Autonomous exploration in unknown environm-ents is a fundamental task of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). To choose exploration goals wisely, we propose an information-driven exploration strategy by applying the fast marching method to exploration of UAVs. A frontier point detection algorithm is designed to obtain Candidate Goals (CGs) by utilizing the structural characteristics of the octree-based map. With the sum of the information gain during the exploration journey as an evaluation indicator, we present a novel utility function to evaluate CGs by considering the trade-off between information gain and travel consumption. Given the effect of the environment on UAVs, UAVs are required to march aggressively in the Euclidean Symbol Distance Field (ESDF) to calculate the flight time, which is defined as the travel consumption. The uncertainty of the environment is minimized gradually by maximizing the utility function during each exploration journey. To take full advantage of the mobility of UAVs, we perform B-spline trajectory optimization and yaw angle planning based on the fast marching paths. We conduct sufficient comparison and evaluation experiments in simulation environments. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed exploration strategy. The code related to the experiments will be published at https://github.com/BoLeiChen /fastmarching-exploration.
With the emergence of edge computing, a large number of devices such as sensor nodes have been deployed in the edge network to sense and process data. However, how to provide real-time on-demand energy for these edge devices is a new challenge issue of edge networks. In real-world applications of edge computing, sensor nodes usually have different task burdens due to the environmental impact, which results in a dynamic change of the energy consumption rate at different nodes. Therefore, the traditional periodical charging mode cannot meet the nodes charging demand that have dynamic energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a real-time on-demand charging scheduling scheme (RCSS) under the condition of limited mobile charger capacity. In the process of building the charging path, RCSS adequately considers the dynamic energy consumption of different node, and puts forward the next node selection algorithm. At the same time, a method to determine the feasibility of charging circuit is also proposed to ensure the charging efficiency. During the charging process, RCSS is based on adaptive charging threshold to reduce node mortality. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed RCSS achieves better performance in the number of survival nodes, the average service time and charging efficiency.
21 March 2018 in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Quantifying the associations between diseases is now playing an important role in modern biology and medicine, as discovering associations between diseases could help us gain deeper insights into pathogenic mechanisms of complex diseases, thus could lead to improvements in disease diagnosis, drug repositioning and drug development. Due to the growing body of high-throughput biological data, a number of methods have been developed for computing similarity between diseases during the past decade. However, these methods rarely consider the interconnections of genes related to each disease in protein-protein interaction network (PPIN). Recently, the disease module theory has been proposed, which states that disease-related genes or proteins tend to interact with each other in the same neighborhood of a PPIN. In this study, we propose a new method called ModuleSim to measure associations between diseases by using disease-gene association data and PPIN data based on disease module theory. The experimental results show that by considering the interactions between disease modules and each module's modularity, the disease similarity calculated by ModuleSim has a significant correlation with disease classification of Disease Ontology (DO). Furthermore, ModuleSim outperforms other four popular methods which are all using disease-gene association data and PPIN data. In addition, MoudleSim also is capable of finding potential associations between diseases.
In wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs), there is a way to use mobile vehicles to charge node and collect data. It is a rational pattern to use two types of vehicles, one is for energy charging, and the other is for data collecting. These two types of vehicles, data collection vehicles (DCVs) and wireless charging vehicles (WCVs), are employed to achieve high efficiency in both data gathering and energy consumption. To handle the complex scheduling problem of multiple vehicles in large-scale networks, a twice-partition algorithm based on center points is proposed to divide the network into several parts. In addition, an anchor selection algorithm based on the tradeoff between neighbor amount and residual energy, named AS-NAE, is proposed to collect the zonal data. It can reduce the data transmission delay and the energy consumption for DCVs’ movement in the zonal. Besides, we design an optimization function to achieve maximum data throughput by adjusting data rate and link rate of each node. Finally, the effectiveness of proposed algorithm is validated by numerical simulation results in WRSNs.
In recent years, since edge computing has improved the performance of transportation systems, research on edge computing-enabled transportation systems has received widespread attention. However, most previous studies overlooked that task requests in transportation systems are unevenly distributed in time and space, which easily causes the overloading of edge servers, resulting in high response latency. To this end, we present a novel task offloading scheme based on Graph Neural Network (GNN) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in Edge computing-enabled Transportation systems (TransEdge). Specifically, we first propose an adaptive node placement algorithm to assign IoT sensors to appropriate edge servers, thereby minimizing transmission latency. Then, an improved DRL scheme based on GNN is designed to capture the spatial features between sensors, aiming to improve the accuracy of task offloading decisions. Finally, we introduce a task forwarding strategy based on the greedy algorithm to achieve collaborative task offloading between different edge servers and overcome the system instability caused by a sudden surge in task requests. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world traffic datasets. The results show that TransEdge reduces the response latency by at least 3.7% compared to four baselines while achieving a success rate of 99%.
20 December 2017 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
One of the important sources for big data is the data sets collected by wireless sensor networks. However, errors in sensor data could result in serious damages in industrial applications. Therefore, error detection plays a crucial role in industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). Existing approaches of error detection are generally threshold-based, which rely on a predetermined threshold to judge whether a reading is erroneous. The threshold-based approaches, however, often fail to balance between detection accuracy and false alarm rate. It is thus difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a proper threshold for various errors in real-world applications. Motivated by this consideration, we propose a novel Threshold-free Error Detection (TED) approach for IWSNs. By taking the advantage of the spatio-temporal correlations between sensor readings, we present the model to character the relationship between sensor pair and thus construct a correlation graph for IWSN. In the correlation graph, the states of nodes, i.e., the states of sensor readings, are accurately exploited without requiring any threshold. Through the experiments on both real sensors and simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to significantly improve the detection accuracy while largely reduce the false alarm rate.