous localization and mapping technique, where a robot or an autonomous vehicle builds up a map within an unknown environment while at the same time keeping track of its current position. Especially in indoor environments, wall detection is often a critical part of SLAM: it plays a key role in scene interpretation and 3D workspace modeling. Further, it also reduces the size of the map. This paper presents an effective and real-time approach for detecting walls in indoor environment using GPU (graphics processing unit). The experimental results show the feasibility of using GPU as a coprocessor in robotic applications.

The purpose of automatic controllers for building services (air conditioning system, lighting and blinds system) is to save energy in the whole building while keeping occupants’ comfort. Nevertheless, most of automatic controllers don’t optimally operate from the viewpoint of total energy efficiency and occupants’ satisfactions. The main reason is that each controller operates, neglecting states of other controllers and therefore, control point of each controller always doesn’t correspond to best control point in the whole building system. In this study, we propose an innovative controller that communicates with other controllers to control building equipments optimally from the viewpoint of total energy efficiency and occupants’ satisfactions. The developed controller functions as an agent in the control system, which can voluntarily collect available information from other controllers and decide set points to enhance total efficiency in cooperation with one another. Therefore, this controller is called as “cooperative controller”. Several types of cooperative controllers have been developed and experimentally applied to an actual building located in Japan (Sogo et. al. 2002, Honma et. al. 2002, Terano et. al. 2002 ). In this paper, cooperative control using daylight, major example in series of cooperative control system, is reported. Daylight is useful to reduce energy consumption of lighting, however, it has not been widely used. The main reason is that as incoming daylight has complex effects on thermal and visual environment, it is difficult to optimally control amount of daylight. To solve this problem, we propose cooperative control system that can control amount of daylight effectively to optimize total energy efficiency and occupants’ comfort. A series of numerical experiments was conducted to confirm effect of cooperative control system on improvement of total energy efficiency and indoor environment. The results showed that this cooperative control system could save energy use rate of almost 10% compared with no cooperative control system. In addition, in order to use in practice, cooperative controller is designed to apply an actual building easily and keep stability even in the other controllers’ troubles.

A methodological approach is presented for the human-centered development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). A procedure has been developed for the objective evaluation of potential impacts of ADAS usage on traffic safety. The procedure is based on the observation and analysis of the emergence resp. avoidance of driving errors (inadequate speed, insufficient safe distance, etc.) in conjunction with the usage of ADAS. Driving errors are assumed to occur by the coaction of functional ADAS features, the situational context and (psychological) behavioral backgrounds. The applicability of the approach is examplified with a simulated ADAS.

The evaluation of notification systems is rare in critical systems. The only available experiences are based on empirical data on costly simulated environments and the subjective follow-up of some guidebooks probed by the experience. In case of absence of performance requirements, critical parameters can provide quantitative measures that may be used to determine the overall usability of interfaces that continuously present precious information ( Notification Systems) in Avionics (NSA) and should be validated before use to improve the confidence level in the measurement unit. In this paper, we introduce a set of critical parameters that could be used for usability evaluation of NSA’s interfaces. A process for a formal validation is described and results of the applicability of these parameters to the real NSA interface of A400M’s power plant are presented.

A fuzzy set-based AR (Automatic Recognition) system named TDARS for machine readable travel documents (MRTDs) is designed and implemented for speeding up customs clearance. The system consists of three parts: text feature extraction, facial feature extraction and identity matching. Text feature extraction takes charge of locating machine readable zone (MRZ) and extracts text features automatically. Facial feature extraction focuses on locating the front face photo (FFP) in the MRTD and extracting the facial features of the MRTD possessor. Identity matching compares text and facial features with feature data in the Terrorist Database (TDB) respectively and fuses the matching results of text and facial features in the decision-making level using a fuzzy set based algorithm. Experimental results show that both the correct acceptance and refusal rates of the TDARS are over 90%, which evidently exceed those of the existing recognition systems that extract text features solely.

An analysis support system has been developed of various energy and environmental system for the sustainable development. The proposed support system can model, and simulate the flows of matter, energy and information with tens or hundreds of elementary processes in the target energy and environmental system. It is based on the combination of Multilevel Flow Model (MFM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) and it can account various indices for sustainability. The values of the evaluation indices can be utilized to not only test the feasibility of one scenario but also carry out the inter-comparison of various optional scenarios. As a case study, introduction of hydrogen production system in a local town is investigated by the proposed analysis support system.