The operational environment of today’s smart grids is becoming more complicated than ever before. A number of factors, including renewable penetration, marketization, cyber security, and hazards of nature, bring challenges and even threats to control centers. New techniques are anticipated to help dispatchers become aware of the accurate situations as they manipulate and navigate the situations as quickly as possible. To address the issues, we first introduce the background for this topic as well as the emerging technical demands of situational awareness in the dispatcher’s environment. The general concepts and technical requirements of situational awareness are then summarized, aimed at offering an overview for readers to understand the state-of-the-art progress in this area. In addition, we discuss the importance of integrating the architecture of support tools in accordance with the dispatcher’s thought process, which in fact guides correct and swift reactions in real-time operations. Finally, the prospects for situational awareness architecture are investigated with the goal of presenting situational awareness modules in an advanced and visualized manner.

Moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as one of the game-changing themes to alter the asymmetric situation between attacks and defenses in cyber-security. Numerous related works involving several facets of MTD have been published. However, comprehensive analyses and research on MTD are still absent. In this paper, we present a survey on MTD technologies to scientifically and systematically introduce, categorize, and summarize the existing research works in this field. First, a new security model is introduced to describe the changes in the traditional defense paradigm and security model caused by the introduction of MTD. A function-and-movement model is provided to give a panoramic overview on different perspectives for understanding the existing MTD research works. Then a systematic interpretation of published literature is presented to describe the state of the art of the three main areas in the MTD field, namely, MTD theory, MTD strategy, and MTD evaluation. Specifically, in the area of MTD strategy, the common characteristics shared by the MTD strategies to improve system security and effectiveness are identified and extrapolated. Thereafter, the methods to implement these characteristics are concluded. Moreover, the MTD strategies are classified into three types according to their specific goals, and the necessary and sufficient conditions of each type to create effective MTD strategies are then summarized, which are typically one or more of the aforementioned characteristics. Finally, we provide a number of observations for the future direction in this field, which can be helpful for subsequent researchers.

The mismatch between compute performance and I/O performance has long been a stumbling block as supercomputers evolve from petaflops to exaflops. Currently, many parallel applications are I/O intensive, and their overall running times are typically limited by I/O performance. To quantify the I/O performance bottleneck and highlight the significance of achieving scalable performance in peta/exascale supercomputing, in this paper, we introduce for the first time a formal definition of the ‘storage wall’ from the perspective of parallel application scalability. We quantify the effects of the storage bottleneck by providing a storage-bounded speedup, defining the storage wall quantitatively, presenting existence theorems for the storage wall, and classifying the system architectures depending on I/O performance variation. We analyze and extrapolate the existence of the storage wall by experiments on Tianhe-1A and case studies on Jaguar. These results provide insights on how to alleviate the storage wall bottleneck in system design and achieve hardware/software optimizations in peta/exascale supercomputing.

The special characteristics of slowly moving infrared targets, such as containing only a few pixels, shapeless edge, low signal-to-clutter ratio, and low speed, make their detection rather difficult, especially when immersed in complex backgrounds. To cope with this problem, we propose an effective infrared target detection algorithm based on temporal target detection and association strategy. First, a temporal target detection model is developed to segment the interested targets. This model contains mainly three stages, i.e., temporal filtering, temporal target fusion, and cross-product filtering. Then a graph matching model is presented to associate the targets obtained at different times. The association relies on the motion characteristics and appearance of targets, and the association operation is performed many times to form continuous trajectories which can be used to help disambiguate targets from false alarms caused by random noise or clutter. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect slowly moving infrared targets in complex backgrounds accurately and robustly, and has superior detection performance in comparison with several recent methods.

The proliferation of forums and blogs leads to challenges and opportunities for processing large amounts of information. The information shared on various topics often contains opinionated words which are qualitative in nature. These qualitative words need statistical computations to convert them into useful quantitative data. This data should be processed properly since it expresses opinions. Each of these opinion bearing words differs based on the significant meaning it conveys. To process the linguistic meaning of words into data and to enhance opinion mining analysis, we propose a novel weighting scheme, referred to as inferred word weighting (IWW). IWW is computed based on the significance of the word in the document (SWD) and the significance of the word in the expression (SWE) to enhance their performance. The proposed weighting methods give an analytic view and provide appropriate weights to the words compared to existing methods. In addition to the new weighting methods, another type of checking is done on the performance of text classification by including stop-words. Generally, stop-words are removed in text processing. When this new concept of including stop-words is applied to the proposed and existing weighting methods, two facts are observed: (1) Classification performance is enhanced; (2) The outcome difference between inclusion and exclusion of stop-words is smaller in the proposed methods, and larger in existing methods. The inferences provided by these observations are discussed. Experimental results of the benchmark data sets show the potential enhancement in terms of classification accuracy.

This research addresses the new level-direction decomposition in the area of image watermarking as the further development of investigations. The main process of realizing a watermarking framework is to generate a watermarked image with a focus on contourlet embedding representation. The approach performance is evaluated through several indices including the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity, whereby a set of attacks are carried out using a module of simulated attacks. The obtained information is analyzed through a set of images, using different color models, to enable the calculation of normal correlation. The module of the inverse of contourlet embedding representation is correspondingly employed to obtain the present watermarked image, as long as a number of original images are applied to a scrambling module, to represent the information in disorder. This allows us to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by analyzing a complicated system, where a decision making system is designed to find the best level and the corresponding direction regarding contourlet embedding representation. The results are illustrated in appropriate level-direction decomposition. The key contribution lies in using a new integration of a set of subsystems, employed based upon the novel mechanism in contourlet embedding representation, in association with the decision making system. The presented approach is efficient compared with state-of-the-art approaches, under a number of serious attacks. A number of benchmarks are obtained and considered along with the proposed framework outcomes. The results support our ideas.

We propose a new and efficient algorithm to detect, identify, and correct measurement errors and branch parameter errors of power systems. A dynamic state estimation algorithm is used based on the Kalman filter theory. The proposed algorithm also successfully detects and identifies sudden load changes in power systems. The method uses three normalized vectors to process errors at each sampling time: normalized measurement residual, normalized Lagrange multiplier, and normalized innovation vector. An IEEE 14-bus test system was used to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerical results are presented and discussed to show the accuracy of the method.

Outline-free floorplanning focuses on area and wirelength reductions, which are usually meaningless, since they can hardly satisfy modern design requirements. We concentrate on a more difficult and useful issue, fixed-outline floorplanning. This issue imposes fixed-outline constraints on the outline-free floorplanning, making the physical design more interesting and challenging. The contributions of this paper are primarily twofold. First, a modified simulated annealing (MSA) algorithm is proposed. In the beginning of the evolutionary process, a new attenuation formula is used to decrease the temperature slowly, to enhance MSA’s global searching capacity. After a period of time, the traditional attenuation formula is employed to decrease the temperature rapidly, to maintain MSA’s local searching capacity. Second, an excessive area model is designed to guide MSA to find feasible solutions readily. This can save much time for refining feasible solutions. Additionally, B*-tree representation is known as a very useful method for characterizing floorplanning. Therefore, it is employed to perform a perturbing operation for MSA. Finally, six groups of benchmark instances with different dead spaces and aspect ratios—circuits n10, n30, n50, n100, n200, and n300—are chosen to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method on fixed-outline floorplanning. Compared to several existing methods, the proposed method is more efficient in obtaining desirable objective function values associated with the chip area, wirelength, and fixed-outline constraints.

We propose a low complexity robust beamforming method for the general-rank signal model, to combat against mismatches of the desired signal array response and the received signal covariance matrix. The proposed beamformer not only considers the norm bounded uncertainties in the desired and received signal covariance matrices, but also includes an additional positive semidefinite constraint on the desired signal covariance matrix. Based on the worst-case performance optimization criterion, a computationally simple closed-form weight vector is obtained. Simulation results verify the validity and robustness of the proposed beamforming method.