This paper investigates the parametric excitation of a micro-pipe conveying fluid suspended between two symmetric electrodes. Electrostatically actuated micro-pipes may become unstable when the exciting voltage is greater than the pull-in value. It is demonstrated that the parametric excitation of a micro-pipe by periodic (ac) voltages may have a stabilizing effect and permit an increase of the...

Coalition formation typically involves the coming together of multiple, heterogeneous, agents to achieve both their individual and collective goals. In this paper, we focus on a special case of coalition formation known as Graph-Constrained Coalition Formation (GCCF) whereby a network connecting the agents constrains the formation of coalitions. We focus on this type of problem given that in ma...

In this paper, we describe methods for efficiently computing better solutions to control problems in continuous state spaces. We provide algorithms that exploit online search to boost the power of very approximate value functions discovered by traditional reinforcement learning techniques. We examine local searches, where the agent performs a finite-depth lookahead search, and global searches, ...

A promising approach to solving large state-space search problems is to integrate heuristic search with symbolic search. Recent work shows that a symbolic A* search algorithm that uses binary decision diagrams to compactly represent sets of states outperforms traditional A* in many domains. Since the memory requirements of A* limit its scalability, we show how to integrate symbolic search with ...

Recently several robust control designs have been proposed to the load-frequency control (LFC) problem. However, the importance and difficulties in the selection of weighting functions of these approaches and the pole-zero cancellation phenomenon associated with it produces closed loop poles. Also the order of robust controllers is as high as the plant. This gives rise to complex structure of s...

In this paper our goal is to perform an open-ended exploration of the program repair search space. Our idea is to collect the largest number of test-suite adequate patches, independently of whether they are fully correct or overfitting. For that, we design Cardumen, a repair approach based mined templates that has an ultra-large search space. We evaluate the capacity of Cardumen to discover tes...

Differential evolution algorithm (DE) constitutes one of the most applied meta-heuristics algorithm for solving global optimization problems. However, the contributions of applying DE for largescale global optimization problems are still limited compared with those problems for low and middle dimensions. DE suffers from slow convergence and stagnation, specifically when it applies to solve glob...

This paper investigates a way of imposing a hierarchy on a graph in order to explore relationships between elements of data. Imposing a hierarchy is equivalent to clustering. First a tree structure is imposed on the initial graph, then a k-partite structure is imposed on each previously obtained cluster. Imposing a tree exposes the hierarchical structure of the graph as well as providing an abs...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks of autonomous nodes used for monitoring an environment. In designing WSNs, one of the main issues is limited energy source for each sensor node. Hence, offering ways to optimize energy consumption in WSNs which eventually increases the network lifetime is strongly felt. Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) is a novel stochastic population-based meta-...