In the literature of reliability engineering, reliability of the weighted k-out-of-n system can be calculated using component reliability based on the structure function. The calculation usually assumes that the true component reliability is completely known. However, this is not the case in...

The reduction of the electricity demand during peak periods is considered a main objective of electricity load management. It can relieve the financial pressure of the investment on the capacity expansion for the power grid in the United States. Compared to a great deal of research on commercial...

The growth of healthcare expenditure provokes constant comments and discussions, as countries battle the issues on cost containment and cost effectiveness. Prior to 1978, medical institutions in China were either state‐owned or were collective public hospitals. Since 1978, China has been...

A modified particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper to investigate the dynamic of pedestrian evacuation from a fire in a public building—a supermarket with multiple exits and configurations of counters. Two distinctive evacuation behaviours featured by the shortest-path...

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is one of the severest desertification areas from wind erosion in North China, and it poses as a potential hazard factor for the slope stability of embankments. As the most common and abundant filler in embankment construction in the desert, Aeolian sandy soil is...

Purpose To improve production efficiency, industrial robots are expected to replace humans to complete the traditional manual operation on grasping, sorting and assembling workpieces. These implementations are closely related to the accuracy of workpiece location. However, workpiece location...

Purpose Many metal workpieces have the characteristics of less texture, symmetry and reflectivity, which presents a challenge to existing pose estimation methods. The purpose of this paper is to propose a pose estimation method for grasping metal workpieces by industrial robots....

Purpose A novel fault-tolerant control (FTC) method is proposed to assure the stability of the remote-operated vehicle (ROV) by considering the thruster failure-induced model perturbations. The stability of the ROV with failures is guaranteed and optimized with the determined model perturbation...