Engineering and Information Technology Research Report 2014 · Research Report 2014 Never Stand Still School of Engineering and Information Technology. Production: ... Bayesian inference

Contact usIf you would like further information, please contact the Research Student Admissions Coordinator:A/Prof Mark PickeringTelephone: +61 2 6268 8238 Fax: +61 2 6268 8443 Email: [email protected] School of Engineering and Information Technology The University of New South Wales Canberra PO Box 7916 CANBERRA BC ACT 2610Cricos Provider Code: 00098G • CMU 141444

The School of Engineering and Information Technology is one of four Schools of the University of New South Wales located at the ADFA campus in Canberra. Research is a key focus for the School, and inspires our approach to teaching and other activities.

Engineering and Information Technology Research Report 2014

Never Stand Still School of Engineering and Information Technology

Production:Editor: Dr Mahmud Ashraf School of Engineering and Information Technology Design: Creative Media Unit

seit.unsw.adfa.edu.au 1

Research Report 2014

Contents

FOREWORD 2

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 4

AIR TRANSPORT 8

COMMUNICATIONS 14

FLUID MECHANICS AND 32

SPACE ENGINEERING

IMAGING 38

IMPACT DYNAMICS 44

CONTROL THEORY AND CONTROL 18

ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

STRUCTURES AND MATERIALS 58

OPTIMIZATION AND DESIGN 52

SYSTEMS AND INFORMATICS 66

CYBER SECURITY 26

SEIT ACADEMICS 72

REFERENCES 78

2014

seit.unsw.adfa.edu.au2

School of Engineering and Information Technology

Foreword

The School of Engineering and Information Technology (SEIT) continues to produce

the highest level of research outcomes in UNSW Canberra. With over 70 academics, SEIT is the largest School in UNSW in terms of academic staff numbers. The diverse mix of research activities within the School facilitates discipline specific as well as collaborative research initiatives

involving various engineering disciplines. In 2013, we identified ten research focus areas, based on our research strength, to promote wider integration within the School. We believe that this process allowed us to integrate, in a more rational way, in presenting our research activities and achievements in a concise fashion to the wider community.

Major research activities within the School are supported through external funding coming from a number of research organisations as well as industry. A number of our academics were successful in obtaining funding through ARC Discovery Grants administered by UNSW Canberra - Prof Hussein Abbass was awarded $399,178 for his project Challenging systems to discover vulnerabilities using computational red teaming, Dr Robert Niven was awarded $313,000 for this project Maximum entropy modelling and Bayesian inference in turbulent fluid mechanics and A/Prof Sudhir Gai, Dr Sean O’Byrne, A/Prof Andrew Neely and A/Prof Harald Kleine were awarded $440,000 for their project Rarefied hypervelocity separated flow in the transitional to continuum regimes.

In addition, Dr Andrew Lambert was successful in obtaining a Discovery Project with Prof David Atchison (administered by Queensland University of Technology) and A/Prof Valeri Ougrinovski was successful in obtaining a Discovery Project with Prof Matthew James and Prof John Gough (administered by The Australian National University). In addition to ARC success, a number of our academics were able to attract funding from a variety of agencies including Middle East Regional Monitoring Agency, New South Innovations, US Department of Air Force and ACT Government, whilst Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Airservices and Eurocontrol continue to support some ongoing projects in SEIT.

The School continues to produce excellent research outputs with over 400 publications added to the Higher Education Research Data Collection in 2013. The number higher degree research students are rising with mostly international students being attracted by the high quality of research activities within the School. We have a number of scholarship schemes to attract outstanding PhD candidates. In addition, China Scholarship Commission (CSC) has been one of the main contributors in attracting quality research students from China.

The research activities and achievements presented in this research report are indicative of what we do within our School. The focus areas could change as the nature of our research evolves with time. We encourage the readers of this report to contact with relevant academics to explore more on their research interests.

Professor Elanor Huntington Head of School, SEIT

2014

Foreword



2014

“Academics at SEIT have seen considerable success in ARC funding in addition to our PhD students receiving recognition at prestigious international events.”

Research Highlights


Research Highlights



Research highlights of the year

Prof Hussein Abbass was awarded $399,178 for his project “Challenging systems to discover vulnerabilities using computational red teaming”.

Dr Robert Niven was awarded $313,000 for his project “Maximum entropy modelling and Bayesian inference in turbulent fluid mechanics”.

TMS Young Leader AwardDr J. P. Escobedo-Diaz was granted Young Leader Award by The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) in recognition to his outstanding research contributions.

Prof Sudhir Gai, Dr Sean O’Byrne, A/Prof Andrew Neely and Dr Harald Kleine were awarded $440,000 for their project “Rarefied hypervelocity separated flow in the transitional to continuum regimes”.

Success in ARC Discoveries

Dr Andrew Lambert was successful in obtaining a Discovery Grant with Prof David Atchison, which will be administered by Queensland University of Technology, and A/Prof Valeri Ougrinovski obtained a Discovery Grant with Prof Matthew James and Prof John Gough, which will be administered by The Australian National University.



President of the International Commission of Acoustics (ICA)Mrs Marion Burgess was elected as the President of the International Commission of Acoustics (ICA) at the International Congress for Acoustics in Montreal on 6 June 2013. This is first time an Australian and a female has been elected president. Mrs Burgess is also the President – Elect of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering.

Best Paper AwardDr Chirs Lokan’s paper entitled “The Evaluation of Weighted Moving Windows for Software Effort Estimation” won the best paper award at the 14th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Engineering and Process Improvement (PROFES 2013) held in Paphos, Cyprus.

Dr Matthew Garratt awarded the 2014 Spitfire Memorial Defence Fellowship With support from Second World War Spitfire pilots, UNSW Canberra researchers are developing an advanced guidance system enabling micro air vehicles (MAVs) to autonomously navigate obstacles in cluttered environments, such as urban conflict zones.

Dr Matthew Garratt from the School of Engineering and Information Technology was awarded the 2014 Spitfire Memorial Defence Fellowship to lead the project, which builds on his work around robotic vision and unmanned aircraft development. Second World War veterans who flew and maintained the iconic Allied fighter aircraft founded the Australian Spitfire Association, which awards the grant. Their memorial fellowship aims to encourage the “development of advanced knowledge and expertise which will aid the defence of Australia”. Dr Garratt received the fellowship from the Governor-General of Australia, Quentin Bryce, at a ceremony at Government House.

Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce AC CVO, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia presents Dr Matt Garratt with the 2014 Spitfire Memorial Defence Fellowship.



2014

“The Air Transport focus area brings together a wide but unique range of expertise and skills in the school including Cognitive Science, Computational Intelligence, Environmental Management, Human Computer Integration, Modelling and Simulation, Multi-Objective Optimisation, Network Analysis, Neuroscience, and Optimisation.“

Air Transport


Air Transport



Air transportation system has evolved into a complex, multi-dimensional, highly-distributed yet highly interdependent dynamical system that interacts with global and regional economies. This system, though served the needs

of air transport over the years, has reached its operational limit. The rising of air traffic demand, reduced robustness to external conditions such as weather and increased safety and environmental concerns have brought new challenges and open research questions which require rigorous research and development in this area. The nonlinear, stochastic and time-dependent interdependency among components in the system make classical mathematical assumptions of linearity, homogeneity, normally and independent and identically distributed observations, obsolete. Typical system-level problems in this domain are ill-structured, requiring proper exploratory analysis, and problem structuring tools. Innovative approaches from diverse fields such as aviation, cognitive engineering, computer science, mathematics, natural science, systems engineering, and operations research when integrated smartly, can offer new insight and open more opportunities for improving the world’s air transportation systems. In recent years, Air Transportation has undergone metamorphic changes with the advent of new technologies in the area of communication, navigation and surveillance. Modelling, evaluation and risk assessment of new concepts and measuring their impact on community and environment is a major drive towards their timely and safe implementation. UNSW Canberra researchers within the Air Transport focus area are leading the development of practical and implementable research backed by fundamental science that aims to balance demand and capacity, uncertainties, while addressing safety, human and environmental concerns.

The Air Transport focus area brings together a wide but unique range of expertise and skills in the school including Cognitive Science, Computational Intelligence, Environmental Management, Human Computer Integration, Modelling and Simulation, Multi-Objective Optimisation, Network Analysis, Neuroscience, and Optimisation. Members of the air transport research focus area have access to outstanding in-house research facilities; this includes an aviation studio, an air traffic laboratory, and a state-of-the-art equipped cognitive engineering laboratory. The laboratories are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment for eye tracking, brain signal sensors, communication boxes, high fidelity 2kx2k screens, and many equipment suitable for safety-critical command and control and air transportation experiments.

Academics

Prof Hussein Abbass

Dr Sameer Alam (Coordinator)

Ms Susan Burdekin

Mr Raymond Lewis

Dr Chris Lokan

Dr Abdun Naser Mahmood

Dr Robert Niven

Mr Heath Pratt

Research Associates

Dr Ayman Ghoneim

Mr Fergus Symon

Dr Jiangjun Tang

Dr Deborah Tucek

Mr William Ningzhou Zhao

Post Graduate Students

Rubai Amin

Md Murad Hossain

Shen Ren

Collaborating Organisations

Air Services Australia

Civil Aviation Affairs, Bahrain

Eurocontrol, EU

International Civil Aviation Organization, Middle East

NASA Ames, USA

Technical University, Delft, Netherlands



The laboratory has its own network, visualizations, Hi-Fidelity Simulation systems, and IT infrastructure. The aviation studio has flight and helicopter simulators with panoramic display and is equipped with infrastructure for Human factor experiments.

In 2013, Prof. Hussein Abbass gave a plenary talk on Human Experiments in Computational Intelligence” at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Singapore. Dr Sameer Alam was invited as a speaker on Universitas 21, Early Career Researcher

Workshop held in Mexico as well as on the Workshop on Aircraft Collision Risk Assessmentheld in Bahrain, where he presented his research on “Models and Methodologies for Technical Vertical Collision Risk Assessment”.

Figure 1: Integrating Air Traffic Controller’s Brain Signals with Air Traffic Scenarios

Figure 2: Example of brain activities for one of the controllers during one of the task.

The computational air traffic control brain: Computational Red Teaming and big data for real-time seamless brain-traffic integrationAbbass, Tang and Amin performed the first experiment of its kind at Eurocontrol Brétigny in France. The experiment aimed at evaluating a proof of concept for contrasting in real-time mental workload assessed directly from electroencephalograph (EEG) data obtained from the human brain and mathematical-based workload models, while closing the automation loop. Throughout the experiment, data from an air traffic environment and human mental/brain activities were continuously, simultaneously and seamlessly monitored and analysed to control the complexity of the traffic in real-time in order to seamlessly manage workload; and compare task and mental load indicators in real-time scenarios.

The system was designed to extract cues in real time from both traffic and mental data to trigger Computational Red Teaming (CRT) to balance complexity. Subjective assessment of traffic complexity through the ATC Workload Input Technique was performed every two minutes and task cues are extracted to capture the complexity of the traffic in play. Simultaneously, brain signals were measured continuously from the Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) in real-time using a Nexus-32™ EEG cap with 19 channels, and these signals were analysed and cognitive cues on the mental states of the ATCO were extracted as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Both types of cues were used to make a decision based on the scenario being used.

When an undesired situation occurred, an Optimisation component was triggered to assess which manoeuvre or action in the environment would best counteract the undesired state. This was done by using a simulation environment for impact and look-ahead analysis. The results demonstrated the feasibility of using brain signals to establish indicators to help ATCOs to manage complexity in airspace. This project is funded by Eurocontrol Innovative Research Grant Scheme.



Integrating the human brain into the air traffic control systemThere is a great deal of human factor research available that focuses on automating the decision-making process of air traffic controllers within their highly dynamic environment. The premise is usually grounded in the fallibility of the human –how to prevent the users from making errors, omissions, or poor judgments. It may sound like by removing the reliance on the human, particularly in safety-critical contexts, one will minimise a number of risk factors such as stemming from operator workload, and “the finite cognitive and perceptual resources of system operators”. But humans are an integral component of the system. The systems won’t exist without humans and humans can’t manage the complexity of the task without the machines.

In this work, Funded by Eurocontrol Innovative Research Grant Scheme, Abbass and Tucek from UNSW along with Kirby and Ellejmi from Eurocontrol identified some root causes of the problem to ensure that humans form part of the solution and do not contribute to the problem. The team then explains the undergoing science and engineering activities to make humans part of the automation, not external to it. This work established the foundations for a major brain-traffic integration experiment; Figure shows typical changes in mental load as cognitive load varies.

3 as some schematic in presented in Figure 3.

.

Computational Red Teaming for correction of traffic events in real time human performance studiesIn human performance studies, when using real-time air traffic simulation, the human performance analyst faces challenges to ensure that certain events and scenario characteristics will occur during the experiments. While some events, such as specific categories of conflicts between aircraft, can be designed in the scenario, the interaction of the humans can undo these events early in the simulation.

This poses a challenge that can compromise the objective of the experiment; making the experimental data less useful. Computational Red Teaming (CRT) is a computational environment that attempts to play the role of a devil advocate. Amin, Tang and Abbass from UNSW and Ellejmi and Kirby from Eurocontrol designed a CRT system to monitor, re-steer and adjust traffic events in real-time air-traffic

simulation environments using a multi objective goal programming optimisation system in order to steer the scenario towards the designed goals. The project is funded by Eurocontrol Innovative Research Grant Scheme. Presented at the USA/Europe ATM R&D Seminar in 2013, the approach was able to correct events successfully, when possible.

Figure 3: Changes in mental load varies with change in cognitive load



Systemic identification of airspace collision risk tipping points using an evolutionary multi-objective scenario-based methodologyOne key measure for judging on the safety of operations in airspace is the collision risk estimate. Comparing this estimate to the target level of safety (TLS), a quantitative value provides an objective assessment on airspace safety of operations. However, this quantitative value does not provide any reasoning or insight on the interaction between sector and traffic features, on one hand, and the air traffic controllers (ATC) actions for traffic flow management (TFM) on the other hand.

There are two fundamentally different approaches to manage high risk scenarios. One is post-the-event, where we need to ask what we should do to reduce risk in a scenario that is already high risk.

The second is a preventive pre-the-event approach, where we can ask the question of what are the causes that make a low risk scenario becoming a high risk one. By identifying these causes, one can prevent risk to escalate.

In this research Alam et al (2013) proposed an evolutionary multi-objective scenario-based methodology for the systemic identification of airspace collision risk tipping points. The methodology attempts to help us to gain insight into the interaction of traffic and sector features with ATC actions that can lead to an increase in collision risk in an otherwise low risk traffic scenario.

Evaluating ground–air network vulnerabilities in an integrated terminal manoeuvring area using co-evolutionary computational red teamingThe inherent complexity of a terminal manoeuvring area (TMA) necessitates a system-level analysis to understand the overall system risk and vulnerabilities. The performance of advanced air traffic control (ATC) procedures, such as dynamic Continuous Descent Approaches (CDAs), may not be appropriately assessed without considering the complex interactions among other parts of the environment and the context in which they operate. The focus of this research is a TMA system which integrates arrival and departure operations. It combines air and ground side resources to model and understand system-level vulnerabilities. In this work, Zhao et al (2013) proposed a methodology using the Computational Red Teaming (CRT) framework to identify ground-air network bottlenecks by exploring areas of vulnerability in the integrated TMA.

The search engine in CRT relies on co-evolutionary search which evolves reciprocal interaction of traffic distributions and ground events (including runways, taxiways and gates). These interactions are modelled to identify inefficiencies resulting from the integration of arrival and departure operations. By evaluating these interactions, we are also able to identify ‘improvement opportunities’ in the implementation of future air traffic management (ATM) concepts and, thereby, understand and work-around major bottlenecks which cause system inefficiencies.

We illustrated the methodology on the Sydney Kingsford-Smith Airport’s domestic terminal area using a dynamic CDA scenario. Among our findings, taxiway B can cause significant delays if it is impacted by a ground event.

In general, taxiways have been found to be a critical airport component with interactions between arrivals and departures, significantly impacting the airport’s throughput capacity

Figure 4: Crossing the Red Line: Interaction of Traffic flow management with traffic/sector characteristics

Figure 5: Dynamic arrival routes in an integrated terminal area with constrained ground–air network.



2014

“Research activities in Communications focus on novel ways to conduct communications, both from the network aspects and for wireless communications.”

Communications


Communications



Academics

Dr Craig Benson

Prof Michael Frater

Dr Greg Milford

A/Prof Mark C Reed (Coordinator)

Dr Mike Ryan

Dr Weiping Zhu

Postgraduate Students

Lucy (Le) Chen

Md Selim Hossain

Md Rakibul Islam

Amin Movahed

Nastaran Nemati


Macquarie University

The Australian National University

University of Texas, Austin

University of Toronto, Canada

Communications is a fundamental and critical need for both military and civilian use. The research has been conducted through computer simulation, hardware construction and through deep mathematical

methods. The research activities of the Communications Research group focus on novel ways to conduct communications, both from the network aspects and for wireless communications. This area is continuing to undergo significant changes, especially around mobile broadband which now requires new advanced network architectures, where, as we discuss, Heterogeneous Wireless Cellular is expected to be the new radio network topology. Smart antenna arrays can significantly improve radio performance and at the same time minimise interference, thus this is also a topic of interest. Further research in our team investigates Radio Frequency hardware modules for better performance of communication systems as well as considering the delay of signals through a network and finding ways to improve this for different topologies.

Small cell deployments for cellular wireless communicationsIn recent years, the cellular communications industry has experienced an unprecedented growth in the numbers of subscribers and data traffic. This significant trend challenges cellular service providers’ traditional macro-only network; a much more advanced and flexible network topology is desired. To meet this demand, the concept of heterogeneous network is proposed to most efficiently use the dimensions of space and frequency. Its network topology is composed of a diverse set of wireless technologies, traditional macrocells and low-power small cells. By off-loading wireless traffic from macro to small cells and decreasing the distance from users to base stations (BSs), small cell networks (SCN) bring a multitude of benefits,

including improved user experiences and more efficient spatial reuse of spectrum.

The main contributions of this research, funded by a Discovery Grant awarded by the Australian Research Council, are as follows:

1. A simple coverage-oriented femtocell deployment scheme is proposed. In this scheme, femtocell BSs within a certain distance away from any macrocell BSs are automatically turned to be inactive. By employing this, we can guarantee that all the active femtocell BSs are deployed in the areas with unsatisfied macrocell coverage.



2. We provide the tractable probabilistic characterisation of the coverage probability at a randomly located mobile user in the new scheme.

3. Our analytical results clearly quantify the impact of inner region size on the cellular coverage probability. For networks adopting the proposed scheme, the service providers are able to use the results in this work to carefully set the condition of femtocell deactivation for optimal coverage performance.

Figure 6 shows coverage regions for a two-tier network with coverage-oriented femtocell deployment.

Figure 6: Coverage regions for a two-tier network with coverage-oriented femtocell deployment. Both macrocell BSs (triangles) and femtocell BSs (squares). Femtocell BSs are inactive (marked as red filled squares) in the inner regions (shadow areas), while femtocell BSs are active (marked as blue nonfilled squares) in the outer regions.

Efficient robust antenna array processingThe performance of adaptive antenna array processors is known to decline severely in the presence of array imperfections and uncertainties. Hence the robustness of an array processor against uncertainties is an important issue. Diagonal loading of the correlation matrix is a popular technique applied to the standard Frost processor to increase robustness of the array system. Hossain et al (2013) presented a number of robust beamforming algorithms using efficient realization techniques. The techniques do not use a pre-steered array and allow an array designer to specify the frequency response of the processor in the look direction and steer the main beam of specified frequency response in an arbitrary direction.

The proposed techniques are computationally efficient and applicable in environments with strong mutual coupling. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed beamforming algorithms and compare the performance of the beamformer using the proposed techniques with that of existing methods.

The methods presented in this work only require inversion of dimensional matrices compared with inversion of matrices used in standard Frost and LCMV broadband beamforming scheme where L denotes the number of elements in the array and N denotes the finite impulse response filter length used by broadband beamforming.

Thus these methods are computationally efficient. The research presents examples to evaluate the performance of the processor using the proposed algorithms and compares the performance of the beamformer using the proposed techniques to that using the existing robust methods.



2014

“Feedback control systems are widely used in engineering applications, including aerospace, manufacturing, mining, automobile and military hardware applications.”

Control Theory & Control Engineering Applications


Control Theory & Control Engineering Applications



Feedback control systems are widely used in engineering applications, including aerospace, manufacturing, mining, automobile and military hardware applications. They are an enabling technology in emerging areas

of engineering, such as quantum and opto-electronics engineering and high-frequency engineering. The Control Theory and Control Engineering Applications research group conducts fundamental research into the theory of automatic control systems and its engineering applications to control of unmanned vehicles, opto-electronic systems and emerging quantum control and quantum information technologies. Particular interests of the members of the group include theory of optimal, robust and distributed control systems, quantum control theory, as well as applications of control theory to control of flexible structures, atomic force microscopy, power systems, fixed and rotor wing unmanned aircraft, potentially high-payoff opto-electronics systems and quantum computing technology. Our members received financial support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) in the form of the Australian Laureate Fellowship, ARC Discovery and Linkage Projects, as well as from the USA Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). The group hosts one of the nodes of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology.

Academics

Dr Sreenatha Anavatti Dr Daoyi Dong Dr Matthew Garratt A/Prof Charles Harb Prof Elanor Huntington Dr Greg Milford A/Prof Valeri Ougrinovski (Coordinator) Prof Ian Petersen, Scientia Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow A/Prof Hemanshu Pota Mr Trevor Wheatley Dr Matthew Woolley Dr Hidehiro Yonezawa

Research Associates

Dr Toby Boyson

Dr Luis Duffaut-Espinosa

Dr Abhijit Kallapur

Dr Aline Ibrahim Maalouf

Dr Obaid Rehman

Dr Mahendra Samal

Dr Hongbin Song

Dr Hamid Teimoori

Dr Igor Vladimirov

Dr Guanghui Wen

Dr Dabo Xu

Dr Masahiro Yanagisawa


Adnan Anwar

Md Sawkat Ali

Khairul Alam

Abdul Barik

Zihao Chen

Yi Cheng

Ayaz Chowdhry

Kathryn Conroy

Ahmed Fathi

Sobers Francis

Habibullah Habib

Medria Hardhienata

Osama Hassanein

F. M. Rabiul Islam

Andrey Kirsanov

Peter Kuffner

Sajal Kumar

Katanya Kuntz

Caixia Li

Mohammad Mabrok

Md Apel Mahmud

A. B. M. Nasiruzzaman

Tahsin Fahima Orchi

Mahardhika Pratama

Md Shihanur Rahman

Md Sohel Rana

Naruttam Kumar Roy

Shibdas Roy

Tushar Roy

Shanon Leigh Vuglar


ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Australian Federal Police, ACT

Australian Research Council

Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Centre for Quantum Computing Technology, Griffith University

CSIRO Canberra

CSIRO Sydney

Curtin University

Dalian University of Technology, China

Department of Physics, Denmark

Department of Physics, Centre for Quantum Computing Technology, University of Queensland

ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Federal University of Parana (UFPR), Curitiba, PR, Brazil

Griffith University

Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, USA

Loyola University, New Orleans, USA

McGill University, Canada

Macquarie University

Nanjing University, China

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada

Princeton University, USA

School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Soochow University, China

Swinburne University of Technology

Tel-Aviv University, Israel

The Australian Centre for Quantum-Atom Optics, The Australian National University

The Australian National University

The University of Hong Kong

Tsinghua University, China

University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

University of Newcastle

University of Manchester

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

University of Queensland

UNSW Sydney

University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, SP, Brazil

University of Melbourne

Universite de Sherbrooke, Canada

University of Maryland, USA

Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Zhejiang University, China



Quantum-limited mirror-motion estimationPrecise measurement and estimation of physical quantities are at the heart of the advanced science and technology. Recently, there has been a lot of work in aiming estimations close to the fundamental limit which is imposed by quantum mechanics. The quantum Cramér-Rao bound (QCRB) is one of the fundamental quantum limits which gives the minimum mean square error for a parameter estimation. In the current research, Iwasa et al (2013) experimentally demonstrate optomechanical motion estimation near the QCRB. We estimate a classical motion of a mirror, while we apply an external stochastic force on the mirror. The target parameters to be estimated are position, momentum and external force of the mirror, which are time-varying and so-called waveforms. We illuminate the mirror by optical probe beams in coherent and squeezed states. By measuring and tracking a variation of an optical phase, we estimate the target waveforms.

It is of practical importance to investigate optimal estimation methods and to compare the estimation precision to the QCRB, because the mathematical formalism of QCRB gives few clues of the optimal methods reachable to the QCRB. This is the first time to our knowledge that experimental results have been compared with the waveform QCRBs as shown in Figure 7. We demonstrate that our estimation method is near optimal in a case of coherent states. The precisions with squeezed states are away from the QCRBs but still show clear quantum enhancements beyond the coherent-state bounds. In this experiment, we focus on a classical mechanical system, but our estimation techniques can also be applied to purely quantum systems. Our methods are potentially useful for a wide range of quantum sensing applications beyond optomechanics.

−50

0

50

Posi

tion

(nm

)

−5

0

5

Mom

entu

m(10−

6 kg

m/s

)

−0.4 −0.2 0 0.2 0.4−0.5

0

0.5

Time (ms)

Forc

e (N

)

(q)

(p)

(f )

(q)

(p)

(f )

(q)

(p)

(f )

Figure 7. Mirror motion estimation in time-domain for (q) position, (p) momentum, and (f) external force. The probe beam is in a phase-squeezed state. The black lines are the waveforms to be estimated, and the red lines are the estimates.

Sampled-data control of qubit systems subject to decoherenceQuantum information technology (QIT) has many important potential applications due to its advantages over traditional Information Technology (IT). The basic information units in QIT are qubits (two-level quantum systems). A bottleneck is the existence of decoherence and uncertainties for practical quantum operation tasks. Hence, it is significant to develop robust control methods for qubit systems with decoherence. In this research Dong et al (2013) presented a sampled-data design method for robust control of a single qubit subject to decoherence.

In particular, two classes of uncertainties were considered involving the system Hamiltonian and the coupling strength of the system-environment interaction. Four cases were analysed in detail including without decoherence, with amplitude damping decoherence, phase damping decoherence and depolarising decoherence. Sampling periods were specifically designed for these cases to guarantee the required robustness.

The method has been used to analyse a superconducting qubit strongly coupled to a nonresonant microwave field. The proposed approach has potential applications in quantum error-correction and in constructing robust quantum gates.



Theory of engineered quantum systemsWe worked on the theoretical analysis of engineered quantum systems. In one project we provided, in collaboration with an experimental group at ETH Zurich, the first demonstration of the quantum interference of individual microwave photons; the details of which are available in Lang et al (2013). Such a demonstration is a key ingredient in linear optics approaches to quantum computation. We provided the calculations of the output field correlation functions to be measured, obtaining good agreement with the experimental data. These calculations were detailed in Wooley et al (2013). We also provided a thorough analysis of three-mode quantum optomechanical systems in Wooley and Clerk (2013).

In particular, we studied the problem of two micromechanical oscillators coupled to a common microwave cavity mode. We showed that it is possible to perform a two-mode back-action-evading measurement of the mechanical oscillators via the cavity mode. This means that the quantum back-action of the measurement does not act on the measured observable, and therefore one can monitor this observable with a precision that is not bounded by quantum mechanics.

Combined with feedback, this measurement allows for the generation of highly-entangled states of macroscopic mechanical oscillators, with implications for quantum foundations and quantum information processing.

We also showed that the sensing of a classical force, beyond conventional quantum limits, could be achieved in this system. Work on the experimental implementation of our proposals is ongoing.

(a)

0

ωm=(ωa+ωb)/2 Ω=(ωa−ωb)/2

Ω ΩΩ Ωω−ωc

−ωa −ωb−ωm +ωa+ωm+ωb

(b)

ωc±ωmωc

ωa ωb

I(t)

(c)

Ω Ω

Figure 8. (a) Micrograph of a superconducting quantum circuit used for the demonstration of the quantum interference of individual microwave photons.

(b) A schematic representation of a system used for the demonstration of the quantum interference of microwave photons. The sources are two independent artificial atoms in independent cavities; the photons output from these sources are interfered at a beam splitter (BS), and the output fields are amplified and then subjected to homodyne detection. The required field correlation functions are reconstructed from these measurements.

Figure 9. (a) Schematic representation of a three-mode quantum optomechanical system, composed of two mechanical oscillators independently coupled to a single common cavity mode. The field output from the cavity is subject to homodyne detection.

(b) By driving the cavity at the frequencies shown it is possible to perform a two-mode back-action-evading measurement of the two mechanical oscillators.

(c) By combining a two-mode back-action-evading measurement with feedback it is possible to prepare a highly-entangled two-mode squeezed state of the two mechanical oscillators, with applications to testing the limits of quantum mechanics and force sensing beyond conventional quantum limits.



Singular perturbation approximations for a class of linear quantum systemsAn important issue which arises both in the synthesis of linear coherent quantum controllers and in the modelling of linear quantum systems, is the issue of physical realizability. This issue relates to the property of whether a given set

of linear quantum stochastic differential equations corresponds to a physical quantum system satisfying the laws of quantum mechanics. In this research Petersen (2013a) considers the use of singular perturbation approximations

for a class of linear quantum systems arising in the area of linear quantum optics. It presents results on the physical realizability properties of the approximate system arising from singular perturbation model reduction.

Stability of quantum Markov systems in the Heisenberg pictureAn important concept in control theory is the notion of Lyapunov function. This notion enables analysis of a system to be performed based on its differential equation model. The project was funded the ARC Discovery project “Stabilisation of Nonlinear Quantum Feedback Control Systems” awarded to James, Petersen, Ougrinovski and Gough in 2011.The work carried out in 2013 set

an objective to develop Lyapunov-type conditions in the Heisenberg picture in order to stabilize the evolution of quantum system operators as well as the underlying dynamics of the quantum states. Using the quantum Markov semigroup associated with a quantum stochastic differential equation, we derived sufficient conditions for the existence and stability of a unique

and faithful invariant quantum state. Furthermore, we introduced and proved the quantum invariance principle, which extends the classical LaSalle invariance principle to quantum systems in the Heisenberg picture. These results are formulated in terms of algebraic constraints suitable for engineering quantum systems that are used in coherent feedback networks.

Real time cavity ring-down infra-red spectrometry (rtCRDS)The Australian Federal Police (AFP), Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, the Office of Transport Security and our other clandestine services, all have interest in technologies that can be used as portable, sensitive detectors for illicit and prohibited substances whilst maintaining the legal ‘status’ of the sample. Recently, a team at UNSW Canberra, led by A/Professor Charles Harb, has developed a world-first real time cavity ring-down infra-red spectrometer (rtCRDS) that makes it possible to uniquely identify a range of materials of interest such as nitromethane, acetonitrile, acetone and nitroglycerin, as well as, crucially, the organic peroxides TATP and DADP. This research has been supported by the ARC Discovery Project “New Quantum and Robust Control Theory with Applications to Quantum Optics”. Specifically, this research made the following important findings:

a) Real-time spectra could be obtained in 2 to 4 seconds scan and covers a wavelength range that is greater than 100 nanometers with at least 150,000 data-points: the innovation of this finding can be seen in Fig. 4 which illustrates the rtCRDS rapid measurement capabilities. The figure shows a real-time hypertemporal scan of acetone filling a cell to a pressure of ~100 mbar. The 4-second scans were taken continuously, 15 in total, and plotted immediately in Matlab. The figure clearly shows the acetone entering the cell, and could be used to identify leaks or to locate the direction of flow of a gas under investigation. Additionally, this system could be combined with a gas chromatography system to create a real-time gas chromatography/infrared measurement system, which would be able to separate the headspace mixture into individual components and display them as a 3-dimensional hypertemporal cube;

b) Measurements of spectra were unique for each material: this result shows that this technology has the potential to avoid false positive readings as is the problem with many detection systems;

c) Spectra of triacetone triperoxide and diacetone diperoxide were distinctly different from their constituents - acetone and peroxide: which is a very important as acetone and peroxides are found commonly, in benign form, throughout society; and

d) The measurements required little to no sample preparation: which is essential for the defence and security groups.

Crucially, the rtCRDS produces these results using a system that does not alter the sample itself – preserving its integrity as evidence in a legal inquest.



Figure 10. Acetone in consecutive scans as the cell is filling up.



A Kalman decomposition for possibly controllable uncertain linear systemsThis research considers the structure of uncertain linear systems building on concepts of robust unobservability and possible controllability. Peterson (2013b) presents a new geometric

characterization of the possibly controllable states. When combined with previous geometric results on robust unobservability, the results of this paper lead to a general Kalman

type decomposition for uncertain linear systems which can be applied to the problem of obtaining reduced order uncertain system models.

Decentralized measurement feedback stabilization of large-scale systems via control vector Lyapunov functionsLarge-scale system modelling has been an accepted approach to the investigation of complex dynamical systems that consist of, or can be partitioned into a set of interconnected subsystems. One of the most common feedback control design strategies for such systems is the decentralized control strategy. Considerable efforts have been made in the literature to develop manageable analysis and

control design methodologies to reduce the computation complexity of the existing methodologies. Xu and Ugrinovskii (2013) studies one of such methodologies related to the problem of decentralized measurement feedback stabilization of nonlinear interconnected control systems. As a natural extension of the recent development on control vector Lyapunov functions, the notion of output control vector Lyapunov function

(OCVLF) is introduced for investigating decentralized measurement feedback stabilization problems. Sufficient conditions on (local) stabilizability are discussed which are based on the proposed notion of OCVLF. It is shown that a decentralized controller for a nonlinear interconnected system can be constructed using these conditions under an additional vector dissipation-like condition.

Conditions for detectability in distributed consensus-based observer networksAn emerging trend in the area of distributed estimation is concerned with the development of consensus-based distributed filtering algorithms to allow each node to carry out estimation by reaching a consensus with its neighbours. An interest in this topic is due to advantages that distributed

processing of measurements in sensor networks offers, over transmitting the raw data. Ugrinovskii (2013) addresses fundamental detectability properties associated with the problem of distributed state estimation using networked observers. The main result of the research establishes

connections between detectability of the plant through measurements, observability of the node filters through interconnections, and algebraic properties of the underlying communication graph, to ensure the interconnected filtering error dynamics are stabilizable via output injection.



2014

“Cyber security is a system concept which could be best described by the Leaky Bucket Theory. The security strength of the system is determined by its weakest link. Therefore our cyber security research covers many layers of the OSI model.”

Cyber Security


Cyber Security



Computer and Computer Network Intrusion Detection Systems (CCNIDS)It is infeasible to prevent all possible cyber-attacks, and therefore it is essential to have a second line of cyber defence which is intrusion detection.

We conducted several projects in both categories of network based intrusion detection and host based intrusion detection.

CCNIDS-1: Data summarization and network traffic analysis It is forecasted that each year internet traffic doubles. One of the open challenges faced by network and data professionals is analysing this huge amount of data in order to gain insight into user behaviour and anomalous events. Computer network traffic produced from different application such as Email, FTP, HTTP, P2P generate a huge amount of data that is produced at a very fast rate, which makes it difficult to analyse network behaviour in real time. One promising solution of this problem can be generating a small summary of the original data, which can be analysed faster and yet reflects the original knowledge about the network. Performing network traffic analysis on this summarized dataset can achieve higher efficiency and scalability in network anomaly detection. Therefore, summarization is an important step to support real time monitoring and reduce time complexity in network traffic analysis.

There are two important applications of data summarization in network traffic monitoring and intrusion detection – (a) summary of network traffic can give an overview of the activities of network to the administrator in a human recognizable form, and (b) summary of network traffic can be used as input to the anomaly detection algorithms. Preliminary results show that performing anomaly detection on a summary instead of a huge dataset cuts computational cost while maintaining high accuracy.

Summarization is considered as a key knowledge discovery approach that produces a concise, yet informative version of the original dataset. This project was funded by an ARC Linkage Project awarded to Tari, Mahmood and Hu in 2011.

Cyber security has been placed as a national priority by many countries. Yet we have witnessed endless security breach reports indicating the daunting task we are facing. Cyber security is a system concept which could be

best described by the Leaky Bucket Theory. The security strength of the system is determined by its weakest link. Therefore our cyber security research covers many layers of the OSI model. We have conducted projects in the areas of computer and computer network intrusion detection, biometrics security including biometric access control and bio-cryptography, network tomography for network security.

Professor Jiankun Hu was invited as a keynote speaker to talk on cyber security in “IB2COM”, China and in “SecureComm” held in Sydney, Australia.

Academics

Prof Hussein Abbass

Dr Laurie Brown

Prof Michael Frater

Prof Jainkun Hu (Coordinator)

Prof Elanor Huntington

Dr Abdun Naser Mahmood

Dr Kamran Shafi

Dr Weiping Zhu

Research Associates

Dr. Enamul Kabir

Dr. F. Jiang


Mohiuddin Ahmed

Gideon Creech

Cai Li

Wanrong Wu

Jinwei Xu

Miao Xie

Wencheng Yang

Bin Zhang

Wei Zhou


Australian National Data Service

Aizu University

Beihang University

City University of Hong Kong

Deakin University

Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO)

Latrobe University

Missouri Western State University

RMIT University

Sun Yat-Sen University

University of Western Australia



CCNIDS-2: Network traffic modelling and network intrusion detection Network traffic modelling is critical for network based intrusion detection, which is a fundamental problem in communication. A traffic model should be able to capture and reproduce various properties of a real trace. Despite the widespread success of most numerical models in various applications, few actually focus on the oscillation behaviour proven to be one of the basic properties in network traffic. Xie et al (2013a) proposed a new mathematical method is proposed to model and synthesize stationary and non-stationary oscillatory processes of network traffic. The proposed model is based on the structure of the hierarchical hidden Markov model, which includes two nested hidden Markov chains and one observable process. The first-layer hidden Markov chain with variable state-duration controls the time-varying oscillatory process. Conditional on the first-layer Markov chain, the local fluctuation process is modelled by the second-layer hidden Markov chain. Algorithms are derived for inference of model parameters and traffic synthesis. The proposed approach is compared with four classical models for performance evaluation. The selected performance criterion includes time structure, statistical properties, self-similarity, queuing behaviour and multi-scale properties. The flexibility and accuracy of the proposed model results in a close fit to the real traces.

Doubly hidden Markov models (DHMMs) have been widely used to analyse a type of time process whose driving factors are hierarchical and hierarchically correlated. A common issue of these models is that they implicitly assume that the dwell time of any system state is constant or exponentially distributed. This property comes from the standard hidden Markov models and causes the DHMM to limitations in some actual application environment, where an application has latent temporal structure and does not follow the exponential distribution but has the period-like or variable-period feature. Such problems are frequently encountered in practice, e.g. network traffic. Xie et al (2013b) remove this limitation by a new structural discrete approach named nested hidden semi-Markov model. The proposed model includes a nested latent semi-Markov chain and one observable discrete stochastic process. The bottom latent semi-Markov chain is the core layer and controls the second-layer semi-Markov chain that generates the observable process. The state duration of both the semi-Markov chains can be variable or explicit. The model makes no assumptions on the distribution of the state-duration and the observable processes. An efficient forward and backward recursion procedure is developed for estimating the generator of the proposed model and inferring the underlying state processes for a given observation sequence.

To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we apply the model to the arrival process of network traffic and compare its simulation traffic and the real traffic. The performance evaluation in the experiments includes time dynamic process, auto-correlation, cross-correlation, statistical distribution and self-similarity.

Xie et al (2013c) proposed a novel server-side defence scheme to resist the Web proxy-based distributed denial of service attack. The approach utilizes the temporal and spatial locality to extract the behaviour features of the proxy-to-server traffic, which makes the scheme independent of the traffic intensity and frequently-varying Web contents. A nonlinear mapping function is introduced to protect weak signals from the interference of infrequent large values. Then a new hidden semi-Markov model parameterized by Gaussian-mixture and Gamma distributions is proposed to describe the time-varying traffic behaviour of Web proxies. The new method reduces the number of parameters to be estimated, and can characterize the dynamic evolution of the proxy-to-server traffic rather than the static statistics. Two diagnosis approaches at different scales are introduced to meet the requirement of both fine-grained and coarse-grained detection. Soft-control is a novel attack response method proposed in this work. It converts a suspicious traffic into a relatively normal one by behaviour reshaping rather than rudely discarding. This measure can protect the quality of services of legitimate users. The experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.



Cyber Security (CS): from Biometrics Access Control, Key Management to Host based Intrusion Detection Cyber security is a major concern in our information age and will become more threatening due to the ubiquitous network connections and more advanced and automated attacks tools available. Cyber attacks can intrude privacy, bring down a whole plant, communication centre, and commanding systems. Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs), e.g.,

firewalls, intend to prevent these attacks but cannot effectively deter new attacks or variations of virus what are occurring daily. Security strength is always upon the weakest link of the systems. Therefore cyber security is a system concept and covers a very broad spectrum including cryptography, access control, authentication, network security, intrusion detection etc.

The Cyber Security group at UNSW Canberra conducts both theoretical and applied research in the aforementioned topics with emphasis on biometrics security, sensor network key management, and intrusion detection including both network based intrusion detection and host based intrusion detection.

CS-1: Body sensor network key managementBody sensor networks (BSNs) are distributed systems where biosensor nodes are distributed in different positions to collect health data from the human body and deliver the information to a remote medical centre. Due to medical data regulations, security of BSNs is very important. However, the operational resources of biosensor

nodes in BSNs are very restricted, and traditional security technologies are not directly applicable to BSNs. Due to characteristics of biosensors, time synchronization and low-energy communication are two challenging problems for BSNs. Zhao et al (2013) use a fuzzy commitment technology with weak time synchronization

mechanism for keys negotiation is developed, with a multi-hop route key management scheme proposed for efficient energy consumption management, including an energy-based multi-hop-route-choice method. Security analyses and performance evaluation have been provided to validate the proposed scheme.

CS-2: Host based intrusion detection systemsHost based intrusion detection system (IDS) design is a very challenging task and existing systems have very high false alarm rate detection for zero-day attacks. One major hurdle is the lack of credible dataset for the testing and evaluation of IDS. The KDD 98 dataset

is virtually the only public dataset for evaluation purpose for more 17 years and is considered out of date. The ADFA Linux Dataset was created as part of this research using a modern operating system and contemporary hacking methods, and is now

publicly available. This research was funded by an ARC Linkage project ‘’Developing smart embedded host-based intrusion detection systems’’ awarded to Hu, Tari, Yu and Han in 2010.

CS-3: Secured context-aware mobile information systems with personalised and adaptable learning and adaptation The aim of the project is to develop novel theory and practical methods of instantiating personalised services within multi-dimensional, heterogeneous contexts in the large scale mobile environment. Personalised and adaptable services are customised, user-oriented and context awarded, forming a newly-emerged direction in the mobile service industries. Billions of internet end-users and portable devices have contributed to the significant data growth in both volumes and data relationships.

Service provision within enterprise infrastructure and information systems has been developed over the last decade. However, in recent years, the rapid increase of information and data has created challenges for the activation of personalised and adaptable services and applications in data-centric systems since the dynamics of new information systems are fundamentally different from those of classic systems. The challenges comes from many areas, but in particular, a) the difficulty of making implicit data incentives and context explicit; b) hidden orders or

associations among the incentives, data, contexts and their mutual influences on individual user’s preferences; c) jeopardisation from anomaly or unexpected intrusions hindering normal service deployment; d) difficulties in evaluating the efficiency and user experiences of personalised mobile services. These aspects make it very challenging to provide customisable services to end-users to satisfy the versatility of user preferences and the interoperability constraints across the various personal systems and platforms.



The current theoretical gap exists in-between the group/organisation-based behaviours and individual-based behaviours. The group-based experiences, behaviours and services have been well studied, however, the customised and individual-based context-aware services/concepts are still lacking in the literature.

The main innovation and expected outcomes include the theoretical underpinning for explicit personal incentives modelling, and the development of new nature-inspired learning and adaptation algorithms to quickly identify the patterns in the data, optimise the process of activating mobile services, and discover the hidden inter-dependency in the contexts. The project will lead to high-quality publications, workshops, a workable prototype, and patent, and essential techniques to enhance Australia’s leading role in this newly-emerging discipline. Built on our existing developments in analysing context-aware systems in terms of their self-adaptability (Jiang et al, 2013a), self-configuration capability, and vulnerability assessment, we will conduct further analytics and prototype implementation on user personalised contexts and behavioural data in the pervasive mobile environment. The outcome will be suitable for resolving crucial problems in other disciplines, such as marketing, commerce, fraud detection, crime and terrorism prevention and even social network-based analysis.

This project will enhance the smart information use of frontier technologies for improving the cyber security status for all Australian by supplementing the backbone infrastructure. The outcome of this project will reduce costs, and improve end-users’ satisfaction and comfort, and increase safety and system resilience which will have a significant impact on Australian industries. Standardising the research findings in applicable standards bodies and forum will strengthen the Australian research profile in this area around the world. This project will deal with the big data by designing new mobile service models, architecture, and algorithms as well as implementing a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware platform to enhance scalable, reliable and robust services, more importantly, with the promising capabilities of early fault detection and diagnosis.

The work we have done so far-

To provide secured context-aware security services, we have explored the immunology, the inspiration of immunology in computer security is from its potential learning and adaptation capability and the impacts on the next generation service-oriented network operation system. We propose a new agent-based threat awareness assessment strategy initiated by the human immune system to dynamically adapt against attacks. Specifically, this approach is based on the dynamic reconfiguration of the file access right for system calls or logs with balanced adaptability and vulnerability.

Based on an information-theoretic analysis on the coherently associations of adaptability, autonomy as well as vulnerability, a generic solution is suggested to break down their coherent links. The principle is to maximize context-situation awarded systems’ adaptability and reduce systems’ vulnerability simultaneously. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed biological behaviour-inspired vulnerability awareness system (Jiang et al, 2013b).

Moreover, we further explored the quantum information processing technologies to facilitate the complex information system. We put forward a new nontrivial three-step strategy for joint remote preparation of arbitrary two-qudit states (JRSP) in a deterministic manner from a spatially separated multi-sender to one receiver. The scheme is then extended to the arbitrary multi-qudit case. In our schemes, various partially entangled GHZ-like states with arbitrary complex parameters are used as the quantum channels. It overcomes state preparation failure leading to the loss of valuable quantum channel resource and ensures the prepared data available for the remote terminals under extreme conditions such as limited number of quantum channels and limited quantum information processing technologies (Jiang and Jiang, 2013 a, b).



2014

“We have been continuing to develop improved ways to model the coupling of complex flow fields with the structural response of the objects of interest.”

Fluid Mechanics and Space Engineering


Fluid Mechanics and Space Engineering



2013 saw continuing recognition of our research efforts across a range of areas in fluid mechanics and space engineering, particularly via large-scale funding from the Australian Research Council, The US Air Force and the Spitfire Association. In 2013, SEIT also began to expand its space engineering capabilities through the recruitment of Dr Sean Tuttle, a

spacecraft-engineering specialist from Astrium (now Airbus Defence & Space) who has worked as engineering lead on a number of high profile space science missions including the Rosetta comet lander and the Bepi Colombo Mercury orbiters. In addition, to further strengthen UNSW Canberra’s efforts in this area a professor of space engineering will be recruited for 2014.

Academics

A/Prof Sudhir Gai

A/Prof Harald Kleine

Prof. Joseph Lai

Dr Andrew Lambert

Dr Jong-Leng Liow

A/Prof Andrew Neely (Coordinator)

Dr Robert Niven

Dr Sean O’Byrne

Dr Sean Tuttle

Dr John Young

Research Associates

Dr Mark Aizengendler

Dr Muhammad Arif Ashraf

Dr Joseph Kurtz

Dr Deepak Narayan Ramanath

Dr Fangbao Tian

SCRAMSPACE supersonic combustion flight test The SCRAMSPACE project is an international collaboration to produce a flight test of a supersonic combustion ramjet-propelled vehicle at hypersonic speed, funded through the Commonwealth Government through the Australian Space Research Program. UNSW Canberra lead the development of a laser-based system for measuring the inlet speed and temperature of the air in the vehicle, as well as the development of temperature-sensitive paint technologies, control algorithms and optimisation algorithms for the vehicle design. The SCRAMSPACE project culminated in the flight of the vehicle from the Andoya rocket range in northern Norway in September 2013. While there were issues with the launch vehicle that were unrelated to the scientific payload, the UNSW Canberra developed TDLAS-based inlet sensor survived the flight and successfully gathered mass flow data. Rehmanet al (2013) recently reported their work on control system design for hypersonic flight vehicles


Ashraf Ali

Tejas Canchi

Rishabh Choudhury

Arnab Dasgupta

Priyanka Dhopade

Zhipeng Gu

Charles Hoke

Tremayne Kaseman

Yedhu Krishna

Zafer Leylek

Rounak Manoharan

Vishal Naidu

Md. Mahfuzur Rahman Shah

Evan Smith

Vikram Sridhar

Sheila Tobing

Chigozie Usoh

Zhaolong Wang

Rakib Zaman

Guofeng Zhu


Australian National University

CSIRO / University of Western Australia, Australia

Defence Science and Technology Organisation

Institut Pprime, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) / Université de Poitiers / ENSMA, Poitiers, France

Kayser-Threde (Germany)

NASA Langley Research Center (USA)

Technische Universität Berlin

University of California Davis

University of Minnesota

University of New South Wales

University of Queensland

University of Southern Queensland

University of Auckland, New Zealand

University of Newcastle, Australia

University of Oxford

University of Potsdam, Germany

University of Texas, Austin

!Figure 11: The sensor shown in a CAD model cutaway view (left) and photographed on the scramjet inlet (right). In the color-coded CAD model, the laser subassembly is purple, the beamsplitter/holder is blue and green, the reference detector subassembly is white, the retroreflector is brown and gold, and the sample detector subassembly is blue. The SCRAMSPACE vehicle (blue) on the launch rail atop a two-stage booster rocket assembly at the Andoya Rocket Range in Norway, September 2013.


The School of Engineering and Information Technology

Diode-laser-based air speed sensors for aircraftThe use of non-intrusive laser-based techniques to measure air-speed offer a number of advantages over traditional pitot tubes both in terms of reducing susceptibility to icing and potentially reducing observability. Dr Sean O’Byrne from UNSW Canberra has been developing a counter propagating laser air speed sensor (COPLASS) for this purpose. Development of this innovative technology for measuring aircraft speed continued with funding support from New South Innovations in collaboration with United Technologies, a major US aerospace company. Wind tunnel tests of the hardware were successfully performed in the UNSW Canbrra low speed wind tunnel demonstrating the ability of the system to measure airspeeds below 25 m/s.

Figure 12: Experimental arrangement for fibre-coupled sensor

Pulse nano-second dischargeDr Sean O’Byrne was awarded the annual Spitfire Memorial Defence Fellowship by the Spitfire Association to investigate the potential for pulse nano-second discharges to enhance supersonic ignition. This work will contribute to improving the performance of combustors for scramjet propulsion systems. Emission measurements were performed in argon and ethelene using a UNSW Canberra developed variable duration pulsed nano-second discharge power supply.

Figure 13: Pulsed nanosecond discharge in ethylene fuel at two different pressures.



Low reynolds number aerodynamics In 2013 John Young, Tapabrata Ray, Joseph Lai and their collaborator from Oxford, Richard Bomphrey, began a 3-year project investigating “Intriguing Aerodynamics of Bees, Hoverflies and Beyond” through ARC Discovery Project funding. This ARC support enabled the recruitment of a postdoctoral research fellow to SEIT to work on this project starting in September 2013. The group is examining the stability of hoverflies and the lift production mechanisms of bees in hovering conditions and the results obtained from numerical simulations are presented in Young et al (2013).

Hypersonic separated flows Work on flow separation in high enthalpy flows has continued in the group. Funding was provided by the USAF via the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD) to begin an investigation of thermal nonequilibrium in hypersonic separated flow. This experimental investigation uses an innovative tick geometry to minimise the influence of the upstream boundary layer on the fluid dynamics of the separation downstream of the leading edge. In related work, simulations of shock wave/boundary layer interactions using the extended Elmer-3 code were reported in the Aeronautical Journal (Deepak et al 2013).

A team of four academics from SEIT led by A/Prof Sudhir Gai has been awarded an ARC Discovery Grant in 2013 to investigate “Rarefied hypervelocity separated flow in the transitional to continuum regimes”.

Figure 14: Two instants of the flapping cycle of a hoverfly, showing the complexity of the vortex structures produced by the wings (red) and secondary flap-like “alula” structures (blue)

Figure 15: (a) Resonantly Enhanced Shearing Interferogram showing the flow (right to left) over the tick model. (b) Contour map of the ratio of vibrational-electronic to translational-rotational temperature for a 24deg compression corner.



Maximum entropy analysis of complex fluid flows and dissipative systemsFluid turbulence, characterised by fluctuating properties such as velocity and density, remains one of the great unsolved problems of science, due to the difficulty of calculating the Reynolds stresses created by the turbulence. To seek to address this problem, we have applied the maximum entropy method of Jaynes – an optimisation tool which forms the basis of thermodynamics – as closure strategy for dissipative dynamical systems. Focus is placed on Galerkin systems arising from a projection of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equation onto orthonormal expansion modes. The maximum-entropy closure is motivated by a simple analytical example, and is then elaborated to a hierarchical framework with sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions (Noack and Niven, 2013).

While the analysed flows are not fully turbulent, the study paves the way for the analysis of fully turbulent flows, for which an ARC Discovery Grant has been awarded to Niven and Noack in 2013 for “Maximum entropy modelling and Bayesian inference in turbulent fluid mechanics”. A second study examines a number of strategies for the principal orthogonal decomposition (POD) of fluid flows, derived from the Navier-Stokes and the vorticity equations (Cordier et al, 2013). These projects significantly increase our ability to predict and control fluid flows, of critical importance to transportation, water supply, power generation and manufacturing systems.

The second law of thermodynamics governs the average direction of all non-equilibrium dissipative processes. However, it tells us nothing about their actual rates, or the probability of fluctuations about the average behaviour. The last few decades have seen significant advances, both theoretical and applied, in understanding and predicting the behaviour of non-equilibrium systems beyond what the Second Law tells us. These include various extremal principles concerning entropy production or dissipation, which are connected in various ways to the maximum entropy formalism of Jaynes.



2014

“We conduct research in real-time imaging for autonomous guidance of unmanned vehicles as well as advanced image processing in biotechnology.”

Imaging


Imaging



Feature mining for hyperspectral image classificationHyperspectral sensors record the reflectance from the Earth’s surface over the full range of solar wavelengths with high spectral resolution. The resulting high dimensional data contains rich information for a wide range of applications. However, for a specific application, not all the measurements are important and useful. The original feature space may not be the most effective space for representing the data. Feature mining, which includes feature generation, feature selection (FS), and feature extraction (FE), is a critical task for hyperspectral data classification as shown in Figure 16. Significant research effort has focused on this issue since hyperspectral data became available in the late 1980s. The feature mining techniques which have been developed include supervised and unsupervised, parametric and nonparametric, linear and nonlinear methods, which all seek to identify the informative subspace.

Research undertaken by Jia et al (2013) provides an overview of both conventional and advanced feature reduction methods, with details on a few techniques that are commonly used for analysis of hyperspectral data. A general form that represents several linear and nonlinear FE methods is also presented. Experiments using two widely available hyperspectral data sets are included to illustrate selected FS and FE methods. With more and more spatial data becoming available, feature mining will play a vital role in the processing of big Earth observation data.

The Imaging group conducts research into many diverse aspects of image processing. The main areas of interest include but are not limited to real-time imaging for autonomous guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles, classification

and compression of hyperspectral imagery, 2D/3D medical image registration for kinematic analysis of knee and hip joints, algebraic reconstruction techniques for faster and finer CT reconstruction, video compression and adaptive optics for turbulence characterisation and retinal imaging.

SEIT Academics

Prof John Arnold

Prof Michael Frater

Dr Matthew Garratt

Dr Xiuping Jia

Dr Andrew Lambert

A/Prof Mark Pickering (Coordinator)

Dr Murat Tahtali

Research Associates

Dr Md Jahangir Alam

Mr Tony Peebles


Ashek Ahmmed

Masuma Akter

Mst Nargis Aktar

Md Asikuzzaman

Kalyan Kumar Halder

Md Mehedi Hasan

Md Ali Hossain

Mafruha Mowrin Hossain

Rafiqul Islam

Md Omar Khyam

Ping Li

Shanggang Lin

Ying Liu

Md Abdullah Masum

An Hung Nguyen

Manuel Cegarra Polo

Tasneem Rahman

Sajib Saha

James Taylor

Mohsen Tehrani

Md Shahin Uddin

Jiefei Wang

Meng Xu

Guangyun Zhang



Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente, Netherlands

Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, China

State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University

Trauma and Orthopaedic Research Unit, The Canberra Hospital

The Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University

Figure 16: Possible operations for feature mining (only one path is used for any specific approach).



Image-assisted non-invasive and dynamic biomechanical analysis of human jointsKinematic analysis provides a strong link between musculoskeletal injuries, chronic joint conditions, treatment planning/monitoring and prosthesis design/outcome. However, fast and accurate 3D kinematic analysis still remains a challenge in order to translate this procedure into clinical scenarios. 3D computed tomography (CT) to 2D single-plane fluoroscopy registration is a promising non-invasive technology for biomechanical examination of human joints. Although this technique has proven to be very precise in terms of in-plane translation and rotation measurements, out-of-plane motion estimations have been a difficulty so far.

Therefore, to enable this technology into clinical translation, precise and fast estimation of both in-plane and out-of-plane movements is crucial, which is the aim of this project. Muhit et al (2013) developed a fast and accurate 3D/2D registration technique to evaluate biomechanical/kinematic analysis. The proposed algorithm utilizes a new multi-modal similarity measure called ‘sum of conditional variances’, a coarse-to-fine Laplacian of Gaussian filtering approach for robust gradient-descent Optimisation and a novel technique for the analytic calculation of the required gradients for out-of-plane rotations.

The results of computer simulations and in vitro experiments showed that the new approach was robust in terms of the capture range, required significantly less iterations to converge and achieved good registration and kinematic accuracy when compared to existing techniques and to the ‘gold standard’ Roentgen stereo analysis. Figure 17 shows examples of the single-plane Fluoroscopy images of a knee joint for different flexion angles used in the experiments to validate the accuracy of the proposed registration algorithm.

Figure 17: Single plane Fluoroscopy images of a knee joint for different flexion angles.



Removing the blinkers: A wider study of the human eye This project is funded by the ARC Discovery grant “Removing the blinkers: a wider study of the human eye” awarded to Atchison, Lambert and Charman. Our research involves determining the optical operation of the living human eye over a wide field of view. We have built a wide field scanning adaptive optics system for probing the changes in the crystalline lens as the subject undergoes accommodation.

Development of algorithms to support the observational data is the current focus. An innovative outcome of this research is to engage an active optics sub-system within the beacon illumination used to guide the adaptive optics correction. A Bessel beacon formed on the retina results in the subject’s physiological responses being more subdued than when a traditional point source beacon is used.

This is a significant advance for retinal diagnosis in subjects who are difficult to examine because of rapid and frequent instability from pathological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or Down and Williams Syndromes.

Figure 18: Images of a modified Bessel beacon use to guide the adaptive optics system, obtained by a retinal imaging camera. The top row of this figure corresponds to a traditional beacon, and the bottom row is the Bessel beacon. Left column: Artificial Eye. Centre and Right columns: Two human subjects. Scale bars correspond to 100 µm (5.8 mrad assuming f = 17 mm).



Compression and communication of single and multi-view video based on overlapping motion hint fieldsThis project explores a new way of communicating motion for video and multi-view (3D) applications, facilitating efficient interactive access to content and is funded by the ARC Discovery Grant “Compression and communication of single and multi-view video based on overlapping motion hint fields” awarded to Taubman, Mathew, Frater and Pickering. Outcomes from the project will include new compression methods that avoid redundant transmission of motion side information, plus client/server technology that leverages metadata from smart surveillance cameras.

The latest standards have proved video coding systems with the ability to adapt the size and shape of the motion estimation area to the objects in the scene can outperform the traditional block-based video coding systems. In this project, a segmentation-based coding strategy that employs bi-directional motion hints for inter-frame prediction was developed. The appealing thing about motion hints is that they are continuous and invertible, even though the observed motion field for a frame will be discontinuous and non-invertible. The developed coder incorporates a bi-directional motion hints based inter-frame prediction strategy.

The coder compares the motion hints based B frame with the standard block-based B-frame in terms of prediction PSNR and transmits only the corner translational motion vectors to the decoder if the motion hints based B-frame comes out as the winner of the comparison. Experimental results show an overall significant improvement both in prediction PSNR (up to 1.1 dB) and bit rebate (up to 26.6%).

Indoor capable unmanned aerial system (UAS) using motion capture feedback In 2013, Dr Matt Garratt was awarded a DSTO research agreement to produce an indoor capable Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) using motion capture feedback to allow for a hovering UAS, and support future enhancement to fixed wing and flapping wing air-vehicles indoors. The need for controlled environment testing of Unmanned Aerial Systems for research and collaboration is difficult to achieve in outdoor testing with environmental factors making repeatability challenging. Moving to indoor operations improves environmental impacts but produces extra challenges in terms of position information without GPS as well as closer proximity to obstacles.

As part of this research agreement, a VICON Motion Capture System (MCS) has been established in the school and research is underway to demonstrate closed loop hover of a Quadrotor UAS using the MCS.



2014

“Research undertaken by the Acoustics and Vibration group spans a wide range of topics and includes environmental noise, occupational noise, machinery noise control, structural dynamics, vibration monitoring for non-destructive inspection and interdisciplinary areas that involve acoustics, vibration, materials and biology.”

Impact Dynamics


Impact Dynamics



Academics

Dr Mahmud Ashraf

Dr Juan Pablo Escobedo-Diaz

Mr Alan Fien

A/Prof. Don Fraser

Prof Paul Hazell (Coordinator)

A/Prof Harald Kleine

Prof. Joseph Lai

Mr Heath Pratt

Dr Krishna Shankar

Dr Sarah (Yixia) Zhang

Research Associates

Marion Burgess

Dr. Sebastian Oberst

Khin Soe


Md. Younus Ali

Hu Chen

Chengjiu Liu

Nick Le’Marshall

Md Golam Rashed

Hongxu Wang

Zhi Fang Zhang

Zhi Zhang


Chassis Brakes International


National University of Singapore

Oita University, Japan

Sceintific Technology Pty Ltd

Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany

Impact Dynamics is a relatively new venture for UNSW Canberra; in 2012 a new research group was setup to focus on this area. There are several areas of interest within the community at UNSW Canberra including:

– Crashworthiness and energy absorbing mechanisms

– Penetration mechanisms

– Optimizing lightweight protective structures

– Shock propagation in condensed matter

– Fracture and spall at high-rate loading

– Blast and the structural response to blast loading

– The response of structures to earthquakes.

The main challenge for the researcher is often observing and measuring events that occur in relatively short time-scales. Frequently, it is necessary to resort to Finite Element techniques to inform on the physical mechanisms.

Research undertaken by the Acoustics and Vibration group spans a wide range of topics and includes environmental noise, occupational noise, machinery noise control, structural dynamics, vibration monitoring for non-destructive inspection and interdisciplinary areas that involve acoustics, vibration, materials and biology. Below are some current research projects which require the use of state-of-the-art acoustics and vibration instrumentation and numerical modelling techniques such as the finite element method, boundary element method and nonlinear time series analysis.

The influence of phase and substructural evolution during dynamic loading on subsequent mechanical properties of zirconiumIn November 2013 Dr J. P. Escobedo-Diaz was granted the 2014 TMS Young Leader Award Research: The influence of phase and substructural evolution during dynamic loading on subsequent mechanical properties of zirconium. Cerreta, Escobedo, Rigg et al (2013) reported on the changes in the mechanical behaviour of Zirconium (Zr) that underwent phase transformation due to high velocity impact. In this regard, if Zr is impacted at stresses in excess of 7 GPa, its atomic structure changes from the hexagonal closed packed (hcp) α-phase to the simple hexagonal ω-phase. Through a combination of post-mortem (electron microscopy, i.e. EBSD) and in-situ measurement techniques (APS Synchrotron), the mechanical response of specimens with various volume fractions of retained high pressure ω-phase and stored plastic work was investigated.

The results indicate that while both plastic deformation and the volume fraction of the high pressure phase play important roles in determining subsequent material properties, the effect of texture evolution due to plastic work is of critical importance in determining these properties. These findings provide an insight into the strength of materials under pressure.



Figure 19: EBSD generated orientation maps imaging only the α-phase of (a) as-annealed Zr and shock-loaded Zr with (b) 0% retained ω-phase, (c) 10% retained ω-phase, and (d) 65% retained w-phase. The colour indicates the crystallographic orientation and the black regions correspond to material identified as ω-phase.

Improving protection offered by ceramic-faced armour systemsIn 2013 Prof Hazell and his team (based at Cranfield University) successfully showed that there are ways of improving the behaviour of ceramic armours by stripping the jackets off bullets before they arrive at the armour system. This novel finding will provide a route to optimize ceramic armour systems and therefore provide better protection for Australian Defence Force personnel.

To do this work, a reverse ballistic technique was employed where the ceramic-faced target was accelerated to a stationary armour-piercing ‘bullet’. When the gilding jacket was removed, it was shown that greater damage occured to the core of the bullet suggesting that the presence of the jacket was pre-damaging the ceramic armour before core arrival.

This was confirmed through computational analysis. The team is now working at ways of pre-stripping a bullet’s jacket prior to contact with a ceramic-faced armour system (Hazell et al, 2013).

Cu triggerplate

Jacket

Core

SiC

Acetal sabot

With bullet jacket

Without bullet jacket

Figure 20: Flash X-Ray showing penetration of a bullet into a ceramic-faced armour (top) a jacketed bullet penetrates; (bottom) a non-jacketed bullet penetrates revealing greater damage is occurring to the core.



Risk-based seismic performance assessment of yielding shear panel deviceYielding Shear Panel Device (YSPD) is a small device composed of a thin steel diaphragm plate encapsulated within a square hollow steel tube, which is designed to facilitate passive energy dissipation through the inelastic shear deformation capability of the steel diaphragm plate during seismic activity with a view to protecting major structural components from excessive stresses. Successful numerical simulation of YSPDs led Hussain et al (2013) to carry out probabilistic performance evaluations i.e. seismic fragility and limit-state probability analyses, to identify the appropriateness of YSPDs and to evaluate its performance based on size, number and configuration. Probabilistic seismic performance evaluation techniques were used to assess the suitability of YSPD as a passive control device. An incremental dynamic analysis was conducted using a suite of available earthquake records as shown in Figure 21. A finite element model of the SAC building, calibrated with a proposed BWBN model, was introduced in the OpenSees platform to investigate the behaviour of the YSPD.

The presented case study evaluated six different YSPD configurations including three different sizes and obtained results demonstrate that the performance varies with change in size, number and configuration of YSPDs. Two different configurations were used for the probabilistic performance evaluation – single bay installation (Case 1) and all moment resisting bay installation (Case 2). Median fragility and limit state annual exceedance probability were used for evaluating the probabilistic performance. For the same size of YSPD, the median fragility was significantly reduced with increasing number of YSPDs in all moment bay installation and limit state annual exceedance probability also reduced when compared with those for single bay installation. Increasing the size of YSPDs reduced the median fragility, the limit state annual exceedance probability and caused a small reduction of seismic demand dispersion for both single bay and all moment resisting bays YSPD installations.

Due to their higher initial stiffness and yield strength as well as larger energy dissipation capability, larger YSPDs showed better seismic performance. The effect of seismic zone on the retrofitted building in different hazard conditions were also evaluated by considering moderate and high seismic zones for limit state probability analysis. The results reveal that YSPDs show better damage state risk reduction in the high-seismic zone when compared against its performance at the moderate-seismic zones. Figure 22 shows the relative performance of all cases considered by Hussain et al (2013). This study explores alternative YSPD configurations for a benchmark structure and the results demonstrate the prospect of utilizing YSPDs for performance based seismic design. Future research is required to explore alternative structural geometries and to develop appropriate performance based design guidelines for YSPDs.

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.50.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

0 0.3 0.6 0.9 1.2 1.5

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0

Prob

abili

ty o

f Exc

eeda

nce

Sa (g)

Immediate Occupancy

Sa (g)

Life Safety

Prob

abili

ty o

f Exc

eeda

nce

Sa (g)

Collapse Prevention

0

1

2

3

4

0 1 2 3

Mean Spectrum (Geometric)

Design Spectrum (ASCE/SEI-7-05)

Spec

tra A

ccele

ratio

n (g)

Time Period (s)

Figure 21: Response spectrum of the scaled ground motion records and the design curve.

Figure 22: Fragility curves for the North-South lateral load-bearing frame of the SAC three storey LA building with and without YSPDs.



Disc brake squeal: the role of nonlinearity, pad modes and uncertaintiesBrake squeal is a significant cost-warranty NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) issue for the automotive industry. Although research has been undertaken since almost a hundred years ago, not all brake squeal mechanisms are sufficiently understood or even discovered. Among the mechanisms studied such as stick-slip, the negative gradient relationship between the kinetic friction coefficient and the sliding velocity, sprag-slip and mode coupling, mode coupling has been considered the major cause of squeal in recent years. A full brake system is difficult to model exactly with regard to boundary contact conditions and material properties.

The current industry practice is to predict unstable vibration modes using the complex eigenvalue analysis (CEA) method. CEA is a linear analysis method but we showed using noise dynamometer tests that squeal is correlated to nonlinearity and nonlinear time series analysis of the microphone signal displays the RUELLE-TAKENS route to chaos.

We have developed a statistical approach to identify spurious Lyapunov exponents and to estimate the true Lyapunov spectrum. Our studies show that pad-mode instabilities (especially in the sliding direction) seem to be able to trigger squeal and could be the cause of the instantaneous mode squeal. We are developing a stochastic model to account for uncertainties in the prediction of brake squeal propensity. FIGURE 1 is a linear 4 degree-of-freedom friction oscillator to represent the essential features of a simplified brake system (pad/sliding plate). Comparison of results from the stochastic approach for this model shows good agreement between the prediction based on the real part of the complex eigenvalue and that based on friction work formulation. This stochastic approach is being extended to a nonlinear model. This project is conducted in collaborations with Chassis Brakes International in Australia and additional details are available in Oberst et al (2013).

1α

2α4k1k

5k

2k

3k1x

2x

2y

1y

2m

1m

(a) (b)

0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 40

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

k1 (N/m)

Prob

abili

ty an

d m

edian

of r

eal p

art o

f

co

mpl

ex ei

genv

alue

Median (MC)Probability (PC)Probability (MC)

0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 40

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

k1 (N/m)

Prob

abili

ty an

d m

edian

of

fricti

on w

ork

per c

ycle

(J)

Median (MC)Probability (PC)Probability (MC)

Figure 23: 4 degree-of-freedom friction oscilator.

Figure 24: Probability and median of (a) the real part of complex eigenvalue; and (b) friction work for the first mode.



Effects of noise on performanceA series of projects on noise performance is undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Brett Moelsworth from School of Aviation at the Universtity of New South Wales, Sydney. The context is the safety critical area of an aircraft cockpit and cabin. Our measurements in the cabin of commercial aircraft have shown that the noise levels are above those considered acceptable for the normal working environment, such as in an office, and below the damage risk noise levels for the workplace. The investigations are undertaken within the laboratory with a simulation of the noise present in an aircraft cabin. The current tests aim to investigate the effects of exposure to the noise for over 80 minutes, a time period comparable with a short haul flight. A number of tests aimed at assessing various aspects of performance are performed before and after the test condition.

Typically there are three groups; one with no noise, one with noise and one with noise but with noise mitigation in the form of noise cancelling headphones. The findings revealed that the effect of being exposed to noise had no noticeable effect on the three performance measures under investigation. There was a small improvement in performance across all groups for the second test which may be attributed to learning technique. There was also a trend toward an improved performance for those exposed to the noise. This may result from an arousal effect from the noise. The findings from one such test, backward digit recall task, are shown below. While the subjective comments from many exposed to in-cabin noise during flights indicate a feeling of fatigue, the findings from this study showed no such effect. Molesworth and Burgess (2013) reported some outcomes of their continuing effort in Safety Scienece.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Num

ber o

f Dig

its R

ecal

led

Backward Digit Recall Task

Before video

After video

No Noise80 dBA 80 dBA + N/C

Figure 25: Scores in backward digit recall task before and after three noise exposure conditions.





2014

“The members of this focus area had been working on a number of theoretical and applied areas ranging from decision making in presence of uncertainty, problem complexity analysis through motif mining, development of efficient methods for equality constraint handling, disruption modelling of production processes, representation of novel shapes and optimum design of high speed marine crafts and underwater vehicles.”

Optimization and Design

53

Optimization and Design



Optimum oil production planning using infeasibility driven evolutionary algorithmPetroleum, either oil or gas, is a finite and scarce resource upon which modern society heavily depends. Enhanced oil recovery is one of the most popular forms of oil extraction, wherein gas is injected into the oil wells for an easy lift. The total gas that can be used for oil extraction is constrained by daily availability limits and the oil extracted from each well is known to be a nonlinear function of the gas injected into each well. The problem is to identify the optimal amount of gas that needs to be injected into each well to maximize the amount of oil extracted subject to the constraint on daily gas availability.

The problem has long been of practical interest to all major oil exploration companies as it has the potential to derive large financial benefits.

A novel algorithm referred as Infeasibility Driven Evolutionary Algorithm (IDEA), developed by Singh et al (2013), was used to solve the problem offering significant benefits. A multi-objective formulation of the problem was introduced which eliminated the need for solving the (single objective) problem on a regular basis.

Optimization is an integral part of any design or decision making process. Increased computing

power, availability of accurate numerical models and the need to solve today’s complex problems have led to significant growth of the field in recent years. The members of the group had been working on a number of theoretical and applied areas ranging from the development of optimization algorithms for optimum oil extraction, failure detection in composites, novel methods for constraint handling and development of entropy based inference systems for prediction and control of complex fluid flows. The briefs presented below are based on selected publications in 2013 from the members of the group.

Academics

Prof Hussein Abbass

Dr Craig Benson

Dr Daryl Essam

Dr Chris Lokan

A/Prof Michael J. Maher

Dr Robert Niven

A/Prof Tapabrata Ray (Coordinator)

A/Prof Ruhul Sarker

Dr Kamran Shafi

Dr Hemant Kumar Singh

Dr Warren Smith

Research Associates

Essam Debie

Saber Elsayed

Ayman Ghoneim

Jiangjun Tang


Md. Asafuddoula

AbdelMonaem F. M. AbdAllah

Hassan Abbass Abdelbari

Ripon Kumar Chakraborty

Noha Hamza

Irman Hermadi

Hawa Hishamuddin

Mohammad Sharif Khan

Min Liu

Sanjoy Kumar Paul

Md. Humyun Fuad Rahman

Eman Sameer Sayed

Steven Waldrip

Md Forhad Zaman

Bin Zhang


Institut PPrime (CNRS - Université de Poitiers - ENSMA), Poitiers, France

Technical University of Berlin, Germany

University of Potsdam, Germany

University of Oxford, England

University of Western Australia

CSIRO Exploration and Mining, Australia

DSTO, Australia

International Islamic University, Malayasia

University of Malaya, Malayasia

National University of Malaysia, Malaysia

Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh

Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico

Curtin University of Technology, Australia

Lethbridge University, Canada

University of Delhi, India

Michigan State University, USA

Université de Lorraine, France

University of Oklahoma,USA

Purdue University, USA

Beijing Institute of Technology, China

Warwick Business School, UK

Department of Defence, Australia

National University of Singapore, Singapore

National Defence Academy, Japan

Xidian University, China

Beihang University, China



Composite delamination detection using computational intelligenceDelamination is a potentially serious damage that can occur in laminated polymer composites due to the poor inter-laminar fracture toughness of the matrix. Vibration based detection methods use change in frequencies to detect and assess damage. To determine the location and severity of damage from measured changes in frequency, one needs to solve an Optimisation problem i.e. an inverse problem.

Zhang et al (2013) introduced a neural network based approach to predict the interface, lengthwise location and size of delamination.

The results have been validated using numerical data generated from the finite element model (FEM) of delaminated beams and measured frequencies from modal testing of simply supported and cantilever carbon fibre reinforced beam specimens.

Results show that the proposed approach can predict delamination parameters accurately. The study also provides useful guidelines on the choice of algorithms for the solution of such classes of problems.

Nonlinear system identification using computational intelligenceHassanein et al (2013) introduced a novel scheme for the identification of nonlinear systems with disturbances. The identification process is carried out in two steps: an offline procedure and an online procedure. The method comprises of an automatic structure generating phase using entropy based technique, where the accuracy of the model is controlled using the entropy measure.

The parameter learning phase uses back propagation. The parameters are identified using a Differential Evolution algorithm. A semi serial-parallel model is introduced to improve the online identification process in the presence of noisy data. The proposed mechanism was utilized and compared against the classical Sugeno,

Adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) model and Laguerre Network-Based Fuzzy System.

The proposed technique was also used to model a rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from real test input–output data.



Differential evolution for real-world optimisationMany real-world Optimisation problems are difficult to solve, as they do not possess the nice mathematical properties that are required by the exact algorithms. In contrast, evolutionary algorithms have been proven to be appropriate for such problems. Elsayed et al (2013) have proposed an improved differential evolution algorithm that uses a mix of different mutation operators. In addition, the algorithm is empowered by a covariance adaptation matrix evolution strategy algorithm that uses a local search. To judge the performance of the algorithm, we have solved well-known benchmark, as well as a variety of real-world optimisation problems.

The real life engineering problems include frequency-modulated sound waves, catalyst blend optimal control, antenna design, static and dynamic despatching, and spacecraft trajectory optimisation. These problems are very hard, in the sense that they have many local minima and present strong nonlinearities in their mathematical representations. According to the results obtained, the algorithm shows superior performance in comparison with other algorithms that also solved these problems.

The self-adaptive mechanism for changing subpopulation sizes is a key contribution in this research. To demonstrate how the subpopulations sizes change during the evolutionary process, we present in Figure 26, a snapshot of the first 50 generations of a test problem.

Figure 26: A Snapshot of salf-adaptive changes to subpopulation sizes



Constraint consensus in optimisationConstrained optimisation is an important research topic that assists in quality planning and decision making. To solve such problems, one of the important aspects, is to improve upon any constraint violation, and thus bring infeasible individuals to the feasible region. To achieve this goal, different constraint consensus (CC) methods have been introduced, but no single method performs well for all types of problems. Hence, in this research, for solving constrained optimisation problems, Hamza et al (2013) introduced different variants of the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm with multiple constraint consensus methods. In addition, a local search technique is applied with the best variants, so as to gain further improvement in solution quality. All the algorithms start with randomly generated individuals. Based on the level of constraint violations, these individuals are divided into two groups (feasible and infeasible).

The CC methods are applied to some of the infeasible individuals until a stopping criteria is met. The resulting individuals are then merged with all of the other individuals and then a standard DE is applied. For the variant of the mix of CC methods, we use three CC methods in one algorithm framework, and we update the number of infeasible solutions that will be assigned to each method adaptively.

The proposed algorithms were tested and analyzed by solving a set of well-known benchmark problems. We have compared our algorithms among themselves, as well as with other state of the art algorithms. Those comparisons show similar, if not better performance, while also using significantly lower computational time.

The final version of the proposed algorithm, named as MCC-CV, is compared with three variants of DE, each with a single CC method (they are CC-CV, CC-R, and CC-PD), and also with a standard DE algorithm , by using a convergence plot as shown in Figure 27.

Figure 27: The convergence plot for MCC-CV with four other DE Variants for a test problem



2014

“Our research topics and projects included development of new methods of structural design and analysis, characterisation of new materials, testing of structural components, studies of the structural performance and manufacturing effects.”

Structures and Materials


Structures and Materials



Academics

Dr Safat Al-Deen

Dr Mahmud Ashraf

Mr Alan Fien

Prof Paul Hazell

Dr Rikard Heslehurst

A/Prof Obada Kayali

Dr Amar Khennane

Prof Evgeny Morozov (Coordinator)

A/Prof Andrew Neely

Dr Krishna Shankar

Dr Murat Tahtali

Dr Sean Tuttle

Dr Sarah (Yixia) Zhang

Research Associate

Dr Muhammad Arif Ashraf


Md. Younus Ali

Rosemary Barnes

Lorin James Coutts-Smith

Hu Chen

Jingfen Chen

Md Shakar Ullah Chowdhury

Yifei Cui

Yuan Fang

Ting Huang

Obinna Kenneth Ihesiulor

Chang Lin

Chengjun Liu

Mustafizur Rahman

Karthik Ram Ramakrishnan

Xiaodan Teng

Ahmed Mostafa Abdell Allah Thabet

He Tian

Md. Sayem Uddin

Hongxu Wang

Xiaofei Wang

Jiting Xie

Caizheng Wang

Chunguang Wang

Kuang Yu

Yuguo Yu

Zhi Fang Zhang

Research work on various aspects of composite technology and applications of advanced composite materials and structures has been carried out by ACRU (Advanced Composite Research Unit) members in 2013. The research

topics and projects included development of new methods of structural design and analysis, characterisation of new materials, testing of structural components, studies of the structural performance and manufacturing effects.

In 2013 the members of the Structures and Materials focus area have published 3 books: Introduction to Finite Element using MATLAB and ABAQUS, CRC Press by A Khennane; Design and Analysis of Structural Joints with Composite Materials, DEStech Publ by R B Heslehurst; and Advanced Mechanics of Composite Materials and Structural Elements, Elsevier by V V Vasiliev and E V Morozov.

Structural behaviour of FRP reinforced concrete beamsBased on the modified Timoshenko’s composite beam functions, Zhang and Lin (2013) developed a simple one-dimensional displacement-based two-node layered composite beam element for nonlinear finite element analysis of structural behaviour of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams. The influences of parameters including different types of reinforcing bars (steel, GFRP, CFRP and BFRP) and different ratios of reinforcement on the structural behaviour were also investigated. This element was further extended in Lin and Zhang (2013a) and a nonlinear finite element model and analysis procedures were developed for analysis and modelling of the structural behaviour of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams under a combined mechanical and thermal loading in fire conditions. A nonlinear finite element analysis based on heat transfer theory was performed to determine the temperature distribution across the cross section of the beam. Both geometric and temperature-dependent material nonlinearities were accounted for. The element was computationally effective, and was demonstrated to be efficient and accurate. A series of parameter effect on the structural behaviour of FRP-reinforced concrete beams in fire conditions were also investigated.

Lin and Zhang (2013b) also developed a novel simple and accurate one-dimensional two-node layered composite beam element with bond-slip effect for nonlinear finite element analyses of the structural behaviour of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams. Lin and Zhang (2013c) also reviewed, analysed and evaluated the available bond-slip models for steel and FRP reinforcing bars in concrete through finite element analysis of FRP-reinforced concrete beams with bond-slip effect taken into account by using the developed element. The suitability and capability of the bond stress-slip models informed from the finite element analyses were summarised and concluded. Parametric study was carried out to investigate the effect of different surface conditions of reinforcing bars on the structural behaviour. In addition, Lin and Zhang (2013d) also investigated the flexural and bond-slip behaviour of fibre reinforced polymer (FRP)-reinforced concrete beams experimentally and numerically.



Impact resistant hybrid fibre-reinforced engineered cementitious compositeSoe et al (2013a) developed an impact resistant hybrid fibre-reinforced engineered cementitious composite (ECC) material reinforced with 1.75% polyvinyl alcohol) fibre and 0.58% steel fibre and conducted a series of experiments to determine the compressive strength, Young’s modulus, modulus of rupture, and tensile characteristics of the new material. The new ECC was found to exhibit improved strength and strain capability than the reference ECC, which were

both essential for improving impact resistance. Soe et al (2013b) also investigated the impact resistance of a new ECC composite experimentally. The ECC panels were subjected to impact from a small ogive–nose steel projectile, which was fired from a gas gun, travelling with an initial impact velocity ranging from 300 m/s to 657 m/s. To evaluate the impact resistance capability of the new ECC material, the impact response of plain concrete panels, high strength concrete

panels and hybrid-fiber ECC panels made of an ECC mix, which was recommended to be the most promising impact resistance material, were also tested. The study showed that the new hybrid-fiber ECC material has an excellent impact resistance to projectile penetration, evidenced by a number of capacities such as the greater absorption of the impact energy from a projectile, the higher fibre bridging capability and the better durability under multiple impacts.

Buckling of the composite orthotropic clamped-clamped cylindrical shell loaded by transverse inertia forcesThe research undertaken by Lopatin and Morozov (2013) is concerned with the buckling analysis of the composite orthotropic cylindrical shell with clamped edges subjected to inertia loading. The problem is characterised by a non-uniform pre-buckling stress state. To address this, the relevant governing system of differential equations with variable coefficients has been derived and solved using Galerkin method.

As a result, the problem of determining the critical acceleration causing the buckling of shell is reduced to the solution of the corresponding generalised eigenvalue problem. Using the proposed approach, the critical accelerations are calculated for the glass-fibre reinforced shells with various dimensional and stiffness parameters (see Figure 28). Results of calculations are compared with those based on finite-element modelling and analysis.

Figure 28: Buckling mode shapes of the orthotropic cylindrical shells



Long-term and ultimate behaviour of post-tensioned composite steel-concrete slabsPost-tensioned composite steel-concrete slabs represent an economical form of construction and consist of thin-walled profiled steel sheeting, post-tensioned strands and concrete. This type of construction combines the advantages of two flooring systems which consist of post-tensioned slabs in the case of concrete structures and of composite slabs for steel structures. The advantages of this novel system cannot be exploited as yet as no design guidelines are currently available. This research project investigates both experimentally and numerically the structural behaviour of post-tensioned composite slabs, aiming to develop valuable design guidance.

As part of this project a full scale experimental study was undertaken by Ranzi et al (2013a) to investigate the long-term behaviour of three post-tensioned composite slabs with identical dimensions. These consisted of one post-tensioned solid slab and two post-tensioned composite ones cast on Condeck HP® and PrimeForm® profiles. The three specimens were tested in a simply-supported static configuration and subjected to their self-weight and to shrinkage effects for nearly 8 months.

From this study it was observed that the development of shrinkage strain is not uniform through the depth of steel-concrete composite slabs (Figure 29). The presence of the steel decking at the bottom of the slab prevented moisture egress from the bottom which caused the development of non-uniform shrinkage. This non-uniform shrinkage gradient increased with time, resulting increased slab deflection. A new model was proposed to predict the long-term response of post-tensioned composite slabs and to account for non-uniform shrinkage distributions. Comparisons between numerical results and experimental measurements highlighted the need to consider shrinkage gradients when dealing with composite slab systems for an accurate predictions of their deflections, as the use of the constant profile commonly used for reinforced concrete slabs was shown to underestimate the deformations for the geometric and material properties considered in the tests (Figure 30).

Also part of the project, another experimental study was performed by Ranzi et al (2013b) on the ultimate behaviour of post-tensioned composite slabs to evaluate the contribution of the steel deck on their flexural strengths and whether this is influenced by time effects. The experiments were grouped in two test series, each consisting of one post-tensioned solid slab and two post-tensioned composite ones cast on Condeck® HP and PrimeForm® profiles. All samples were cast with the same concrete and tested in a simply-supported static configuration subjected to two transverse line loads applied near the mid-span. Based on the experimental results it was noted that rigid-plastic calculations produced reasonable predictions for the ultimate flexural capacity of the post-tensioned solid slab. Predictions for the flexural strengths measured for the post-tensioned composite specimens overestimated the experimental results when based on full shear connection. A new model was presented to evaluate the ultimate capacity of post-tensioned composite slabs relying on partial shear connection theory based on which the calculated capacities were close to the experimental ones, even if still slightly overestimating them.

(a) Solid slab with both sides open to air (b) Solid slab with bottom side sealed with

plastic

(c) Composite slab with Condeck HP® (d) Composite slab with PrimeForm®

Figure 29: Total long-term deformations through the slab thickness of different samples.

Figure 30: Comparisons between numerical results and experimental measurements.



Vibration-based inverse algorithms for detection of delamination in composites.Delamination is a frequent and potentially serious damage that can occur in laminated polymer composites due to the poor inter-laminar fracture toughness of the matrix. Vibration based detection methods employ changes caused by loss of stiffness in dynamic parameters such as frequencies to detect and assess damage. One of the challenges of using frequency shift for damage detection is that while the presence of damage is easily identified through a shift in measured frequency, the determination of the location and the severity of the damage are not easy to accomplish. To determine the location and severity of damage from measured changes in frequency, it is necessary to solve the inverse problem, which requires the solution of a set of

non-linear simultaneous equations. In this work, Zhang et al (2013) examined three different inverse algorithms for solving the non-linear equations to predict the interface, lengthwise location and size of delamination: direct of solution using a graphical method, artificial neural network (ANN) and surrogate-based Optimisation.

The three inverse algorithms have been validated using numerical data generated from the finite element model (FEM) of delaminated beams (see Figure 31) and measured frequencies from modal testing conducted on simply supported and cantilever carbon fibre reinforced beam specimens.

Results show that all three algorithms can predict the delamination parameters accurately using the validation data directly generated from FE model. However, if using experimental data from real beams, ANN does not fare as well as the other two methods as it is more sensitive to the measurement errors. Finally, the advantages and limitations of each method have been summarized to provide a useful guide for selecting inverse algorithms for vibration-based delamination detection.

Figure 31: FE model of delaminated beam (a) without contact elements and (b) with contact elements between sub-laminates

a b



Effect of shear keys on the shear performance of sandwich panels with PVC and PU foam coreThe present study undertaken by Mostafa et al (2013a, b, c) explores the effect of introducing shear key inserts between the face sheet and the foam core of the composite sandwich structure on the shear performance. Parametric finite element (FE) investigation using ABAQUS software has been performed to evaluate the effect of the shear key orientation (bi-axial model) on the shear response and the failure mode of the composite sandwich panel under in-plane shear load and comparing the results with the zero orientation shear key model (uniaxial).

Polyvinylchloride (PVC) foam has been used as a core material which sandwiched between two thin strong face sheets of glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) to build a high performance sandwich panel. Chopped strand glass fibre (CS) impregnated with epoxy resin was used as shear key material.

A comprehensive material testing program was first carried out on the constituent materials in order to characterise its elastic response under different types of load (see Figure 3). Different orientations of the shear keys, namely ±15º, ±30º, ±45º, ±60º and 90/0º, have been investigated.

The FE results showed an improvement in the initial stiffness and ultimate stress of the sandwich panel as a result of introducing the shear keys. The FE model precisely captured the failure mode and demonstrated that the model with ±60º was the most sustainable model among the other bi-axial models. In comparison with the bi-axial model, uniaxial model offered a remarkable enhancement in the shear performance compared with the bi-axial model and accordingly selected for the future investigation.

Figure 32: Shear test setup for sandwich panel



Buckling of a uniformly compressed rectangular SSCF composite sandwich plate.The buckling problem for a uniformly compressed rectangular composite sandwich plate having two parallel edges simply supported, one edge clamped and the remaining edge free (the SSCF sandwich plate) has been solved by Lopatin and Morozov (2013b). A variational buckling equation is derived based on the Lagrange principle and first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT).

The Kantorovich procedure is applied to reduce the original equation to a one-dimensional form. Subsequent application of the generalized Galerkin method leads to an analytical formula for the critical load which is verified by using finite-element analysis (see Figure 4). Efficiency of the analytical formula derived is demonstrated for design cases in which constraints are imposed on the value of critical load.

Figure 33: Buckling mode shapes of the SSCF sandwich plate



2014

Systems and Informatics

“The Systems and Informatics research focus area addresses issues through the study of behaviours and interactions of people, organizations, software systems and related devices.”


Systems and Informatics



eGovernment for least developed countrieseGovernment can offer substantial benefits to governance in least developed countries (LDC). However, there are considerable barriers to its use: lack of knowledge of the strategic use of information and communication (ICT) systems for government business processes, and shortages of skills and confidence to use such systems. Ahmed Imran, and Tim Turner of SEIT, and Shirley Gregor of the ANU have been leading a research program to understand and to help overcome these barriers.

The book on eGovernment Management for Developing Countries by Imran et al (2013) builds on the authors’ extensive experience and research, and provides valuable insights into the practical implementation of e-government. It focuses on the developing world where the effective implementation of e-government remains a struggle, often because of the absence of adequate guidance. It follows a structured step-by-step process of e-government implementation and management, from conception to evaluation. The book is the first of its kind for developing countries, and provides a comprehensive treatment of the practical issues faced by today’s e-government managers and

their teams.

In partnership with the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre, they have put the results of their research into practice. They designed and implemented an eGovernment capacity-building project, to assist Bangladesh in overcoming these barriers. There is evidence to suggest that there are flow-on effects in terms of increased efficiency and transparency and benefits to citizens. This project is funded by a grant from Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID).

The development of eGovernment in LDCs is not well addressed in the research literature, which tends to focus on first-world issues. Gregor et al (2013) describe the design of the project, and reflect and systematize the design knowledge developed over the project. They characterize the approach as action design research within a broader framework for design science research, and they formulate a “sweet spot strategy” for LDCs, so that their success in Bangladesh might be replicated.

The interaction of people and software systems has many subtleties. Sometimes software development is inflexible in responding to the real needs of people and organizations, but other times people use software systems in

unexpectedly effective ways. Software systems provide us unprecedented amounts of data, but that data can be difficult to understand and exploit, and its use can have unexpected consequences. Software has the potential to enrich and enhance our lives, and to make our work more productive, but it often fails and frustrates.

The Systems and Informatics research focus area addresses these and other issues through the study of behaviours and interactions of people, organizations, software systems and related devices. This is naturally a multi-disciplinary endeavour, and we employ many different techniques to investigate, analyse and (hopefully) understand the behaviours and interactions of human and software systems. Experimentation helps us reveal behaviours and interactions in controlled situations; case studies provide information about the interactions in situ of organizations and software systems; simulations allow us to project possible future behaviours based on our current understanding; while mathematical analyses allow us to identify capabilities (and incapabilities) of specific software designs.

Academics

Prof. Hussein Abbass

Dr. Alireza Abbasi

Dr. Michael Barlow

Dr. Ahmed Imran

Ms. Bronwyn Jones

Dr. Edward Lewis

A/Prof. Michael Maher (Coordinator)

Dr. Alan McLucas

Dr. Kathryn Merrick

Dr. Michael Ryan

A/Prof. Ruhul Sarker

Dr. Tim Turner


Abdelmonaem Fouad Moustafa Abdallah

Umran Abdullah

Todd Baldwin

Allan Birch

Essam Debie

Medria Hardhienata

Rahul Gupta

Noha Hamza

Wayne Hargreaves

Michael Hartas

Dan Hartigan

John Harvey

Hafsa Ismail

Erandi Lakshika Kankanamge

Les Kosowski

Suranjith De Silva Piyadigamage

Eman Sayed

Marcus Thompson

Bing Wang


Bohemia Interactive Simulation

University of Newcastle, Australia.



Social network analysis in bushfire managementPreparing for natural hazard-related emergencies and consequence management is considered to be dynamic and challenging in managing crises, preventing losses, and in the allocation of resources. Abbasi and his colleagues investigate the effects of social connectedness among different team members to manage bushfires.

They further analyse response coordination by exploring variables such as participants’ preparedness quality, quality of incident action planning, and quality of accessibility of resources. They also examine the effects of these variables on improved adaptive behaviour. The results show high positive correlation between social connectedness for team members and coordination quality and also adaptive behaviour.

Applying regression analyses, the results indicate positive significant effect of social connectedness on coordination and adaptive behaviour and also the effect of coordination on adaptive behaviour. By exploring the proposed model by Abbasi et al. (2013), managers and policy makers are able to develop a better understanding of the factors that support adaptive behaviour in incident management teams responding to Bushfire events



Adaptive configuration of evolutionary algorithmsIn the literature, many different evolutionary algorithms (EAs), with different search operators, have been reported for solving optimisation problems. However, no single algorithm is consistently able to solve all types of problems. To overcome this problem, the recent trend is to use a mix of operators within a single algorithm. There are also cases where multiple methodologies, each with a single search operator, have been used under one approach. These approaches outperformed the single operator based single algorithm approaches. Elsayed et al (2013b) have proposed a new algorithm framework

that uses multiple methodologies, where each methodology uses multiple search operators. It involves a two-level adaptive configuration, where the first level is to decide the methodologies and the second level is to decide the search operators. In this approach, all operators and population sizes are updated adaptively. Although the framework may sound complex, one can gain significant benefits from it when solving optimisation problems. The framework was tested by solving two sets of specialized benchmark problems.

The results showed a competitive, if not better, performance when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the computational time in comparison to both single and multi-operator based algorithms.

Figure 34 shows how the sub-population sizes change, within a fixed overall population size of 120, whilst Figure 35 shows the number of individuals assigned to each EA operator, during the evolution process.

Figure 34: Change of sub-population size of each EA, and the change of the number of individuals assigned to each operator, for a test problem for the first 500 generations.

Figure 35: Change of number of individuals assigned to each operator

New centrality measures for social network analysisSocial network analysis is a methodology to map and measure the relationships and flows between nodes of a (social) network. A method used to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is about determining the centrality of an actor. These measures help determine the importance of a node in the network. In this project, Abbasi (2013) proposes new hybrid centrality (collaborative) measures for a node in weighted networks in three different categories:

the first category of measures only considers a node’s neighbors’ degree; the second category of measures takes into account the links’ weights of a node in a weighted network; and the third category of measures combines both neighbors’ degree and their links’ weight. Using a co-authorship network, the association between these new measures and the existing measures with scholars’ performance is examined to show the applicability of the new centrality measures.

The analysis shows that the scholars’ citation-based performances measures are significantly associated with all the proposed centrality measures but the correlation coefficient for the ones based on average indicators (i.e, a-Degree and Aw-Degree) is the highest.



Comparing expressiveness of defeasible logicsDefeasible logics are languages for expressing and reasoning about contradictory chains of reasoning. Such contradictions might arise from an adversarial situation, such as a trial, where the adversaries attempt to draw conflicting conclusions. They may also arise in reasoning by a lone agent, when different rules of thumb conflict. For example, we know that birds fly and emus do not, and yet emus are birds! Defeasible logics are able to express such situations, and reason sensibly with the knowledge.

An important feature of a defeasible logic is how it handles unresolved conflicts, called ambiguities. If an ambiguous conclusion is treated as if it has no support (i.e. as if there is no reason to believe it), a logic is said to block ambiguity, but if ambiguous conclusions can be used to influence other conclusions, the logic is said to propagate ambiguity. Using the notion of relative expressiveness developed and reported in 2012, Maher has established that these two ways of handling ambiguity have different expressiveness. This means that

neither class of logics can simulate the reasoning of the other class. In an extension of this work, Maher(2013) investigated logics that differ on how they treat circular reasoning: whether a proposition only supported by circular reasoning should be considered false, or only undetermined (neither true nor false). Strangely enough, although the former is computationally more complex and has greater inference strength, it is not more expressive than the latter. However, a sufficient condition for the former to be more or equally expressive than the latter was identified.

Analysing behaviour in noisy and deceptive conditionsWang et al (2013) defined an agent-based model to analyse behaviour produced under noisy and deceptive information conditions. They developed a simple, yet powerful, simulation environment where adaptive agents act and adapt to varying levels of information quality that they sense about their environment. The simulation environment consists of two types of agents moving in a bounded two-dimensional continuous plane: a neuro-evolutionary learning agent that

adapts its manoeuvring strategies to escape a pre-programmed deceptive agent; and a pre-programmed agent, whose goal is to capture the adaptive agent, that acts on noisy information about the adaptive agent’s manoeuvres that it senses from the environment. The pre-programmed agent is also able to produce deceptive actions to confuse the adaptive agent. The behaviour is represented in terms of the manoeuvring strategies that the agents adopt as their actions to the

environmental changes. A behaviour analysis methodology is developed to compare agent actions under different information conditions, that analysis elicits interesting relationships between behaviour and the studied information conditions. The framework is easily extendable to analyse human behaviour in similar environments by replacing the adaptive agent with an interactive human–machine interface.

Geographic diversity and research impactIn recent years there has been a sharp increase in collaborations among scholars and there are studies on the effects of scientific collaboration on scholars’ performance. In this project Abbsi and Jaafari (2013) examine the hypothesis that geographically diverse scientific collaboration is associated with research impact. Here, the approach is differentiated from other studies by: (a) focusing on publications rather than researchers or institutes;

(b) considering the geographical diversity of authors of each publication; (c) considering the average number of citations a publication receives per year (time-based normalization of citations) as a surrogate for its impact; and (d) not focusing on a specific country (developed or developing) or region. Analysis of the collected bibliometric data shows that a publication impact is significantly and positively associated with all related geographical

collaboration indicators. But publication impact has a stronger association with the numbers of external collaborations at department and institution levels (inter-departmental and inter-institutional collaborations) compared to internal collaborations. Conversely, national collaboration correlates better with impact than international collaboration.



2014

SEIT Academics



SEIT Academics



Prof Elanor Huntington Head of School

A/Prof Andrew Neely Deputy Head of School

(Technical Support)

Dr Chris Lokan Deputy Head of School

(Administration)

A/Prof Ruhul Sarker Deputy Head of

School (Research)

Dr Alan McLucas Deputy Head of

School (Teaching)

Dr Alireza Abbasi Lecturer

Prof Hussein Abbass Professor

Dr Sameer Alam Lecturer

Dr Safat Al-Deen Lecturer

Dr Sreenatha Anavatti Senior Lecturer

Dr Michael Barlow Senior Lecturer

Dr Craig Benson Senior Lecturer

Prof Russell BoyceProfessor

Mahmud Ashraf Senior Lecturer

John Arnold Professor

Deputy RectorDr

Dr Lawrie Brown Senior Lecturer

Ms Sue Burdekin Senior Lecturer

Dr Daoyi Dong Senior Lecturer

Mr Martin Copeland Lecturer

Dr Juan Pablo Escobedo-Diaz

Lecturer



Michael Frater Professor

Rector

Dr Matt Garratt Senior Lecturer

Dr C.T. (Rajah) Gnanendran

Senior Lecturer

Mr Alan Fien Senior Lecturer

Dr Daryl Essam Senior Lecturer

Mr Charles Hoke Postgraduate Teaching

Fellow

Dr Haroldo Hattori Senior Lecturer

A/Prof Charles Harb Associate Professor

Dr Rik Heslehurst Senior Lecturer

Prof Paul Hazell Professor

Professor Jiankun Hu Professor

A/Prof Obada Kayali Associate Professor

Dr Ahmed Imram Lecturer

Dr Xiuping Jia Senior Lecturer

Dr Amar Khennane Senior Lecturer

A/Prof Harald Kleine Associate Professor

Dr Edward Lewis Senior Lecturer

Mr Raymond Lewis Senior Lecturer

Prof Joseph Lai Professor

Dr Andrew Lambert Senior Lecturer



Prof Evgeny Morozov Professor

Dr Robert Niven Senior Lecturer

Dr Sean O’Byrne Senior Lecturer

Dr Gregory Milford Senior Lecturer

A/Prof Valeri Ougrinovski

Associate Professor

Prof Ian Petersen Professor

A/Prof Mark Pickering Associate Professor

A/Prof Hemanshu Pota Associate Professor

Mr Heath Pratt Lecturer

A/Prof Tapabrata RayARC Future Fellow

A/Prof Mark C. ReedSenior Lecturer

Dr Michael Ryan Senior Lecturer

Dr Kamran Shafi Lecturer

Dr Krishna Shankar Senior Lecturer

Prof Hemant Kumar Singh

Lecturer

Dr Kathryn Merrick Lecturer

Dr Abdun Nasser MahmoodLecturer

A/Prof Michael j Maher Senior Lecturer

A/Prof Robert Lo Associate Professor

Dr Jong-Leng Liow Senior Lecturer



Dr Fangbao Tian Lecturer

Dr Matthew J Woolley Lecturer

Dr Tim TurnerSenior Lecturer

Dr Hidehero Yonezawa Senior Lecturer

Dr Sean Tuttle Senior Lecturer

Dr John Young Senior Lecturer

Dr Murat Tahtali Senior Lecturer

Dr Kathryn Wilson Senior Lecturer

Dr Weiping Zhu Senior Lecturer

Dr Warren Smith Senior Lecturer

Mr Trevor Wheatley Lecturer

Dr Sarah (Yixia) Zhang Senior Lecturer

Prof Jill Slay Professor



2014

References





References relevant to this reportAbbasi A (2013), h-Type hybrid

centrality measures for weighted networks, Scientometrics, 96(2):633-640.

Abbasi A, Owen C, Hossain L and Hamra J (2013), Social Connectedness and Adaptive Team Coordination during Fire Events, Fire Safety Journal, 59:30-36.

Abbasi A and Jaafari A (2013). Research Impact and Scholars’ Geographical Diversity, Journal of Informetrics, 7(3):683-692.

Alam S, Lokan C, Aldis G, Barry S, Butcher R, and Abbass HA (2013), Systemic Identification of Airspace Collision Risk Tipping points using an Evolutionary Multi-Objective Scenario-based Methodology, Transportation Research Part C, 35:57-84.

Cordier L, Noack BR, Daviller G, Tissot G, Lehnasch G, Delville J, Balajewicz M and Niven RK (2013), Identification strategies for model-based control, Experiments in Fluids, 54(8): 1-21.

Cerreta EK , Escobedo JP, Rigg PA, Trujillo CP, Brown DW, Sisneros TA, Clausen B, Lopez MF, Lookman T, Bronkhorst CA, Addessio FL (2013), The influence of phase and substructural evolution during dynamic loading on subsequent mechanical properties of zirconium, Acta Materialia, 61: 7712-7719.

Deepak NR, Gai S and Neely A (2013), A computational investigation of laminar shock wave / boundary layer interactions, The Aeronautical Journal, 117(1187):27-56.

Dong D, Petersen IR and Rabitz H (2013), Sampled-data control of qubit systems subject to decoherence, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 58: 2654-2659.

Elsayed S, Sarker R and Essam D (2013a), An Improved Self-Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm for Optimization Problems, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 9(1):89-99.

Elsayed S, Sarker R and Essam D (2013b), Adaptive Configuration of Evolutionary Algorithms for Constrained Optimization, Applied Mathematics and Computation, 222: 680-711.

Gregor S, Imran A and Turner T (2013), A “Sweet Spot” Intervention in a Least Developed Country: Leveraging eGovernment Outcomes in Bangladesh, European Journal of Information Systems, pp. 1-17.

Hamza N, Sarker R and Essam D (2013), Differential Evolution with Multi-Constraint Consensus Methods for Constrained Optimization, Journal of Global Optimization, 57(2):583-611.

Hassanein OI, Anavatti S and Ray T (2013), Black-box tool for nonlinear system identification based upon fuzzy system, International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications, 12(2):1350009-1(21).

Hazell PJ, Appleby-Thomas GJ, Philbey D and Tolman W (2013), The effect of gilding jacket material on the penetration mechanics of a 7.62 mm armour-piercing projectile, International Journal of Impact Engineering, 54:11-18.

Hossain MR, Ashraf M and Padgett JE (2013), Risk-based seismic performance assessment of Yielding Shear Panel Device, Engineering Structures, 56:1570-1579.

Hossain MS, Milford GN, Reed M and Godara LC (2013), Efficient Robust Broadband Antenna Array Processor in the Presence of Look Direction Errors, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 61(02):718-727.

Imran A, Gregor S and Turner T (2013), eGovernment Management for Developing Countries, NCISR, Canberra.

Iwasawa K, Makino K, Yonezawa H, Tsang M, Davidovic A, Huntington E, and Furusawa A (2013), Quantum-limited mirror-motion estimation, Physics Review Letters 111, 163602.

Jia X, Kuo BC and Crawford MM, (2013), Feature Mining for Hyperspectral Image Classification, Proceedings of the IEEE, 101(3): 676-697.

Jiang F, Cao LB, Frater MR (2013b), Agent-based Self-adaptable Context-aware Network Vulnerability Assessment, IEEE Transactions on Network and System Management, 10(3): 255-270.

Jiang M and Jiang F (2013), Deterministic joint remote preparation of arbitrary multi-qudit states, in Physics Letters A, 15(38):2524–2530.

Lang C, Eichler C, Steffen CL, Fink JM, Woolley MJ, Blais A, and Wallraff A (2013), Correlations, indistinguishability and entanglement in Hong–Ou–Mandel experiments at microwave frequencies, Nature Physics, 9:345-348.



Lin X and Zhang YX (2013a), Nonlinear finite element analyses of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams in fire conditions, Composite Structures, 97: 277-285.

Lin X and Zhang YX (2013b), A novel composite beam element with bond-slip for nonlinear finite element analyses of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams, Journal of Structural Engineering, technical notes, 2013;139(12), 06013003-1-06013003-6.

Lin X and Zhang YX (2013c), Evaluation of bond stress-slip models for FRP reinforcing bars in concrete, Composite Structures, 107:131-141.

Lin X and Zhang YX (2013d), Bond-slip behaviour of FRP-reinforced concrete beams, Construction and Building Materials, 44: 110-117.

Lopatin AV and Morozov EV (2013a), Buckling of the composite orthotropic clamped-clamped cylindrical shell loaded by transverse inertia forces, Composite Structures, 95: 471-478.

Lopatin AV and Morozov EV (2013b), Buckling of a uniformly compressed rectangular SSCF composite sandwich plate, Composite Structures, 105:108-115.

Maher MJ (2013), Relative expressiveness of defeasible logics II. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 13(4-5):579-592.

Molesworth BRC and Burgess M (2013), Improving intelligibility at a safety critical point: In flight cabin safety, Safety Science, 51(1):11-16.

Mostafa A, Shankar K and Morozov EV (2013a), Effect of Shear Keys Diameter on the Shear Performance of Sandwich Panel with PVC and PU Foam Core: FE Study, Composite Structures, 102:90-100.

Mostafa A, Shankar K and Morozov EV (2013b), Influence of shear keys orientation on the shear performance of composite sandwich panel with PVC foam core: Numerical study, Materials and Design, 51:1008-1017.

Mostafa A, Shankar K and Morozov EV (2013c), Insight into the shear behaviour of composite sandwich panels with foam core, Materials and Design, 50:92-101.

Muhit AA, Pickering MR, Scarvell JM, Ward T and Smith PN (2013), Image-assisted non-invasive and dynamic biomechanical analysis of human joints, Physics in medicine and biology, 58(13):4679-702.

Noack BR and Niven RK (2013), A hierarchy of maximum entropy closures for Galerkin systems of incompressible flows, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 65: 1558-1574.

Oberst S, Lai JCS and Marburg S (2013) Guidelines for numerical vibration and acoustic analysis of disc brake squeal using simplified models of brake systems. Journal of Sound & Vibration, 332(9), 2284-2299.

Petersen IR (2013a), Singular perturbation approximations for a class of linear quantum systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 58(1):193-198.

Petersen IR (2013b), A Kalman decomposition for possibly controllable uncertain linear systems, Automatica, 49(8):2474-2482.

Ranzi G, Al-Deen S, Ambrogi L and Uy B (2013a), Long-term behaviour of simply-supported post-tensioned composite slabs, Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 88:172-180.

Ranzi G, Al-deen S, Hollingum G, Hone T, Gowripalan S and Uy B (2013b), An experimental study on the ultimate behaviour of simply-supported post-tensioned composite slabs, Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 89:293-306.

Rehman OU, Petersen IR, and Fidan B (2013a), Feedback Linearization Based Robust Nonlinear Control Design for Hypersonic Flight Vehicles, Journal of System Engineering and Control, 227(1):3-11.

Singh HK, Ray T and Sarker R (2013), Optimum oil production planning using infeasibility driven evolutionary algorithm, Evolutionary Computation, 21(1):65-82.

Soe K, Zhang YX and Zhang LC (2013a), Material properties of a new hybrid-fibre engineered cementitious composite, Construction and Building Materials, 43:399-407.

Soe K, Zhang YX and Zhang LC (2013b), High velocity impact responses of hybrid-fiber ECC, Composite Structures, 104: 320-330.

Ugrinovskii V (2013), Conditions for detectability in distributed consensus-based observer networks, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 58:2659-2664.

Wang SL, Shafi K, Lokan C and Abbass HA (2013), An agent-based model to simulate and analyse behaviour under noisy and deceptive information, Adaptive Behavior, 21(2):96-117.



Woolley MJ, Lang C, Eichler C, Wallraff A and Blais A (2013), Signatures of Hong Ou Mandel interference at microwave frequencies, New Journal of Physics, 15, 105025.

Woolley MJ and Clerk AA (2013), Two-mode back-action-evading measurements in cavity optomechanics, Physical Review A, 87, 063846.

Xu D and Ugrinovskii V (2013), Decentralized measurement feedback stabilization of large-scale systems via control vector Lyapunov functions, Systems & Control Letters, 62(12):1187-1195.

Xie Y, Hu J, Xiang Y, Yu S, Tang S, and Wang Y (2013a), Modelling oscillation behaviour of network traffic by nested Hidden Markov Model with variable state-duration, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 24(9):1807-1817.

Xie Y, Hu J, Tang S, and Huang X (2013b), A forwarded-backward algorithm for nested Hidden semi-Markov model and application to network traffic, The Computer Journal, 56(2):229-238.

Xie Y, Tang S, Xiang Y, and Hu J (2013c), Resisting web proxy-based HTTP attacks by temporal and spatial locality behaviour, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 24(7):1401-1410.

Young J, Ashraf MA, Lai JCS and Platzer MF (2013), Numerical Simulation of Fully Passive Flapping Foil Power Generation, AIAA Journal, 51(11):2727-2739.

Zhang YX and Lin X (2013), Nonlinear finite element analysis of steel/FRP-reinforced concrete beams by using a novel beam element, Advances in Structural Engineering, 16(2):339-352.

Zhang Z, Shankar K, Ray T, Morozov EV and Tahtali M (2013), Vibration based inverse algorithms for detection of delamination in composites, Composite Structures, 102:226-236.

Zhao W, Alam S, and Abbass HA (2013), Evaluating Ground-Air Network Vulnerability in an Integrated Terminal Manoeuvring Area Using Co-evolutionary Computational Red Teaming, Transportation Research Part-C, 29: 32-54.

Zhao H, Jin Q, and Hu J (2013a), An energy efficient key management scheme for body sensor networks,’’ IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 24(11):2202-2210.

Production:Editor: Dr Mahmud Ashraf School of Engineering and Information Technology Design: Creative Media Unit

Contact usIf you would like further information, please contact the Research Student Admissions Coordinator:A/Prof Mark PickeringTelephone: +61 2 6268 8238 Fax: +61 2 6268 8443 Email: [email protected] School of Engineering and Information Technology The University of New South Wales Canberra PO Box 7916 CANBERRA BC ACT 2610Cricos Provider Code: 00098G • CMU 141444

The School of Engineering and Information Technology is one of four Schools of the University of New South Wales located at the ADFA campus in Canberra. Research is a key focus for the School, and inspires our approach to teaching and other activities.

Engineering and Information Technology Research Report 2014

Never Stand Still School of Engineering and Information Technology

Documents

Engineering and Information Technology Research Report 2014 · Research Report 2014 Never Stand Still School of Engineering and Information Technology. Production: ... Bayesian inference