With the maturation of autonomous driving technology, the use of autonomous vehicles in a socially acceptable manner has become a growing demand of the public. Human-like autonomous driving is expected due to the impact of the differences between autonomous vehicles and human drivers on safety. Although human-like decision-making has become a research hotspot, a unified theory has not yet been formed, and there are significant differences in the implementation and performance of existing methods. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of human-like decision-making for autonomous vehicles. The following issues are discussed: 1) The intelligence level of most autonomous driving decision-making algorithms; 2) The driving datasets and simulation platforms for testing and verifying human-like decision-making; 3) The evaluation metrics of human-likeness; personalized driving; the application of decision-making in real traffic scenarios; and 4) The potential research direction of human-like driving. These research results are significant for creating interpretable human-like driving models and applying them in dynamic traffic scenarios. In the future, the combination of intuitive logical reasoning and hierarchical structure will be an important topic for further research. It is expected to meet the needs of human-like driving.

Rutting of asphalt pavements is a crucial design criterion in various pavement design guides. A good road transportation base can provide security for the transportation of oil and gas in road transportation. This study attempts to develop a robust artificial intelligence model to estimate different asphalt pavements’ rutting depth clips, temperature, and load axes as primary characteristics. The experiment data were obtained from 19 asphalt pavements with different crude oil sources on a 2.038 km long full-scale field accelerated pavement test track (Road Track Institute, RIOHTrack) in Tongzhou, Beijing. In addition, this paper also proposes to build complex networks with different pavement rutting depths through complex network methods and the Louvain algorithm for community detection. The most critical structural elements can be selected from different asphalt pavement rutting data, and similar structural elements can be found. An extreme learning machine algorithm with residual correction (RELM) is designed and optimized using an independent adaptive particle swarm algorithm. The experimental results of the proposed method are compared with several classical machine learning algorithms, with predictions of average root mean squared error (MSE), average mean absolute error (MAE), and average mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for 19 asphalt pavements reaching 1.742, 1.363, and 1.94% respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the RELM algorithm has an advantage over classical machine learning methods in dealing with non-linear problems in road engineering. Notably, the method ensures the adaptation of the simulated environment to different levels of abstraction through the cognitive analysis of the production environment parameters. It is a promising alternative method that facilitates the rapid assessment of pavement conditions and could be applied in the future to production processes in the oil and gas industry.

Generally, the classic iterative learning control (ILC) methods focus on finding design conditions for repetitive systems to achieve the perfect tracking of any specified trajectory, whereas they ignore a fundamental problem of ILC: whether the specified trajectory is trackable, or equivalently, whether there exist some inputs for the repetitive systems under consideration to generate the specified trajectory? The current paper contributes to dealing with this problem. Not only is a concept of trackability introduced formally for any specified trajectory in ILC, but also some related trackability criteria are established. Further, the relation between the trackability and the perfect tracking tasks for ILC is bridged, based on which a new convergence analysis approach is developed for ILC by leveraging properties of a functional Cauchy sequence (FCS). Simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the presented trackability criteria and FCS-induced convergence analysis method for ILC.

Constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs) include the optimization of objective functions and the satisfaction of constraint conditions, which challenge the solvers. To solve CMOPs, constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs) have been developed. However, most of them tend to converge into local areas due to the loss of diversity. Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) is new model of solving complex optimization problems, through the knowledge transfer between the source task and other related tasks. Inspired by EMT, this paper develops a new EMT-based CMOEA to solve CMOPs, in which the main task, a global auxiliary task, and a local auxiliary task are created and optimized by one specific population respectively. The main task focuses on finding the feasible Pareto front (PF), and global and local auxiliary tasks are used to respectively enhance global and local diversity. Moreover, the global auxiliary task is used to implement the global search by ignoring constraints, so as to help the population of the main task pass through infeasible obstacles. The local auxiliary task is used to provide local diversity around the population of the main task, so as to exploit promising regions. Through the knowledge transfer among the three tasks, the search ability of the population of the main task will be significantly improved. Compared with other state-of-the-art CMOEAs, the experimental results on three benchmark test suites demonstrate the superior or competitive performance of the proposed CMOEA.

As wafer circuit widths shrink less than 10 nm, stringent quality control is imposed on the wafer fabrication processes. Therefore, wafer residency time constraints and chamber cleaning operations are widely required in chemical vapor deposition, coating processes, etc. They increase scheduling complexity in cluster tools. In this paper, we focus on scheduling single-arm multi-cluster tools with chamber cleaning operations subject to wafer residency time constraints. When a chamber is being cleaned, it can be viewed as processing a virtual wafer. In this way, chamber cleaning operations can be performed while wafer residency time constraints for real wafers are not violated. Based on such a method, we present the necessary and sufficient conditions to analytically check whether a single-arm multi-cluster tool can be scheduled with a chamber cleaning operation and wafer residency time constraints. An algorithm is proposed to adjust the cycle time for a cleaning operation that lasts a long cleaning time. Meanwhile, algorithms for a feasible schedule are also derived. And an algorithm is presented for operating a multi-cluster tool back to a steady state after the cleaning. Illustrative examples are given to show the application and effectiveness of the proposed method.

The smart grid utilizes the demand side management technology to motivate energy users towards cutting demand during peak power consumption periods, which greatly improves the operation efficiency of the power grid. However, as the number of energy users participating in the smart grid continues to increase, the demand side management strategy of individual agent is greatly affected by the dynamic strategies of other agents. In addition, the existing demand side management methods, which need to obtain users’ power consumption information, seriously threaten the users’ privacy. To address the dynamic issue in the multi-microgrid demand side management model, a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning method based on centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm is presented to mitigate the damage of training performance caused by the instability of training experience. In order to protect users’ privacy, we design a neural network with fixed parameters as the encryptor to transform the users’ energy consumption information from low-dimensional to high-dimensional and theoretically prove that the proposed encryptor-based privacy preserving method will not affect the convergence property of the reinforcement learning algorithm. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed demand side management scheme with the real-world energy consumption data of Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively improve users’ satisfaction while reducing the bill payment compared with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods (i.e., deep Q learning (DQN), deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), QMIX and multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG)). The results also demonstrate that the proposed privacy protection scheme can effectively protect users’ privacy while ensuring the performance of the algorithm.

This article deals with the consensus problem of multi-agent systems by developing a fixed-time consensus control approach with a dynamic event-triggered rule. First, a new fixed-time stability condition is obtained where the less conservative settling time is given such that the theoretical settling time can well reflect the real consensus time. Second, a dynamic event-triggered rule is designed to decrease the use of chip and network resources where Zeno behaviors can be avoided after consensus is achieved, especially for finite/fixed-time consensus control approaches. Third, in terms of the developed dynamic event-triggered rule, a fixed-time consensus control approach by introducing a new item is proposed to coordinate the multi-agent system to reach consensus. The corresponding stability of the multi-agent system with the proposed control approach and dynamic event-triggered rule is analyzed based on Lyapunov theory and the fixed-time stability theorem. At last, the effectiveness of the dynamic event-triggered fixed-time consensus control approach is verified by simulations and experiments for the problem of magnetic map construction based on multiple mobile robots.

High-speed rail (HSR) has formed a networked operational scale in China. Any internal or external disturbance may deviate trains’ operation from the planned schedules, resulting in primary delays or even cascading delays on a network scale. Studying the delay propagation mechanism could help to improve the timetable resilience in the planning stage and realize cooperative rescheduling for dispatchers. To quickly and effectively predict the spatial-temporal range of cascading delays, this paper proposes a max-plus algebra based delay propagation model considering trains’ operation strategy and the systems’ constraints. A double-layer network based breadth-first search algorithm based on the constraint network and the timetable network is further proposed to solve the delay propagation process for different kinds of emergencies. The proposed model could deal with the delay propagation problem when emergencies occur in sections or stations and is suitable for static emergencies and dynamic emergencies. Case studies show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the computational efficiency of the large-scale HSR network. Moreover, the real operational data of China HSR is adopted to verify the proposed model, and the results show that the cascading delays can be timely and accurately inferred, and the delay propagation characteristics under three kinds of emergencies are unfolded.