Mitsuru Ikeda

Railway Technical Research Institute | RTRI

Promoting reflective thinking is becoming increasingly important in helping learners develop strategies to apply new information to unpredictable situations during their daily activities. Reflective writing, based on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, could be one method for promoting reflective thinking that allows learners to consider their expe...

Simulation of Catenary/Pantograph dynamic interaction is used for understanding the dynamic behavior of overhead contact lines (OCL) and pantographs, and stability to supply electric power to a vehicle. The authors developed a new simulation tool using a three-dimensional model of OCL and a pantograph, which can calculate their full three-dimension...

It is important to understand the dynamic behavior of overhead contact lines and pantographs to achieve stable power supply. For this purpose, simulation of catenary/pantograph dynamic interaction is often performed. However, since lumped-mass model of a pantograph has been used in the conventional simulation, the three-dimensional dynamic behavior...

When domain experts try to find a business solution, ambiguous terms arise within the context of discussion in a multidisciplinary research group. Different meanings and relationships with various concepts cause ambiguous semantics. This research aims to address complex business problems in a collaborative research group. This approach presents a c...

In order to ensure reliability and stability of the electric railway systems, adequate maintenance operation for the electric power supply system is an essential matter. On the other hands, its maintenance operation involves high cost, because this system has a huge spatial scale. Furthermore, working population in Japan has been decreasing today,...

Causation is shrouded in mystery. Notwithstanding much work on causation in a number of different domains, it remains a challenge to build an adequate theory of causation for applied ontology. This paper offers a functional perspective on causation, thereby enabling domain experts to have a fairly expressive representation of various causal phenome...

Abstract To become a self-regulated learner, one needs to have a skill required to induce himself to comprehend their own cognition. In this paper, we provided a definition of Seed skill to become a self-regulated learner (S2SRL) as a basis terminology for developing our proposed framework, CREMA—Computer-Supported Meta-Reflective Learning Model vi...

The ability for metacognitive thought, or “thinking about thinking,” is recognized as an increasingly important skill for the future enrichment of social life. However, this skill is difficult to teach because it involves implicit cognitive activities that cannot be perceived by an outside observer. In this study, we propose an interpretation frame...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1155/2017/7575280.].

Creating an ontology from multidisciplinary knowledge is a challenge because it needs a number of various domain experts to collaborate in knowledge construction and verify the semantic meanings of the cross-domain concepts. Confusions and misinterpretations of concepts during knowledge creation are usually caused by having different perspectives a...

In the present study, we propose a learning support method to raise self-awareness of the inconsistency between knowledge and action in information ethics. The proposed method, which consisted of two phases, was applied to the lecture for first-year university students. In the first phase, students answered two tasks: behavior selection task to con...

Contact phenomena often lie at the heart of solutions to be found for various problems related to the railway system. Clarifying these phenomena is therefore crucial to improve the quality of railway operations. This paper describes research to gather greater insight into an array of contact phenomena such as, rolling contact of wheels and rails, i...

Railway Technical Research Institute has been upgrading the pantograph/catenary simulator. As a part of the simulator improvement, a three-dimensional simulation model of pantograph was constructed. In this paper, the method of vibration test of actual pantograph to identify parameters of the pantograph model is introduced. First, the pantograph mo...

For development of overhead contact lines system (OCS) and a pantograph, it is important to grasp dynamic interaction between the OCS and the pantograph. Therefore, pantograph/catenary simulator, in which lamped-mass pantograph models can run along a three-dimensional catenary FEM model, was developed. This paper shows the analysis method of contac...

Many studies have analyzed the effects of clinical pathways, but most have considered only single diseases. The purpose of the present study was to exploratively analyze electronic medical records related to the use of clinical pathways, seeking trends that could usefully benefit clinical activity. From the data warehouse of University of Miyazaki...

This article describes how culture-based tourism is a way to learn different cultures and gain appreciation of the inner value of heritages. However, to fully realize those values, visitors need extensive knowledge in several aspects that are scattered in domains; culture-based tourism thus does not gain much attention as other types of tourism. In...

Information extraction and knowledge discovery regarding adverse drug reaction (ADR) from large-scale clinical texts are very useful and needy processes. Two major difficulties of this task are the lack of domain experts for labeling examples and intractable processing of unstructured clinical texts. Even though most previous works have been conduc...

People may have knowledge to handle a certain situation; however, often they might not be able to perform their behaviour well when encountering the actual situation. There are knowledge-to-action gaps that make ones do not aware the existing knowledge and act improperly. This research aims to motivate learner to become aware of their thought by pr...

Effective management of all knowledge in an organization is a key criterion for innovation. Academic libraries are beginning to realize the importance of knowledge management in this regard. However, there are no quantitative studies studying knowledge management and service innovation in the context of libraries. Islam, Agarwal and Ikeda arrived a...

It is important for the companies that they need to put effort to develop the working environment where employees can grow up by themselves for adapting to the diversification of business through daily work. In this study, we regard the weekly reports for the new employee training as a learning environment in which the new employee and his mentor h...

It is quite simple for most residents to understand the knowledge of disaster prevention. However, people sometimes fail to apply such knowledge to take appropriate action, which is often referred to as knowledge-to-action gap. We advocate it is important for learners to have simulated experiences of dangerous situations as results of their intenti...

In order to derive a finite element model of contact lines installed along track with curve sections, an evaluation method of the fully three-dimensional static geometry of contact lines based on the non-linear FEM was developed. This paper shows the outline of algorism of this method, and indicates the result of trial calculation. This program can...

The development of metacognitive skills is important to train people to work in the knowledge society, which requires the creation of value. However, within the limited period of university education, it is not reasonable to teach metacognitive skills that come from a knowledge co-creation process requiring collaborative metacognitive skills in a s...

If learners cannot form an intention to take an appropriate action with knowledge about information ethics, it cannot be said that the learners have acquired the knowledge in essence. In the present study, the two experiments are conducted to examine if the knowledge-to-action gap can be confirmed by means of paper-and-pencil tests consisting of kn...

RTRI has been working on innovative technical solutions for various dynamic problems caused by characteristics of the railway system. Numerical simulation techniques are one of the powerful tools which can be used to promote this kind of research; therefore, RTRI started development in 2010 on a simulation tool called the "Railway Simulator" using...

Negotiation mechanism using conversational agents (chatbots) has been used in Open Learner Models (OLM) to enhance learner model accuracy and provide opportunities for learner reflection. Using chatbots that allow for natural language discussions has shown positive learning gains in students. Traditional OLMs assume a learner to be able to manage t...

To communicate one’s thinking precisely and to find proper solution in case of conflict, it is important to improve one’s thinking skills. Thinking skills are required to expose the root of conflict between one’s own thought process and that of others. To cultivate such a skill, a training tool that analyzes a person’s internal self-conversation by...

In this paper we discuss the findings related to our research on the paradigm of Negotiation-Driven Learning (NDL). Fully-negotiated OLMs have employed different negotiation mechanisms to support learner learning and reflection. In NDL research we are trying to combine and extend the best practices of previous OLMs to enhance the role of negotiatio...

Humanitarian aid in an emergency information system involves information from multidisciplinary environments. A lot of information is stored in relational databases. Semantic interoperability between existing relational databases and ontologies still remains a major practical issue. In order to avoid a combinatorial explosion of terminology alignme...

Reduction in aerodynamic noise emitted from a pantograph, especially pantograph head, is an important subject for environmental preservation and speed-up of Shinkansen trains. In the present study, synthetic jet actuators are applied to a pantograph head model with two types of vent locations, the one is the bottom ejection case, and the other is t...

In this paper, we present plans for a retooled ubiquitous computer system that works towards facilitating knowledge acquisition and knowledge dissemination between learners during the process of acculturation. Focused on the foreign population of JAIST (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology - A Japanese post graduate university in Japa...

For preventing accident occurring at the contact area between overhead catenary system and pantograph, overhead catenary system must be carefully maintained, resulting in requiring heavy maintenance cost. The present on-board monitoring system for overhead contact lines mainly keeps watch on dynamic states of contact wire. However, its static state...

It is not difficult for residents, for the most cases, to know the knowledge of disaster prevention, while it is quite difficult for them to take appropriate evacuation behavior. For example, it is easy to know why flooded underpasses should not be gone through by cars. It is just because cars would be submerged and got stuck on the way. However, p...

Railway Dynamics is the research field for finding out technical solutions for dynamic problems caused by the characteristics of the railway system. RTRI has been tackling many problems in the field of railway dynamics. To accelerate this research and development, RTRI has been developing organized simulation tools in the form of a "Railway Simulat...

Prevention of accident occurring at the contact area between overhead contact lines and pantograph requires careful maintenance of overhead contact lines, resulting in high maintenance costs. Current on-board overhead contact line monitoring systems mainly check the dynamic geometry of contact wires. However, their static geometry is also extremely...

Self-regulated learners are aware of their knowledge and skills and proactive in learning. They view learning as a controllable process and accept more responsibility for the results of this process. The research described in this article proposes, implements, and evaluates an ePortfolio-based self-regulated learning model. An ePortfolio system was...

For high-speed trains, active control of the pantograph is crucial technology to collect electrical current from the overhead contact wire. In this paper, a mathematical model of the pantograph-catenary system is developed to design a controller, and then a sliding mode controller is proposed to regulate the contact force in the presence of variati...

A vortex generator (VG) is one of the most successful devices used for suppression of flow separation. A conventional VG is a passive control device, so that it may suffer from an inherent drag penalty. As an alternative, we use a dielectric-barrier-discharge plasma actuator (PA) as a VG. Since few studies have been made on such a vortex generator-...

This paper describes a unique learning system that cultivates a positive attitude toward learning through presentation design activities. Learners are assigned two tasks: a declarative knowledge task and a presentation task that involves selecting slides from among a set of slides provided to create a presentation. The slides have been prepared so...

As the running speed of Shinkansen increases, the reduction of aerodynamic noise emitted from a pantograph head of Shinkansen becomes more important. This paper describes CFD analysis on the flow control around the pantograph head using synthetic jet actuator (SJA). In this study, spanwise and streamwise orientations of rectangular orifice are anal...

Gasen-do FE is a simulation software for pantograph/catenary dynamic interaction analysis. Gasen-do FE is based on the non-linear finite element method, and its code is implemented in Matlab. This program corresponds to 2D and 3D models of simple and compound catenaries. Steady arms and catenary suspension equipments such as droppers and hangers ar...

This paper describes the results of a voluntary benchmark initiative concerning the simulation of pantograph–catenary interaction, which was proposed and coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and participated by 10 research institutions established in 9 different countries across Europe and Asia. The aims of the benchmark are to assess the dispersio...

One of the functions of peer support services for diabetic patients is psychological changes through communications among patients. Medical professionals in the practice of this research request peer support services through a web system. The design of the psychological functions requires tailoring depending on contexts. An important thing for the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies thatlibrarians employ to ensure quality of service, the ways and barriers forservice innovation, and the likelihood of adopting knowledge management forservice innovation in libraries (KMSIL). Design/methodology/approach – In total, 17 academic librarians filled out a qualitative...

PROBLEM is a key concept used in sharing intentions of medical services among health professionals belonging to different domains. PROBLEMs represent the necessity for medical services from each domain. PROBLEMs serve as a reference point for unifying multiple domain knowledge, when health professional team designs services. However, there is confu...

To reduce aerodynamic noise generated by a pantograph panhead, a flow control method is applied to the panhead. First, a plasma actuator is applied to the panhead surface to verify that flow control can control flow separation and reduce turbulence intensity behind the panhead. Second, based on the flow control mechanism derived from the experiment...

Effective management of all knowledge produced within an organization is frequently identified as a key criteria for innovation of new products and services within the organization. Academic libraries are beginning to realize the importance of knowledge management (KM) in this regard. However, there aren't any quantitative studies studying KM and s...

While Web 2.0 tools are increasingly being adopted by academic libraries to connect with patrons, they are not actively used to facilitate knowledge management (KM). This study investigates the awareness and comfort of librarians, their perceived usefulness of KM using Web 2.0, organizational readiness, and the ways in which these affect the librar...

Humanitarian aid information, e.g., information on the occurrences of disaster situations, victims, shelters, resources, and facilities, is usually rapidly dynamic, ambiguous, and huge. A system of humanitarian aid often involves data items from multidisciplinary environments, some of which have similar meanings but appear structurally different in...

Open Learner Models mostly employ positional-based negotiation mechanisms which confine the role of negotiation as a "problem-solving" technique. Negotiation provides an excellent opportunity to learn and understand why a learner holds a certain belief and why these beliefs contradict with that of the system. This study aims at proposing a new para...

An accident of pantograph and overhead catenary system occurs not so frequently. But, once such accident occurs, long down-time of train service is unavoidable. For preventing accident between overhead catenary system and pantograph, overhead catenary system requires a lot of maintenance cost. To reduce this maintenance cost, the authors have devel...

Activity recognition has recently been playing an important role in several research domains, especially within the healthcare system. It is important for physicians to know what their patients do in daily life. Nevertheless, existing research work has failed to adequately identify human activity because of the variety of human lifestyles. To addre...

For high-speed trains, active control of the pantograph is crucial technology to collect electrical current from the overhead contact wire. In this paper, a mathematical model of the pantograph-catenary system is developed to design a controller, and then a sliding mode controller is proposed to regulate the contact force in the presence of variati...

Reducing aerodynamic noise emitted from a pantograph head is an important environmental factor to be examined in the light of increasing the running speed of Shinkansen trains. This paper discusses control of flow around the pantograph head using plasma actuators. The results of the wind tunnel tests show that plasma actuators can prevent flow sepa...

This paper proposes a feedforward controller for active suppression of contact force fluctuation between a pantograph and overhead contact line of a high-speed railway vehicle, assuming the use of a pneumatic actuator with low response speed. The proposed controller, designed to exploit the periodicity of the disturbance as a priori knowledge, cons...

In gerneal, human behavior under emergency situation is considered as irrational behavior. However, recent research studies showed that evacuees had rational decision making process even though they said they were panic at that time. Evacuees behaved rationally based on information they could access at that moment and then selected the best option...

Negotiation mechanism used in the current implementations of Open Learner Models is mostly positional based and provides minimal support for learners to understand why their beliefs contradict with that of the system. This study aims at proposing a new paradigm of learning that uses negotiation coupled with targeted responses to motivate a learner...

It is important to reduce aerodynamic noise generated by pantograph panheads on high-speed trains. The former study reported that aerodynamic noise can be reduced by using synthetic jet actuators. In this study, the authors analyzed the flow field around pantograph panhead with synthetic jet actuator which has rectangular orifice using CFD. Analysi...

The design intentions of the education for fostering the skills to solve the authentic, contextual and social problems are sometimes implicit and difficult to represent appropriately. It is caused by the variety of the factors implicated in the learning design and the complexity of the relationship among those factors. In this paper, we developed a...

Purpose: Knowledge management systems have opened new arrays in the present digital environment. Nowadays, because of innumerable features, they have become the choice of many organizations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the issues of a KM-based digital library system that will support the creation, organization, storage, dissemination a...

Research in nonmonotonic reasoning for description logics to handle incomplete knowledge on the Semantic Web has attracted much attention in recent years. Among proposed approaches, preferential description logic has a well-formed semantics while defeasible reasoning shows its efficiency in the propositional case. In this paper, we propose a method...

For recent years, it has grown importance to evaluate medical service qualities of medical staffs and/or hospitals by using quality indicators. This paper introduces a representation system QI-RS of quality indicators. By using QI-RS, one can define quality indicators that satisfy understandability and formality, where "understandability" means tha...

The prime focus of this study is to measure knowledge sharing behaviour of Information Science and Library Management (ISLM) faculties in Bangladesh. Determining factors that may influence knowledge sharing behaviour constitutes an important area of research. A survey questionnaire was developed and used to collect data on faculties’ demographic an...

Vortex generator(VG) is one of the most successful flow control devices. A conventional VG is a passive control device; it does not adapt various velocity conditions. As an alternative to the conventional VG, we propose to use a plasma actuator(PA) as a VG. Since few studies have been made on such a vortex generator-type plasma actuator(VG-PA), man...

We think that to acquire a skill for co-creating knowledge with others cooperatively, it is important to develop meta-cognitive skill, but to do so is not straightforward. In this paper, we attempt to design a thinking skill particularly meta-cognitive skill development curriculum for first-year bachelor-degree students on the basis of the results...

Indoor emergency is a challenging research domain. It has to deal with dynamic situations, unexpected consequence of incidents, many entities involved such as human and building elements. Emergency simulation cannot avoid these various and dynamic information. This research proposes a multilayer of ontology-based floor plan representation in order...

This paper describes the effect of spanwise interval synthetic jets on the reduction of aerodynamic noise radiated from a pantograph head for a high speed train. Noise measurement results indicate that the ejection of synthetic jets in parts of spanwise area of full-scale panhead model is more effective than in the whole spanwise area for the reduc...

It is important to reduce aerodynamic noise generated by pantograph pantograph on high-speed trains. The former study reported that aerodynamic noise can be reduced by using synthetic jet actuators. In this study, the authors analyzed the flow field generated by the synthetic jet actuators using CFD analysis to clarify the formation process of vort...

Activity recognition plays an important role in several researches. Nevertheless, the existing researches suffer various kinds of problems when human has a different lifestyle. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes the activity log in the context-aware infrastructure ontology in order to interlink the history user’s context and current...

Defects of a pantograph might cause widespread damage of overhead contact lines. Among these defects, there is an abnormality of the dynamic characteristic of a pantograph. This abnormality causes increase of contact loss between the pantograph and the contact lines, resulting in increase of wear of the contact strips and the contact wire. Although...

The authors have been studying on the method for reduction in contact force fluctuation between catenary and pantograph using variable stiffness devices. The normal pan springs of the pantograph are replaced by the devices utilized in this study. It is possible to improve the current collection performance by varying the stiffness of the device in...

A contact force between pantograph and contact line is one of the important criteria to evaluate contact performance. Hence, contact force measuring methods were developed. The currently-used measurement methods use built-in sensors on the panhead. However, these sensors affected the dynamic characteristics of the pantograph. In addition, the metho...

The wake behind the pan head of a pantograph is a major source of aerodynamic noise generated by the Shinkansen bullet train running at high speed. In the present study, we propose to apply a plasma actuator to reduce this aerodynamic noise through suppression of vortex shedding. First, we perform a parametric study to identify the parameter set un...