we want to publish an Open-Source for integrating Reinforcement Learning to Smartgrid optimization.
We use OpenModelica as GUI, PyFMI for the import to Python and Gym.
Nearly everything is running, but a possibility to connect or disconnect additional loads during the simulation is missing. Everything we can do for now is a variation of the parameters of existing loads, which gives some flexibility, but way less then the possibility to switch loads on and off.
Using the implemented switches in OpenModelica is not really an option. They just place a resistor at this spot, giving it either a very low or very high resistance. First, its not really decoupled, and second, high resistances make the ODE-system stiff, which makes it really hard (and costly) to solve it. In tests our LSODA solver (in stiff cases basically a BDF) ran often in numerical errors, regardless of how the jacobian was calculated (analytically by directional derivatives or with finite differences).
Has anyone an idea how we can implement a real "switching effect"?
Best regards,
Henrik
Ideal connection and disconnection of components during simulation
requires structure variability, which is not fully supported
by Modelica (yet). See also this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/30487641/8725275
One solution for this problem is to translate all possible
model structures in advance and switch the simulation model if certain conditions are met. As there is some overhead involved, this approach only makes sense, when the model is not switched very often.
There is a python framework, which was built to support this process: DySMo. The tool was written by Alexandra Mehlhase, who made a lot of interesting publications regarding structure variability, e.g. An example of beneficial use of
variable-structure modeling to enhance an existing rocket model.
The paper Simulating a Variable-structure Model of an Electric Vehicle for Battery Life Estimation Using Modelica/Dymola and Python of Moritz Stueber is also worth a look. It contains a nice introduction about variable structure systems and available solutions.
I'm very new to coding, and need some help with a project of sorts. I have segments of video, and I need to be able to track the motion of an object(s) through these segments, and get data like a mapped path, average and instantaneous velocities, etc. I'm trying to do this in MATLAB, and have the 2016a version installed. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Without knowing exactly what project you're working on, I can guess that Matlab is the wrong tool for this job.
I've been using Matlab near-daily for about four years now, but when I want to track an object in a video, I use Tracker.
Matlab is a good language for a beginning programmer because you can start doing numerical calculations, and plotting the results, very quickly. More advanced programmers tend to use Matlab to process data (Mathworks has many useful libraries for things like Fourier Transforms); to do linear algebra; to do quick numerical analyses; and to build scientific models. These applications are mainly in math, science, and engineering.
If you want to learn Matlab, I recommend you find a project which plays to Matlab's strengths.
If you want to analyse images and videos, I recommend that you learn a language which is used professionally for this purpose, such as Python or Java.
I am analyzing EMG data in my research lab. One of the steps is to calculate a continuous wavelet transformation of the dataset (size ~80000). Therefore, I use Matlab with the wavelet toolbox and "cwt" to plot a 3D-scalogram.
The calculation takes a lot of time and any interaction like 3D-rotation (which is very important to see different aspects of the data) is nearly impossible.
The resource-monitor shows that only one of my hexa-core processor is working. I use parallel computing for other calculations and haven't found any solution or even a similiar question like this.
Is there anything I can do to activate multicore support for plots?
I'll hazard an educated guess and plump for the answer No to your question Is there anything I can do to activate multicore support for plots?
Matlab can certainly use multiple cores for its computations. Many of its intrinsic functions are already multi-threaded and will use any available cores without the programmer (or user) having to do take any special measures. For your own computations you can use the Parallel Compute Toolbox.
However, unless you have some very special graphics hardware (and if you do why didn't you mention it ?) your display shows you why only one processor is being used when you interact with your 3D plots -- somewhere between the screen and the hardware of your computer there is a bottleneck through which the outputs of all those cores are squeezed into one stream of bits and bytes for presentation.
Your experience is consistent with that bottleneck being the Matlab visualisation routines, I think it is safe to conclude from the evidence you present, that the Mathworks haven't multi-threaded the routines which compute the new screen positions of each element in a plot as you rotate it, or any of the other processing that goes on to turn the results of your analyses into a picture or pictures. If they did parallelise those routines, that would shift the bottleneck but not remove it.
To remove the bottleneck you would have to have a way for different Matlab threads to separately address different parts of your screen; I see no evidence that Matlab has that capability. Google will find you a ton of references to parallel rendering but I see no sign that Matlab currently implements any aspect of this.
I'll just add, in response to your comment where you write unfortunately I can't resample my data that you should be mindful that Matlab's visualisation routines are resampling your data for presentation unless you are only visualising datasets with numbers of samples less than the number of pixels available. If you visualise a time series with 80000 samples on a display with 2000 pixels horizontally, something has got to give.
You might get better graphics performance and superior understanding if you take charge of that resampling yourself.
Matlab plotting performance is pretty bad, it's more focused on customizability than performance. Using MEX to run some native C++ code to plot the data with OpenGL will likely be much much faster.
My BE final year project is about sign language recognition. I'm terribly confused in choosing the right classification technique for patterns seen in the video of signs generated by a dumb user. I learned neural nets(NN) are better than hidden markov model in several aspects but fine tuning the parameters of NN requires a lot of time. Further, some reports say that Support Vector Machine are better in performance than NN. What do I choose among these alternatives or are there any other better alternatives so that it would be feasible to complete my project within 4-5 months and I could continue with that field in my masters?
Actually the system will be fed with real time video and we intend to recognize the hand postures and spatiotemporal gestures. So, its the entire sentences I'm trying to find.
On the basis of studies till now, I'm making my mind to use
1. Hu moments & eigenspace size functions to represent hand shapes
2. SVM for posture classification &
3. Threshold HMM for spatiotemporal gesture recognition.
What would u comment in these decisions?
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A professor asked me to help making a specification for a college project.
By the time the students should know the basics of programming.
The professor is a mathematician and has little experience in other programming languages, so it should really be in MATLAB.
I would like some projects ideas. The project should
last about 1 to 2 months
be done individually
have web interface would be great
doesn't necessary have to go deep in maths, but some would be great
use a database (or store data in files)
What kind of project would make the students excited?
If you have any other tips I'll appreciate.
UPDATE: The students are sophomores and have already studied vector calculus. This project is for an one year Discrete Mathematics course.
UPDATE 2: The topics covered in the course are
Formal Logic
Proofs, Recursion, and Analysis of Algorithms
Sets and Combinatorics
Relations, Functions, and Matrices
Graphs and Trees
Graph Algorithms
Boolean Algebra and Computer Logic
Modeling Arithmetic, Computation, and Languages
And it'll be based on this book Mathematical Structures for Computer Science: A Modern Approach to Discrete Mathematics by Judith L. Gersting
General Suggestions:
There are many teaching resources at The MathWorks that may give you some ideas for course projects. Some sample links:
The MATLAB Central blogs, specifically some posts by Loren that include using LEGO Mindstorms in teaching and a webinar about MATLAB for teaching (note: you will have to sign up to see the webinar)
The Curriculum Exchange: a repository of course materials
Teaching with MATLAB and Simulink: a number of other links you may find useful
Specific Suggestions:
One of my grad school projects in non-linear dynamics that I found interesting dealt with Lorenz oscillators. A Lorenz oscillator is a non-linear system of three variables that can exhibit chaotic behavior. Such a system would provide an opportunity to introduce the students to numerical computation (iterative methods for simulating systems of differential equations, stability and convergence, etc.).
The most interesting thing about this project was that we were using Lorenz oscillators to encode and decode signals. This "encrypted communication" aspect was really cool, and was based on the following journal article:
Kevin M. Cuomo and Alan V. Oppenheim,
Circuit Implementation of Synchronized Chaos with Applications
to Communications, Physical Review
Letters 71(1), 65-68 (1993)
The article addresses hardware implementations of a chaotic communication system, but the equivalent software implementation should be simple enough to derive (and much easier for the students to implement!).
Some other useful aspects of such a project:
The behavior of the system can be visualized in 2-D and 3-D plots, thus exposing the students to a number of graphing utilities in MATLAB (PLOT, PLOT3, COMET, COMET3, etc.).
Audio signals can be read from files, encrypted using the Lorenz equations, written out to a new file, and then decrypted once again. You could even have the students each encrypt a signal with their Lorenz oscillator code and give it to another student to decrypt. This would introduce them to various file operations (FREAD, FWRITE, SAVE, LOAD, etc.), and you could even introduce them to working with audio data file formats.
You can introduce the students to the use of the PUBLISH command in MATLAB, which allows you to format M-files and publish them to various output types (like HTML or Word documents). This will teach them techniques for making useful help documentation for their MATLAB code.
I have found that implementing and visualizing Dynamical systems is great
for giving an introduction to programming and to an interesting branch of
applied mathematics. Because one can see the 'life' in these systems,
our students really enjoy this practical module.
We usually start off by visualizing a 1D attractor, so that we can
overlay the evolution rule/rate of change with the current state of
the system. That way you can teach computational aspects (integrating the system) and
visualization, and the separation of both in implementation (on a simple level, refreshing
graphics at every n-th computation step, but in C++ leading to threads, unsure about MATLAB capabilities here).
Next we add noise, and then add a sigmoidal nonlinearity to the linear attractor. We combine this extension with an introduction to version control (we use a sandbox SVN repository for this): The
students first have to create branches, modify the evolution rule and then merge
it back into HEAD.
When going 2D you can simply start with a rotation and modify it to become a Hopf oscillator, and visualize either by morphing a grid over time or by going 3D when starting with a distinct point. You can also visualize the bifurcation diagram in 3D. So you again combine generic MATLAB skills like 3D plotting with the maths.
To link in other topics, browse around in wikipedia: you can bring in hunter/predator models, chaotic systems, physical systems, etc.etc.
We usually do not teach object-oriented-programming from within MATLAB, although it is possible and you can easily make up your own use cases in the dynamical systems setting.
When introducing inheritance, we will already have moved on to C++, and I'm again unaware of MATLAB's capabilities here.
Coming back to your five points:
Duration is easily adjusted, because the simple 1D attractor can be
done quickly and from then on, extensions are ample and modular.
We assign this as an individual task, but allow and encourage discussion among students.
About the web interface I'm at a loss: what exactly do you have in mind, why is it
important, what would it add to the assignment, how does it relate to learning MATLAB.
I would recommend dropping this.
Complexity: A simple attractor is easily understood, but the sky's the limit :)
Using a database really is a lot different from config files. As to the first, there
is a database toolbox for accessing databases from MATLAB. Few institutes have the license though, and apart from that: this IMHO does not belong into such a course. I suggest introducing to the concept of config files, e.g. for the location and strength of the attractor, and later for the system's respective properties.
All this said, I would at least also tell your professor (and your students!) that Python is rising up against MATLAB. We are in the progress of going Python with our tutorials, but I understand if someone wants to stick with what's familiar.
Also, we actually need the scientific content later on, so the usefulness for you will probably depend on which department your course will be related to.
A lot of things are possible.
The first example that comes in mind is to model a public transportation network (the network of your city, with underground, buses, tramways, ...). It is represented by a weighted directed graph (you can use sparse matrix to represent it, for example).
You may, for example, ask them to compute the shortest path from one station to another one (Moore-dijkistra algorithm, for example) and display it.
So, for the students, the several steps to do are:
choose an appropriate representation for the network (it could be some objects to represent the properties of the stations and the lines, and a sparse matrix for the network)
load all the data (you can provide them the data in an XML file)
be able to draw the network (since you will put the coordinates of the stations)
calculate the shortest path from one point to another and display it in a pretty way
create a fronted (with GUI)
Of course, this could be complicated by adding connection times (when you change from one line to another), asking for several options (shortest path with minimum connections, take in considerations the time you loose by waiting for a train/bus, ...)
The level of details will depend on the level of the students and the time they could spend on it (it could be very simple, or very realist)
You want to do a project with a web interface and a database, but not any serious math... and you're doing it in MATLAB? Do you understand that MATLAB is especially designed to be used for "deep math", and not for web interfaces or databases?
I think if this is an intro to a Discrete Mathematics course, you should probably do something involving Discrete Mathematics, and not waste the students' time as they learn a bunch of things in that language that they'll never actually use.
Why not do something involving audio? I did an undergraduate project in which we used MATLAB to automatically beat-match different tunes and DJ mix between them. The full program took all semester, but you could do a subset of it. wavread() and the like are built in and easy to use.
Or do some simple image processing like finding Waldo using cross-correlation.
Maybe do something involving cryptography, have them crack a simple encryption scheme and feel like hackers.
MATLAB started life as a MATrix LAB, so maybe concentrating on problems in linear algebra would be a natural fit.
Discrete math problems using matricies include:
Spanning trees and shortest paths
The marriage problem (bipartite graphs)
Matching algorithms
Maximal flow in a network
The transportation problem
See Gil Strang's "Intro to Applied Math" or Knuth's "Concrete Math" for ideas.
You might look here: http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_center/tutorials/launchpad.html
on the MathWorks website. The interactive tutorial (second link) is quite popular.
--Loren
I always thought the one I was assigned in grad school was a good choice-a magnetic lens simulator. The math isn't completely overwhelming so you can focus more on learning the language, and it's a good intro to the graphical capabilities (e.g., animating the path of an off-axis electron going through the lens).
db I/O and fancy interfaces are out of place in a discrete math course.
my matlab labs were typically algorithm implementations, with charts as output, and simple file input.
how hard is the material? image processing is really easy in matlab, can you do some discrete 2D filtering? blurs and stuff. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/filtops.htm