G.1.2 Approximation
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This thesis addresses some of the algorithmic and numerical challenges associated with the computation of approximate border bases, a generalisation of border bases, in the context of the oil and gas industry. The concept of approximate border bases was introduced by D. Heldt, M. Kreuzer, S. Pokutta and H. Poulisse in "Approximate computation of zero-dimensional polynomial ideals" as an effective mean to derive physically relevant polynomial models from measured data. The main advantages of this approach compared to alternative techniques currently in use in the (hydrocarbon) industry are its power to derive polynomial models without additional a priori knowledge about the underlying physical system and its robustness with respect to noise in the measured input data. The so-called Approximate Vanishing Ideal (AVI) algorithm which can be used to compute approximate border bases and which was also introduced by D. Heldt et al. in the paper mentioned above served as a starting point for the research which is conducted in this thesis. A central aim of this work is to broaden the applicability of the AVI algorithm to additional areas in the oil and gas industry, like seismic imaging and the compact representation of unconventional geological structures. For this purpose several new algorithms are developed, among others the so-called Approximate Buchberger Möller (ABM) algorithm and the Extended-ABM algorithm. The numerical aspects and the runtime of the methods are analysed in detail - based on a solid foundation of the underlying mathematical and algorithmic concepts that are also provided in this thesis. It is shown that the worst case runtime of the ABM algorithm is cubic in the number of input points, which is a significant improvement over the biquadratic worst case runtime of the AVI algorithm. Furthermore, we show that the ABM algorithm allows us to exercise more direct control over the essential properties of the computed approximate border basis than the AVI algorithm. The improved runtime and the additional control turn out to be the key enablers for the new industrial applications that are proposed here. As a conclusion to the work on the computation of approximate border bases, a detailed comparison between the approach in this thesis and some other state of the art algorithms is given. Furthermore, this work also addresses one important shortcoming of approximate border bases, namely that central concepts from exact algebra such as syzygies could so far not be translated to the setting of approximate border bases. One way to mitigate this problem is to construct a "close by" exact border bases for a given approximate one. Here we present and discuss two new algorithmic approaches that allow us to compute such close by exact border bases. In the first one, we establish a link between this task, referred to as the rational recovery problem, and the problem of simultaneously quasi-diagonalising a set of complex matrices. As simultaneous quasi-diagonalisation is not a standard topic in numerical linear algebra there are hardly any off-the-shelf algorithms and implementations available that are both fast and numerically adequate for our purposes. To bridge this gap we introduce and study a new algorithm that is based on a variant of the classical Jacobi eigenvalue algorithm, which also works for non-symmetric matrices. As a second solution of the rational recovery problem, we motivate and discuss how to compute a close by exact border basis via the minimisation of a sum of squares expression, that is formed from the polynomials in the given approximate border basis. Finally, several applications of the newly developed algorithms are presented. Those include production modelling of oil and gas fields, reconstruction of the subsurface velocities for simple subsurface geometries, the compact representation of unconventional oil and gas bodies via algebraic surfaces and the stable numerical approximation of the roots of zero-dimensional polynomial ideals.
This thesis investigates the suitability of state-of-the-art protocols for large-scale and long-term environmental event monitoring using wireless sensor networks based on the application scenario of early forest fire detection. By suitable combination of energy-efficient protocol mechanisms a novel communication protocol, referred to as cross-layer message-merging protocol (XLMMP), is developed. Qualitative and quantitative protocol analyses are carried out to confirm that XLMMP is particularly suitable for this application area. The quantitative analysis is mainly based on finite-source retrial queues with multiple unreliable servers. While this queueing model is widely applicable in various research areas even beyond communication networks, this thesis is the first to determine the distribution of the response time in this model. The model evaluation is mainly carried out using Markovian analysis and the method of phases. The obtained quantitative results show that XLMMP is a feasible basis to design scalable wireless sensor networks that (1) may comprise hundreds of thousands of tiny sensor nodes with reduced node complexity, (2) are suitable to monitor an area of tens of square kilometers, (3) achieve a lifetime of several years. The deduced quantifiable relationships between key network parameters — e.g., node size, node density, size of the monitored area, aspired lifetime, and the maximum end-to-end communication delay — enable application-specific optimization of the protocol.