We study emulation-based stabilisation of nonlinear networked control systems communicating over multiple wireless channels subject to packet loss. Specifically, we establish sufficient conditions on the rate of transmission that guarantee ℒp stability-in-expectation of the overall closed-loop system. These conditions depend on the cumulative dropout probability of the network nodes for static protocols. We use the obtained stability results to study power control, where we show there are interesting trade-offs between the transmission rate, transmit power, and stability. Lastly, numerical examples are presented to illustrate our results.

We propose a unifying emulation-based design framework for the event-triggered control of nonlinear systems that is based on a hybrid small-gain perspective. We show that various existing event-triggered controllers fit the unifying perspective. Moreover, we demonstrate that the flexibility offered by our approach can be used for the development of novel event-triggered schemes and for a systematic modification and improvement of existing schemes. Finally, we illustrate via a simulation example that these novel and/or modified event-triggered controllers can lead to a reduction in the required number of transmissions, while still guaranteeing the same stability properties.

This paper studies the behaviour of observers for the slow states of a general singularly perturbed system – that is a singularly perturbed system which has boundary-layer solutions that do not necessarily converge to a slow manifold. The solutions of the boundary-layer system are allowed to exhibit persistent (e.g. oscillatory) steady-state behaviour which are averaged to obtain the dynamics of the approximate slow system. It is shown that if an observer has certain properties such as asymptotic stability of its error dynamics on average, then it is practically asymptotically stable for the original singularly perturbed system.

In this work we adapt and evaluate different solutions for automatic speech recognition (ASR) to be used as an HMI for the assistant robot. Two on-device solutions: Kaldi (DNN-HMM) and Mozilla's DeepSpeech (end-to-end), and three internet service APIs: IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure and Google Speech to Text are evaluated. The systems are adapted to the domain of robot commands and evaluated on a set of expected inputs. As the goal is to retain the ability to recognise general language, the systems are also evaluated on out of domain data.

Energy saving potentials related to steam generation and its usage in the medium size bakery are analyzed and presented. Input data needed for the investigation are gathered through detailed energy audit. Four energy savings measures are analysed in detail: 1) change of heat generator for space heating and domestic hot water preparation from steam boiler to condensing boiler, 2) reduction of heat losses from steam and condensate distribution lines, 3) heat utilization of return condensate and 4) replacement of the old, low efficiency steam boiler with high-efficient one. Implementation of these measures will result in substantial reduction of energy costs, ranging from 2.900 to 26.200 € annually. Interaction of all measures is analysed through energy efficiency improvement scenario, whose implementation will ensure significant energy cost savings, estimated at 40.793 € annually, with simple payback period shorter than 4 years. Implementation of presented measures will improve facility’s energy efficiency, represented through reduction of annual energy performance indicators by 6,14 %. Presented analysis revealed that steam generation and its usage in the industrial facilities offer a substantial potential for reduction of energy use and energy related cost.

This article introduces a computational design framework for obtaining three‐dimensional (3D) periodic elastoplastic architected materials with enhanced performance, subject to uniaxial or shear strain. A nonlinear finite element model accounting for plastic deformation is developed, where a Lagrange multiplier approach is utilized to impose periodicity constraints. The analysis assumes that the material obeys a von Mises plasticity model with linear isotropic hardening. The finite element model is combined with a corresponding path‐dependent adjoint sensitivity formulation, which is derived analytically. The optimization problem is parametrized using the solid isotropic material penalization method. Designs are optimized for either end compliance or toughness for a given prescribed displacement. Such a framework results in producing materials with enhanced performance through much better utilization of an elastoplastic material. Several 3D examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mathematical framework.

In this paper, the authors analyse the legal nature of criminal procedure in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the special emphasis on reform processes of criminal procedure legislation and adoption and acceptance of new legal solutions over the past two decades, acknowledging the aspiration for effectiveness and protection of basic human rights and freedoms. For the purpose of effective criminal procedure, it identifies the main and secondary actors in criminal proceedings whose role is crucial from the aspect of shedding light on and resolving a certain criminal matter, as well as issuing a judicial decision. To that end, the role and importance of those actors in taking procedural actions to carry out a criminal procedure task is emphasised for the purpose of understanding the legal nature, structure and course of the criminal procedure, and achieving the scope of legally prescribed rights of the suspect, that is, the defendant. In addition, special attention is paid to the specific procedural situation and status of an underage person in the criminal law as the perpetrator and injured parties in a criminal case, taking into account their age as the basis for the differentiation and protection in relation to adults.

The online platform is a platform of the future, both in the world and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “The World Without a Label” is the first counseling center of this kind in BiH, because it brings together experts from behavioral, psychological, and psychiatric problems in one place. As a special problem of sociopolitical context is victims of sexual violence, war rape crimes. A case study shows a young boy is accompanied by a parent due to behavioral problems manifested by extremely bad social interaction with peers and for spending most of his free time on his computer playing video games. The boy’s mother had previously been treated in a psychiatric clinic’s day hospital, where she shared her own trauma of rape in group psychotherapy and the painful problems she faced in her early 20s, where Republika Srpska Army soldiers systematically raped captured Bosniaks. The father is a former member of the Bosnian army, and he himself had lot of war traumas. Experience in working in the Counseling Centers like this one, as well as with all the scientific and technological achievements, we have enabled the development of procedures for solving mental health problems through online platforms and standardization of those procedures.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has witnessed continuous depopulation since 1991. Depopulation was foreseen even without the emergence of war, but not nearly to that extent or that early. Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a worse demographic position than the European Union countries that show similar demographic trends. Very low birth rates, low fertility and low natural population growth have been recorded in the time of weaker economic development, which increasingly accelerates the emigration of the educated population in particular, and permanently adversely affects the reproductive potential of the country. This paper considers a hidden mutual relationship between the demographic situation (natural change, population ageing) in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its citizens' system of values. According to the survey conducted on 614 respondents, Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizens have fewer children than they would like.

Bosnia-Herzegovina and southern-coastal/hinterland-region of Dalmatia, Republic of Croatia are a part of the same seismo-tectonic province and share a considerable and real threat of high-magnitude earthquakes. Numerous Magnitude 6 (Richter) and above earthquakes have been recorded in the past 500 years and some of them have resulted in a considerable loss of life, material and even prestige or geopolitical significance (e.g. the demise of Ragusa in the earthquake of 1667). Given the propensity of the region for destructive earthquakes, complex geomorphological framework and challenging infrastructure, still recovering in parts from the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s., the region may yield a “perfect” crisis in the aftermath of a major earthquake event. Taking into consideration unchecked development of several metropolitan areas, lack of oversight and permitting, decaying infrastructure as well as unresolved political ambiguities and territorial disputes, a potential destructive earthquake may create several cascading crises, especially if it coincides with some other challenging events (e.g. winter storms). This study is taking into consideration several scenarios, their possible effects and resulting conditions upon which cascading crises may arise in the aftermath of a magnitude 7+ earthquake affecting several major urban areas in southern and central Bosnia-Herzegovina and the southern Dalmatian region of Croatia. These scenarios are intended to provide training aids and risk assessments in countering the destructive forces after the earthquake, expected to test the current crisis-management models.

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republic of Croatia share 931km of border (494km land and 425km riverine), which has been contentious for the greater part of the modern European history and represented one of the hardest and most-militarized border demarcating the frontiers of the major empires. Nowadays, it is in the process of becoming another hard-border between the Schengen-Zone EU and non-EU Western Balkans. In this study we are considering several strategic elements required for planning of effective and constructive border security, while countering variety of pseudo-hybrid warfare operations as well as tactical considerations when responding to crisis, communications and overall control of the fluid frontier. Strategic elements taken into consideration are:  a) overall contiguity of the border, b) communications network / trafficability at border-crossing and c) geospatial support in the intelligence preparation of the area. Tactical elements considered are a) real-time geospatial support during operations b) alternative communications and vetting of alternative communications c) defensive operations (e.g. drone defense, jamming defense, incursion prevention). We are considering lessons-learned from the hostilities and frozen-conflicts in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and potential future conflagrations in Trans-Dnistria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo* and the Baltics. We are using several criteria in understanding the required geospatial preparations required to undertake or defend against mass-migrations and potential hybrid threats such as unresolved territorial issues, population density information, infrastructure condition, land-use and overall completeness and availability of geospatial data. * Designation without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence

Abstract We propose a novel method for enforcing AI fairness with respect to protected or sensitive factors. This method uses a dual strategy performing training and representation alteration (TARA) for the mitigation of prominent causes of AI bias. It includes the use of representation learning alteration via adversarial independence to suppress the bias-inducing dependence of the data representation from protected factors and training set alteration via intelligent augmentation to address bias-causing data imbalance by using generative models that allow the fine control of sensitive factors related to underrepresented populations via domain adaptation and latent space manipulation. When testing our methods on image analytics, experiments demonstrate that TARA significantly or fully debiases baseline models while outperforming competing debiasing methods that have the same amount of information—for example, with (% overall accuracy, % accuracy gap) = (78.8, 0.5) versus the baseline method's score of (71.8, 10.5) for Eye-PACS, and (73.7, 11.8) versus (69.1, 21.7) for CelebA. Furthermore, recognizing certain limitations in current metrics used for assessing debiasing performance, we propose novel conjunctive debiasing metrics. Our experiments also demonstrate the ability of these novel metrics in assessing the Pareto efficiency of the proposed methods.

This paper explores the use of the meshfree computational mechanics method, the Material Point Method (MPM), to model the composition and damage of typical renal calculi, or kidney stones. Kidney stones are difficult entities to model due to their complex structure and failure behavior. Better understanding of how these stones behave when they are broken apart is a vital piece of knowledge to medical professionals whose aim is to remove these stone by breaking them within a patient’s body. While the properties of individual stones are varied, the common elements and proportions are used to generate synthetic stones that are then placed in a digital experiment to observe their failure patterns. First a more traditional engineering model of a Brazil test is used to create a tensile fracture within the center of these stones to observe the effect of stone consistency on failure behavior. Next a novel application of MPM is applied which relies on an ultrasonic wave being carried by surrounding fluid to model the ultrasonic treatment of stones commonly used by medical practitioners. This numerical modeling of Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL) reveals how these different stones failure in a more real-world situation and could be used to guide further research in this field for safer and more effective treatments.

Project management frameworks describe the preferred approaches to project quality management, as well as applicable methods and tools. Despite this, quality problems in the construction project are still widespread. This study aimed to identify crucial quality-related factors in construction project management and find relations between them, to help researchers and project managers better respond to quality issues. A systematic literature review (SLR) was used to identify previous studies on quality-related factors. Literature review and further quantitative analysis revealed that quality-related factors are related to three categories: Quality of project process, quality of organisational processes, and quality of results (products), which together create the quality of the whole construction project. The results highlight quality-related factors (14 related to the quality of processes, 6 to quality of an organisation, and 13 to quality of products) that should be taken into account in further research, as well as planning and executing construction projects. Their inclusion at the planning stage should help project managers, sponsors, and steering committees avoid or minimise quality-related problems. Moreover, this study sheds an interesting light on quality. We found that the quality of processes and quality of an organisation has precedence over the final product quality. Based on the results of the study, structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to create a null model that will be the starting point for further research in the construction enterprises.