I need to get a thesis written for my MSEE. I have been struggling with the topic for about a year now. A few months ago I decided to create a model of our Arc Furnace charging practice, and then use the model to perform optimization. So, I was basically done with that, but then decided that I wanted to do something more. I decided to try to model our Electric Arc Furnace using a neural network. My idea is that once I have the model built, I can use genetic algorithms to create control profiles that are near optimal.
The problem that I am running into is that the amount of data required to train the network is large. I have the data, but I don’t have the CPU horsepower or memory. I need some serious RAM, and a dual 3GHz Linux box, or some nice Sparc server would really help (If I were still at Lockheed …….:). What I may end up having to do is to train the network in multiple train/test sessions. More Matlab programming.
I found that java classes can be pulled into Matlab and used very easily. That is pretty cool. I have been wondering for a long time if there are any popular apps out there that were built using java. Looks like most of Matlab is java. I don’t particularly like programming in java, but I will probably use it for the genetic algorithm classes.