The facing control in retail-industry is to rearrange number and position of each goods on a gondola in order to increase the total amount of sales as much as possible. It is difficult to mathematically formulate this control problem. Because the total amount of sales is not only influenced by the number and position of each goods but also by various factors such as advertisement, climate, price and so on.
To solve this problem, a facing control system has been developed. The system utilizes rearrangement knowledge of expert planners who consideres various characteristics (collor, container, package, etc.) of goods. In the proposed system, number and position rearrangement are attained by repeating the following process; (1) Alternatives for partial rearrangement are generated automatically by using the knowledge. (2) The layout of each alternative is generated by layout computation with the size data of each goods and shelves. (3)A suitable layout is selected from the above alternatives by evaluating the sales performance based on an evaluation function which is defined by the planner beforehand.
Further, the proposed system is possessed of the following display functions. (1) A goods layout is displayed by using goods images. (2) Each characteristics data of goods is displayed on a goods layout.

View full abstract

In this paper, a quick solving method in an expert-system is developed for selecting switching devices suitable in private electric power distribution systems by modeling the inference processes of engineers who design the protection coordination. The engineers efficiently and quickly select switching devices by taking into account of the nature of rules and deal with time-current characteristic curves of switching devices by some clusters. In order to simulate these engineer's treatments, we classify the rules regarding the over-current protection into three groups. The first group is independent of the characteristic curves of switching devices. Second and third group consist of the rules for determining the lower and upper bounds of the solution, respectively. The inference engine of our prototype system is improved by adding a new function to understand a cluster of characteristic curves of switching devices.
This classification of rules brings about the reduction of the application frequency of rules in our expert system and makes it possible to construct a quick inference system. This conception could be applied to the similar problems dealing with numerical data and curves.

View full abstract

A signal interpretation system (SIPS) is a tool for the davelopment of diagnostic and control methodologies. By analysis of the observed system's signals combined with knowledge engineering, it is possible to establish system characteristics. The SIPS described in the article consists of two main programs. One, for signal processing tasks, employs many FORTRAN programs for specific processing tasks. The other, for making inferences, uses a kernel written in C with knowledge-based IF-THEN loops, enabling full use to be made of knowledge databases in signal processing and the system being examined

View full abstract

This paper introduces a mill pacing expert control system for use in steel bar mills to determine the discharge pitch from the reheating furnace and to automatically control that process. The system receives various process data on a steel bar mill, determines the present condition of mill operations, predicts future material flow, and makes inferences to ensure optimum control of the material discharge pitch. This system permits automatic control of the discharge pitch from the reheating furnace, an operation which traditionally has depended on the experience and skill of the operator, and helps improve productivity and labor efficiency.
This paper discusses the design concept of the system, implementation, and evaluation based on verification test results.

View full abstract

A method of compressing the data volume of left ventricular cineangiograms for digital storage is proposed. This method makes digital optical discs store the cineangiograms with the recording density as high as HDTV VTRs under the premise of preserving original image quality. This method first decomposes each frame of the cineangiogram into the three regions of the inner part, the inner wall and the background by a statistical method which the authors reported previously. Then each region is compressed by a difference operation and adaptive approximation with smooth functions.
The performance is tested on real cineangiograms. The specifications are proved to have a spatial resolution of 1000TV lines, a dynamic range of 60 dB, a S/N ratio of 40 dB (p-p/rms), volume compression into 7% of the original one, 126sec/frame for coding, and 0. 32 s/frame for decoding. This performance enables a digital database system for the left ventricular cineangiograms with the space saving property of VTRs in addition to the digital optical discs' inherent property of high speed seeking and robust storage over a long period of time.

View full abstract

We present a general fault diagnosis theory which extends the Reiter's component-level theory to the package-level.
In our theory, a system is defined as (SD, COMPONENTS, PACKAGES, OBS), where SD (system description) is a set of first-order logic sentences, COMPONENTS (system components) is a set of constants, and PACKAGES is a partition of COMPONENTS. Each element of PACKAGES is called a package. Observation OBS is described as a set of first-order sentences.
Package-level diagnosis is a minimal set Δp of PACKAGES such that
SD_??_OBS_??_{_??_ AB(c)/c∈COMPONENTS-comp(Δp)}
is consistent, where comp (Δp)={c|(_??_P)c∈P∈Δp} and AB(c) means that the component c is abnormal.
Based on theory, we developed a package-level diagnosis algorithm which uses a mechanical theorem prover for detecting a discrepancy between SD and OBS. We implemented it by using the automated reasoning system Thinker, which we have developing since 1984.
We applied it to the diagnosis of typical sequential circuits such that a synchronous counter and an automatic vending machine, where SD consists of the description of gates, wiring, axioms of Boolean algebra, etc.
The example of counter circuits, which has 3 packages (3 JK-type flip-flops and an and gate), demonstrates that we have to explicitly embed the clock time into these descriptions. The automatic vending machine consists of 18 packages (53 components including 3 D-type flip-flops), and the diagnosis time for detecting all of the 6 single-level package fault was about 25 min. In this process, Thinker was invoked 37 times.
The experiments show that the proposed approach is practical for large-scale sequential circuits.

View full abstract

In this paper, a semi-absolute interpolation method to improve the resolution of a monofrequency laser interferometer is proposed. The displacement of the moving device which corresponds to λ/2 is measured by an up-down counter. The location within a λ/2 movement is detected using an absolute encoding technique which is referred to as the phase encoding method. The system becomes immune from the error caused by mechanical, optical and/or electrical noise. The analysis and experiments indicate that the combination of 6 bit A-D converters and 4 kbyte ROM is enough to obtain 5nm resolution.
A circuit scheme to provide with the velocity information in analogue voltage is also presented for the convenience of constructing servo-systems. As the measuring interval of the system varies according to the object speed, the method is applicable to a system where the object speed varies widely.

View full abstract