Date of Award

2011-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Industrial Engineering

Advisor(s)

Heidi A. Taboada

Abstract

The intention of this research is to develop a new algorithm that it is mainly focus in the principle of echolocation or also called biosonar. This principle is active in many animals such as: birds, shrews, dolphins and bats, these last ones are going to be a fundamental part of our study. These animals use it as radar in order to find food, obstacles or just to locate objects.

These animals use ultrasound beams with a certain degree of angle and multiple receivers; such as the two ears that are located slightly apart, so at the time of the returning echo the difference of loudness and also the difference between the arriving of one ear and the other tells them different and useful details about their prey or object in question. The main focus is going to be in the study of the bats in top of any other echolocating animal. The algorithm developed and explained in this paper uses the radar method in order to explore the search space in the looking of the optimal solution. The algorithm searches the solution space within an initial angle of 180 degrees. This is because the bat has a sight of no more than 180 degrees. After that the angle is going to be a changing parameter according to the new conditions of the problem. Also in between each solution there is a boundary that contains two solutions and is a simulation of the two ears of the animals, which are located slightly apart.

This algorithm is applied to the well-known Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP), investigating a single objective and multiple objective functions. The single objective will consider only reliability while the multiple objective function will simultaneously try to maximize reliability and minimize the cost and weight of the system.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

65 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Karla Rocio Gutierrez

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