Recently, global warming becomes one of the most serious problems for sustainable development in the world and energy saving is now important activity as the countermeasure. In industrial sector, the energy saving in not only factories but also increasing office buildings is required. In this paper, BEMS(Building and Energy Management System) which totally manages energy consumption and generation in whole office building is first introduced, then the activity for improving office work productivity by controlling office light is explained as one of the examples for positive energy saving activity.

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The amounts of elements (Ag, Al, Au, Ba, Cr, Cu, Fe, In, Ni, Pb, Sb, Sn, Sr, Zn and Zr) in shipped, stock and waste electrical and electronic equipments (Cathode Ray Tube TV, liquid-crystal display TV, plasma display panel TV, refrigerator, air conditioner, washing machine, microwave oven and cleaner) have been estimated. The recyclability for these elements were evaluated in the view point of urban mine.

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For the sustainable society, organization management not based on the mass production and mass consumption but having the flexibility to meet to various social needs precisely is required. For realizing such management, the emploees' work morale is required. Recently, however, the emploees' work morale is tend to decrease. Therefore, in this study, the authors developed the model of the method for promoting and keeping employees' work morale effectively and efficiently. Especially the authors thought “work morale” of “attitude to the work”. Based on this idea, it could be considered that the theory of the persuasion psychology and various persuasion techniques. Therefore, the model of the method applying the character agent was developed based on the forced compliance which is one of persuasion techniques based on the theory of the cognitive dissonance. By the evaluation experiment using human subjects, it was confirmed that developed method could improve workers' work morle effectively.

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A control of CO₂ emissions which is the main factor of global warming is one of the most important problems in the 21st century about preservation of earth environment. Therefore, efficient supply and use of energy are indispensable. We have proposed distributed energy management systems (DEMSs), where we are to obtain optimal plans that minimize both of costs and CO₂ emissions through electrical and thermal energy trading. A DEMS consists of the plural entities that seek their own economic profits. In this paper, we propose a trading method that gives competitive equilibrium resource distribution by applying the market-oriented programming (MOP) to DEMSs.

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Dispersed generators such as wind power generation, photovoltaic system, and co-generation system are expected to mitigate the environmental burden or energy consumption, and their installation is recently promoted. Micro-Grid is focused on as a method to solve some problems to a commercial electric power line when installing a large number of dispersed generators, and some demonstrative researches on Micro-Grid for large scale systems are carried out now. Also, small co-generation systems for houses such as gas engine and fuel cell are expected to improve the CO2 emission. However, if the power and heat demand of a family are relatively small or are unbalanced, the co-generation system doesn't operate effectively. The authors studied the application of Micro-Grid for home energy supply, and have developed a control system to solve this problem. The system enables us to reduce CO2 emission and energy cost by sharing electric power and heat among some houses with co-generation systems. This paper presents the outline of the developed system, and especially describes the effect of the reduction in CO2 emission compared with a conventional energy supply method and the case when dispersed generators are installed in some houses and operate independently.

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In order to carry out energy saving service, it is indispensable to calculate the energy saving effect quantitatively by presuming the energy cost at the time of not executing the energy saving measure. However, it is difficult because the energy cost changes when environment (energy demand, unit prices of fuel or electric power, and so on) changes even if an energy saving measure is not executed. Although the effect has been conventionally evaluated by the difference between the energy costs before and after the energy saving measure, the effect cannot be calculated correctly when there is environmental change. In this paper, we propose the method of estimating energy saving effect by presuming the energy cost after an energy saving measure, assuming that the measure is not executed, and show the results of its application to the practical power plants.

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A method for the analysis of fatigue parameters has been rarely researched in VDT operation. Up to now, fatigue was evaluated by changing of biological information. If signals regarding fatigue are detected, fatigue can be measured. The purpose of this study proposed experiment and analysis method to extract parameters related to fatigue from the biological information during VDT operation using the Independent Component Analysis (ICA). An experiment had 11 subjects. As for the experiment were light loaded VDT operation and heavy loaded VDT operation. A measurement item were amount of work, a mistake number, subjective symptom, surface skin temperature (forehead and apex nasi), heart rate, skin blood flow of forearm and respiratory rate. In the heavy loaded operation group, mistake number and subjective symptom score were increased to compare with the other. And Two-factor ANOVA was used for analysis. The result of mistake number was confirmed that heavy loaded. After the moving averages of waveshape were calculated, it was made to extract independent components by using the ICA. The results of the ICA suggest that the independent components increase according to accumulation of fatigue. Thus, the independent components would be a possible parameter of fatigue. However, further experiments should continue in order to obtain the conclusive finding of our research.

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The ultrasound sensor system is a widely used system in various fields such as the external environment sensors for autonomous mobile robots mainly due to their features, small size and robust construction. However, the conventional ultrasound sensor system is limited to measure only the distance to the object at the reflection time of the ultrasound wave. In this paper, a new type of high performance ultrasound sensor system is proposed. In this system, the ultrasound wave modulated by several featured frequencies is transmitted and the reflected waves are analyzed through the Fourier transformation. At the same, the system can time measure the speed, the direction of the movement, and even a ruggedness condition on the surface of object. The effectiveness of our proposal has been proved by experimental results.

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A personal identification system based on isodensity maps in which the properties of a face is well reflected has been proposed. In the conventional method, however, there were problems in terms of memory requirements for registration of facial images and the processing time. To improve these problems, a new matching scheme using chain coded isodensity maps is proposed. Isodensity contours are the line pictures. Therefore, it can be convert to chain codes. By using the coded isodensity contours, the improvement of the processing performance can be expected in terms of the processing time and the memory size required. In this paper, a robust personal identification system for angled faces based on the chain coded isodensity maps is presented.

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A state setting technique of controller is discussed for constrained linear systems. The relation between changes of a partial state and corresponding responses is characterized by introducing an extended singular value decomposition (SVD). By employing the SVD, the setting value of the state which fulfills system constraints is derived. The advantage of partial state setting is illustrated with numerical examples.

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This paper examines the sensorless control system based on the direct torque control (DTC) for an interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM). In the DTC system, the rotor position is not required, and the rotor speed is estimated from the estimated position of stator flux-linkage vector. In addition, the maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) control and the flux weakening (FW) control can be applied to the DTC as well as the current control method in the d-q reference frame. Therefore the DTC can operate over a wide speed range. The characteristic of the maximum power operation is shown by the experimental result. The torque response is investigated by the simulation and experimental results. A relationship between the controller gain and torque response is shown, and an improvement method of the torque response is proposed.

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In recent years, a robotics technology is extremely progressive, and robots are widely applied in many fields. One of the most typical robots is a pet robot. The pet robot is based on an animal pet, such as a dog or a cat. Also, it is known that an animal pet has a healing effect. Therefore, the study to apply pet robots to Animal Assisted Therapy instead of an animal pet has begun to be investigated. We, also, have investigated a method of an owner distinction for pet robot, to emphasize a healing effect of pet robots. In this paper, taking account of implementation into pet robots, a real-time owner distinction method is proposed. In the concrete, the method provides a real-time matching algorithm and an oblivion mechanism. The real-time matching means that a matching and a data acquisition are processed simultaneously. The oblivion mechanism is deleting features of owners in the database of the pet robots. Additionally, the mechanism enables to reduce matching costs or size of database and it enables to follow a change of owners. Furthermore, effectivity and a practicality of the method are evaluated by experiments.

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Through analyzing the dynamics characteristic of maximum neural network with an added vertex, we find that the solution quality is mainly determined by the added vertex weights. In order to increase maximum neural network ability, a stochastic nonlinear self-feedback and flexible annealing strategy are embedded in maximum neural network, which makes the network more powerful to escape local minima and be independent of the initial values. Simultaneously, we present that solving ability of maximum neural network is dependence on problem. We introduce a new parameter into our network to improve the solving ability. The simulation in k random graph and some DIMACS clique instances in the second DIMACS challenge shows that our improved network is superior to other algorithms in light of the solution quality and CPU time.

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This paper proposes a solution to mixed-integer programming by using a gradient system and searching for multiple equilibrium points in the system. The method is available when the objective function of a problem is continuous and differentiable. In order to find feasible solutions of a mixed-integer programming problem by gradient systems, discrete decision variables are treated as continuous ones. We demonstrate a systematic way to build the kind of gradient systems in which equilibrium points are embedded at feasible solutions of a mixed-integer problem. For numerical computation, the multiple equilibrium points search method we have already proposed is available and its adjustments to improve efficiency and certainty for mixed-integer programming are also proposed in this paper. Results for some problems show the effectiveness of our method: high ability of thorough search and high quality of derived solutions.

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The Information on travel time is useful to improve traffic efficiency, e.g., to reduce traffic congestion effectively. Travel time is computed from the passage time of vehicles observed at both origin (upstream) and destination (downstream) points. To do so, we are studying a vehicle identification method using vehicle height data obtained from ultrasonic vehicle detectors. However, matching method using vehicle height only, suffer from poor identification accuracy because many similar vehicles exist on the road. Therefore, we propose a method based on matching vehicle sequences (two or more vehicles). In addition, we develop this method using Genetic Algorithm based on traffic characteristic.

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This paper proposes a page centric approach for developing Web applications in which an application is modeled as state machine of a UML that considers a Web page a state. Application variables are divided into page related variables and others. Business logics are also divided into presentation related logics and others. In this paper, based on our model a Web application development environment is also described. Using this environment, we can intuitively define the behavior of a Web application. Examples of applications developed by our method are shown.

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Recently, biological superior information processing ability has been researched to be able to be useful for a computer system. Especially, neural networks about brain and nervous system have been researched. Immunity network models based on biological immune response network also have been researched, but most of the researchers consider only a basic part of the interaction between B cells and T cells. The recent research has been reported a thing that the function of T cell receptor (TCR) is important in practical immune response network. Therefore, we propose a new immunity network model which, unlike the traditional immunity networks, has the same function that a T cell receptor has. We applied the proposed immunity network model and the traditional immunity network model to the pattern recognition system. And we compare performance of the proposed immunity network model with the traditional immunity network model, therefore showed usability of the proposed immunity network model.

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In this paper, we propose a novel method to measure similarity between program source codes. Different to others, our method doues not compare two source codes directly but compares two reference vectors, where a reference vector is calculated from one source code and a set of reference source codes. This means that our method requires no original source code when considering an application open to public such as a search engine for the program source code on the internet. We have built a simple search system and have evaluated with Java source codes made in the university course of basic programming. Results show that the system can achieve quite high average precision rate in very short time which means the proposed method can measure correct similarity very fast.

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To build a cooperative logistics network covering multiple enterprises, a planning method that can build a long-distance transportation network is required. Many strict constraints are imposed on this type of problem. To solve these strict-constraint problems, a selfish constraint satisfaction genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. In this GA, each gene of an individual satisfies only its constraint selfishly, disregarding the constraints of other genes in the same individuals. Moreover, a constraint pre-checking method is also applied to improve the GA convergence speed. The experimental result shows the proposed method can obtain an accurate solution in a practical response time.

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In Totally-Implantable Artificial Heart (TAH) system, Transcutaneous Optical Information Transmission System (TOITS) and Externally Coupled Transcutaneous Energy Transmission System (ECTETS) are effective for driving, controlling and monitoring the TAH. Using these systems, a patient needs to wear an optical coupler and a transcutaneous transformer separately, and then the patient's QOL (Quality of Life) will be deteriorated. Therefore, we research the energy and information transmission by wearing an unified transcutaneous transformer. In this paper, the unified transcutaneous transformer for the energy and information transmission was investigated. As a result, the unified transformer, by which the coupling between the energy and information transmission was reduced, was developed.

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The measuring technique of Raman gain efficiency along the transmission line composed of optical fibers and connectors based on the OTDR is proposed. It is a simple method of estimating Raman gain efficiency from the backscattered powers with and without pump power based on the OTDR. Experiments of Raman gain efficiency are carried out for the optical transmission line composed of four 3-km long single-mode fibers. By our present method, the Raman gain efficiency distribution is successfully estimated.

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