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Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) is a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm. The algorithm is inspired by the behavior of Harris Hawks collaborating with each other to pursue prey in nature. The algorithm has the advantages of simple structure, fewer parameters, easy implementation, and excellent performance on high-dimensional problems. However, the algorithm also suffers from the inability to strike a good balance between exploration and exploitation, low convergence accuracy, and slow convergence speed in the early stage. In response to these defects, this paper will introduce three strategies to the HHO: a non-negative stochastic shrinkage exponential energy function, a Cauchy-Gaussian-based dynamic variance reduction selection strategy, and a greedy-difference-based selection strategy. The improved algorithm TSHHO is analyzed on the well-established 28 benchmark test functions, and four industrial engineering design problems. The experimental results show that the TSHHO algorithm proposed in this paper can achieve a better balance in the exploration and development stages,the strategies significantly improve the search efficiency, convergence accuracy, and robustness of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workflow scheduling poses a significant challenge due to the large scale of workflows and heterogeneity of algorithms in cloud-fog environment. Also, these nature-inspired algorithms have limitations, such as being trapped in local optima, leading to failure in achieving a global optimal solution. Since, workflow scheduling is used to enhance the optimization of task allocation and execution within cloud-fog computing. Therefore, various metaheuristic algorithms have been recommended by researchers for addressing scheduling problems. Our paper used a hybrid algorithm "particle swarm optimization-whale optimization algorithm" (PSO-WOA) to overcome the abovementioned issues. When applied individually, the PSO becomes trapped in the global optimum due to the presence of a high-dimensional search space, while the WOA, which lacks flexibility in search spacing, becomes trapped in local optima. The proposed PSO-WOA algorithm overcomes the constrained exploration of search spaces observed in the population-based WOA algorithm and efficiently mitigates the challenge of becoming trapped in local optima. The simulation was performed using the WorkflowSim toolkit, and the results were tested for several test cases on five scientific workflows with varying numbers of tasks and iterations. The results illustrate that the hybrid PSO-WOA approach produced superior outcomes when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms (ACO, PSO, WOA, GA and BH-FWA) for both total execution cost (TEC) and total execution time (TET). After analysis of results, two workflows i.e., montage and epigenomics stood apart from others in terms of time and cost. Statistical analysis was done with Wilcoxon and Friedman tests and were found to be significant. In summary, this study provides a comparative analysis of enhancing both TET and TEC in a hybrid algorithm along with its impact on performance metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research paper, we propose a two-stage hybrid approach that uses machine learning techniques and meta-heuristic algorithms. The first step, known as data preparation, involves converting string values to numeric format and subsequently normalizing the data. To increase the performance beyond the limitations of traditional methods, we use population-based meta-heuristic algorithms, namely Atom Search Optimization (ASO) and Equilibrium Optimization (EO), for feature selection, aiming to achieve global optimization. The second step, called attack detection, focuses on distinguishing normal traffic from malicious traffic. To improve the performance of this step, we use K-means clustering and firefly algorithm (FA). In addition, an elitism method is randomly integrated. The resulting approach is called ASO-EO-FA-K-means. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using two datasets, namely NSL-KDD, UNSW_NB15, and KDD_CUP99. To establish a benchmark, we compare our method with other approaches including Particles Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic, Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO), Ant colony optimization (ACO), Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO), NSGA-2, Multi-objective PSO, Multi-objective GWO, learning vector quantization (LVQ), XGBoost, particle swarm optimization based on C4.5 (PSO-C4.5) and genetic algorithm based on multilayer perceptron (GA-MLP)) we compare. The evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves the highest accuracy and the lowest error rate in three datasets NSL-KDD and UNSW_NB15 KDD-CUP99 with accuracy values of 0.998, 0.995 and 0.995, respectively. In addition, our method shows superior efficiency in terms of computation time. In general, our research shows the effectiveness of the ASO-EO-FA-K-means method in intrusion detection and provides better accuracy and efficiency compared to alternative approaches. In all three data sets, the results have shown that NSL-KDD data set with MSE 0.012, accuracy value 0.998 has obtained better results than other data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual machine placement (VMP) has a significant importance with respect to resource utilization in cloud data centers. Indeed, the optimized management of machine placement usually results in a significant reduction in energy consumption. VMP is a bin packing problem generalization, which is a well known hard combinatorial optimization problem. Besides being NP-hard, VMP is characterized by conflicting objectives and a noisy search space. Meta-heuristics, such as genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization (PSO), cuckoo search (CS), tabu search and simulated annealing (SA) have been shown to be effective for this category of problems. This paper reports a performance comparison between SA, CS and PSO meta-heuristics to solve the VMP problem. In contrast to reported research work in this area, we study the performance behavior of these three meta-heuristics with respect to, not only the quality of solutions, but also the quality of the explored solution sub-space, in addition to the convergence speed towards reported solutions and the speed with which each meta-heuristic evolves towards the best reported optimized solution. Extensive simulations on randomly generated tests with sizes varying between 200 and 1000 virtual machine demands show that PSO achieves the best performance behavior with respect to all criteria. Moreover, for all tests, PSO produces a reduction of as much as 17% of the number of physical machines, 15% of the energy cost and 21% of the resource utilization of physical machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The software requirement selection problem endeavors to ascertain the optimal set of software requirements with the dual objectives of minimizing software cost and maximizing customer satisfaction. The intricate nature of this problem stems from the interdependencies among individual software requirements, rendering it a complicated NP-hard problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-objective optimization algorithm christened the Quantum -Inspired Multi-Objective African Vulture Optimization Algorithm with Hierarchical Structures (QMO_HSAVOA), where hierarchical structure and in-quantum computation ideas are introduced to improve the performance of the algorithm in QMO_HSAVOA. To gauge the efficacy of QMO_HSAVOA in tackling the software requirement selection problem, we empirically apply it to the problem, orchestrating three distinct simulation experiments. The ensuing evaluation of QMO_HSAVOA's performance is conducted with meticulous scrutiny through the application of Friedman's statistical test to the experimental outcomes. These results decisively demonstrate that the proposed QMO_HSAVOA not only delivers exceptionally competitive outcomes but also outshines alternative algorithms. This finding provision is an innovative and highly efficient solution for addressing the software requirement selection problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel hybrid metaheuristic algorithm called the remora crayfish optimization algorithm (HRCOA) designed for solving continuous optimization problems. The crayfish optimization algorithm (COA), recently proposed as a meta-heuristic algorithm (MA), exhibits certain limitations such as imbalanced exploration and exploitation capacities, susceptibility to premature optimization, and a propensity for stagnation. To address these shortcomings, we incorporate the exploitation operators from the remora optimization algorithm (ROA) to enhance the exploitative behaviors of COA. In addition, we simplify the summer resort operator in the original COA to streamline the search operator design, thus avoiding unnecessary complexity. Furthermore, numerical experiments on 10-dimensional (D) and 20-D CEC2022 benchmark functions, 50-D and 100-D CEC2020 benchmark functions, engineering optimization problems, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) coverage optimization problems are conducted to investigate the performance of our proposed HRCOA comprehensively. We compare the proposed HRCOA against eight well-known state-of-the-art MAs, including CMAES and the original COA, as competitor algorithms. The experimental and statistical results confirm the effectiveness, competitiveness, and scalability of our proposal. Finally, we conclude that the proposed HRCOA possesses significant potential for addressing diverse optimization challenges in real-world scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the critical gap in the understanding of the effects of various configurations and feedback mechanisms on the performance of hybrid metaheuristics (HMs) in unsupervised clustering applications. Despite the widespread use of HMs due to their ability to leverage multiple optimization methods, the lack of comprehensive studies on their configuration and feedback mechanisms effects often results in sub-optimal clustering performances and premature convergence. To tackle these issues, we introduce two algorithms for implementing eight distinct HM schemes, focusing on the impacts of parallel and serial processing models along with different feedback mechanisms. Our approach involves selecting candidate metaheuristics based on a mix of evolutionary and swarm-based methods, including the k-means algorithm, to form various HM-based clustering schemes. These schemes were then rigorously evaluated across a range of datasets and feedback mechanisms, further assessing their efficiency in the deployment of smart grid base stations. Performance analysis was based on total fitness evaluations, timing capabilities, and clustering accuracy. The results revealed that parallel HMs with decoupled feedback mechanisms performed best in terms of accuracy but at the cost of slower convergence rates as compared to serial HMs. Our findings further suggest that serial HMs will be best suited for time-sensitive applications where a compromise between speed and accuracy is acceptable, while parallel HMs with decoupled feedback mechanisms are preferable for scenarios where precision is paramount. This research significantly contributes to the field by providing a detailed analysis of HM performance in varying conditions, thereby guiding the selection of appropriate HM schemes for specific clustering tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection plays a critical role in reducing high-dimensional feature space in machine learning applications without affecting the accuracy of performance. The feature selection problem has been extensively studied in the literature. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted on unsupervised text feature selection because of the absence of feature class labels and local optimization limitations. For that, this paper proposes three binary versions of the fire hawk optimizer based on different transfer functions for unsupervised text feature selection that can be used to select the most informative features for text clustering. The internal feature subset was evaluated using a mean absolute difference filter. The performance of the proposed methods is tested and compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms on several different benchmark text datasets from different sources using various evaluation metrics. The K-means clustering is applied to cluster documents based on the features selected by the methods. The results of the experiments indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method based on the S-shaped transfer function for improving the performance of document clustering compared with other feature selection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature Selection (FS), a pre-processing step used in the majority of big data processing applications, aims to eliminate irrelevant and redundant features from the data. Its purpose is to select a final set of data characteristics that best represent the data as a whole. To achieve this, it explores every potential solution in order to identify the optimal subset. Meta-heuristic algorithms have been found to be particularly effective in solving FS problems, especially for high-dimensional datasets. This work adopts a recently developed meta-heuristic called the White Shark Optimizer (WSO) due to its simplicity and low computational overhead. However, WSO faces challenges in effectively balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in complex multi-peak search problems. It tends to converge prematurely and get stuck in local optima, which can lead to poor search performance when dealing with FS problems. To overcome these issues, this paper presents three enhanced binary variants of WSO for well-known FS problems. These variants are as follows: (1) Binary Distribution-based WSO (BDWSO), where the algorithm refines the positions of white sharks by considering both the average and standard deviation of the current shark, the local best shark, and the global best shark. This strategy is designed to alleviate issues of premature convergence and stagnation during iterations , (2) Binary Sine Cosine WSO (BSCWSO), which uses sine and cosine adaptive functions for the social and cognitive components of the position update rule, and (3) Binary Hybrid Sine Cosine WSO (BHSCWSO), which employs sine and cosine acceleration factors to regulate local search and achieve convergence to the global optimal solution. Additionally, the population was initialized using the Opposition-Based Learning (OBL) mechanism, and the sine map was used to modify the inertia weight of WSO. These revised variants of WSO were established to have a better harmony between the exploration and exploitation facets. The proposed methods were extensively compared to the fundamental binary WSO and other well-known algorithms in the field. The experimental findings and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the conventional and most evaluated similar algorithms in terms of robustness and solution quality. In terms of classification accuracy, number of selected features, specificity, sensitivity, and fitness values, the proposed BHSCWSO optimizer performed better than all other proposed peer optimizers, including BSWO, BDWSO, and BSCWSO, in 11, 8, 13, 18, and 10 datasets, respectively. The proposed BHSCWSO optimizer showed performance levels of more than 90% in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity metric measures on 15, 14, and 11 of the 24 datasets deemed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new network architecture, Software Defined Network (SDN) has been widely used in recent years. The continuous increase of network scale makes centralized SDN unable to meet network requirements, so distributed SDN comes into being. The application of the optimization algorithm to solve the Controller Placement Problem (CPP) can improve the performance of distributed SDN. The meta-heuristic algorithm has been widely concerned because it is not easy to fall into the local optimal solution. Based on the advantages of meta-heuristic algorithm, this paper uses the multi-point replacement method and the two-point replacement method which have low complexity to discretization African Vultures Optimization Algorithm (AVOA) in the search and development stages respectively to solve CPP in SDN. In addition, the performance of the improved optimization algorithm is compared with other algorithms on three real SDN topologies of different scales. The research results show that compared with other six latest meta-heuristic algorithms, the improved optimization algorithm in this paper can obtain the lowest average delay between the controller and switch in the shortest time. Compared with PHCPA with the best performance, IAVOA proposed in this paper improves the convergence speed of 38.16%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continual increase in the amount of generated data by social media, IoT devices, and monitoring systems have motivated the use of Distributed Data Stream Processing (DSP) systems to harness data in a real-time manner. The scheduling of processing tasks in DSP systems across the machines in a cluster or cloud environment is an NP-Hard problem. Different scheduling schemes have been proposed to address the scheduling problem, but most fail to take into account the runtime adaptation and workload changes after initial scheduling. In this paper, we propose a new scheduler (GT-Scheduler) that leverages a heuristic and rule-based algorithm to schedule tasks at near-optimal performance alongside using a meta-heuristic algorithm to make runtime adaptation. Firstly, K-way graph partitioning divides the tasks in an application graph according to the communication patterns. It places tasks with the highest amount of communication near each other to limit an increase in the topology response time. Secondly, instead of assigning tasks to the worker nodes, a partition of tasks is assigned to the nodes by adopting a greedy strategy. If the capacity of nodes is insufficient to host a specific partition of tasks, this partition is iteratively divided by the k-partitioning algorithm to assign to a proper node. The idea of runtime adaptation lies in detecting overutilized worker nodes and reassigning their tasks by exploiting a Tabu-Search and a new scoring strategy to find the best solution in a way that no worker node is overutilized. GT-Scheduler is implemented on the standard Apache Storm and using the standard benchmarks, it is shown that GT-Scheduler outperforms the R-Storm and the Online-Scheduler by at least 35% in reducing the topology response time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential Evolution (DE) is a population-based metaheuristic search algorithm that exhibits excellent performance. However, it is sensitive to mutation strategies and control parameters.To mitigate the impact of these factors, this paper proposes refining differential evolution with mutation rate and neighborhood weight local search(MRNLDE). The algorithm guides individuals in selecting an appropriate mutation mode through the mutation rate, effectively utilizing the evolutionary information inherent in the individuals themselves, thereby enhancing the search efficiency of the algorithm. Furthermore, the neighborhood individual information is utilized to re-explore the solution space, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of individual evolutionary potential and enhancing the algorithm's diversity. The performance of MRNLDE was validated under two sets of benchmark problems at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Computing in Evolution (CEC), and the results show that MRNLDE performs well overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, agricultural production and operation activities generate a lot of data. As a result, computer-aided agriculture applications have become a hot topic in the study, with various machine learning (ML) algorithms being used to classify agricultural data. This paper presents a comparative study consisting of a combination of ML algorithms with meta-heuristic algorithms for feature selection to improve the classification capability of ML algorithms by finding the features that significantly impact accuracy. We have used six different meta-heuristic algorithms for feature selection. Experiments are conducted on four different agricultural datasets with five classification models. To understand the effect of proposed models, the selected features are fed into the ML algorithms. The results prove that combining ML and meta-heuristic algorithms achieves higher classification accuracy with fewer features on agricultural datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog Computing paradigm that provisions low-latency computing services at the edge network, is a bonanza for supply chain computing resources in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In different scenarios such as smart homes/healthcare systems, multiple IoT applications are distributed simultaneously in cloud and fog nodes to provide different IoT-based services. In addition, each program requires resources and has its desired quality of service (QoS) which should be met. One of the key challenges in fog computing environment is how to efficiently allocate resources to IoT applications because inefficient resource allocation leads to burdening providers high costs and it lowers down the delivered QoS to users. Since the majority of IoT applications are time-sensitive, the low delay and near physically allocated resources improve the amount of delivered QoS. Therefore, the resource clustering algorithms with the lowest distance error rate and the lowest delay as a consequence are favorable. The aim is to reduce clustering errors and improve the overall performance of the system. This paper formulates resource allocation to IoT applications in heterogeneous 4-layered fog platforms to an optimization problem. To solve this problem, a fusion approach incorporating a genetic algorithm (GA) and the k-means clustering approach is presented. Firstly, it utilizes the k-means approach and Jaccard measurement to cluster fog nodes with a minimum clustering rate. Then, the resources of fog clusters are allocated to IoT devices with the minimum error rate by incorporating GA algorithm. This selection of processing nodes in a fog layer helps to minimize latency and allows applications to access resources simultaneously. The simulation results in extensive scenarios prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm against other successful meta-heuristic approaches in terms of the objective function and lowest error/delay rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has experienced extraordinary development across a wide range of industries by giving customers the flexibility to employ computing resources as needed. The task scheduling problem is one of several major challenges in cloud computing, and it should be scheduled effectively to minimize makespan and maximize resource utilization. Therefore, this paper put forward an improved scheduling efficiency algorithm called Enhanced Marine Predator Algorithm (EMPA). Firstly, task scheduling model with makespan and resource utilization is constructed. Secondly, each individual represents a result of task scheduling, and the purpose of algorithms is to find the optimal scheduling result, therefore the operator of WOA, nonlinear inertia weight coefficient and golden sine strategy are introduced into Marine Predator Algorithm. In the simulation experiment, EMPA is compared with Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) under different number of tasks in synthetic datasets and GoCJ datasets.The experimental results show that the EMPA algorithm has more advantages in terms of makespan, degree of imbalance, and resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, by transforming physical devices into innovative items, affects every aspect of our daily lives. It has brought a slew of evolutionary and revolutionary services that were almost impossible to imagine until recently. The numerous services and applications offered by IoT cover numerous fields, such as personal healthcare, urban life, energy management, and manufacturing. A tremendous amount of data is produced to reach valuable information and meet users' needs. In addition, since the number of services and applications is increasing rapidly, an efficient method to fulfill the growing demands in different application domains becomes challenging. To handle the mentioned problems, task scheduling mechanisms have a significant influence. Despite the importance of these methods in the IoT, an in-depth and systematic review of the current works in this area is clearly lacking. Therefore, we aim to overcome this gap by adopting an organized manner. In fact, this paper aims to specify the challenging problems in IoT task scheduling, highlight the effective works, and outline some hints for upcoming studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of big data, the number of science and technology service resources has proliferated, and the integration and clustering of science and technology documents become a challenging issue. This paper proposes a novel meta-heuristic algorithm, banyan tree growth optimization (BTGO), for resource clustering of science and technology services. The proposed algorithm is inspired by the growth process of banyan tree, which periodically uses three operators including rooting, multi-trunk, and adjustment to search the solution space globally according to the growth conditions of different stages. To evaluate the performance of BTGO, 29 CEC17 benchmark functions were first utilized to examine its effectiveness. Moreover, a clustering study on UCI datasets is then presented, which compares the suggested algorithm with seven advanced metaheuristic optimization algorithms. The results of numerical experiments and standard datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of BTGO. In clustering optimization problems, BTGO can not only finding the optimal solution efficiently, but also improving the clustering accuracy and NMI significantly. Our method was successfully applied to solve the science and technology text clustering problem and validated on the Hainan Science and Technology Service Experimental Platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image enhancement is an essential step in image analysis and processing as it helps people to recognize and understand images because their perception is greatly influenced by image quality. Incomplete beta function (IBF) is a broadly employed transformation function for image contrast enhancement (ICE). However, IBF has low parameter selection efficiency, a limited range of mutable parameters to stretch areas with high or low gray levels, and image enhancement with stretching at both ends is almost ineffectual. In this paper, a hybrid whale optimization algorithm (WOA) with the Chameleon Swarm algorithm (CSA), referred to as HWOA, is presented to adaptively determine the optimal parameters of IBF for ICE. Then, bilateral gamma correction (BGC) is utilized to produce better contrast and brightness while preserving edge detail. The proposed HWOA algorithm follows a multi-phased process of strategies. Many improvements were made to the mathematical model of WOA followed by its hybridization with CSA for further exploration and exploitation aspects. The proposed HWOA is tested over some standard images along with well-known available Kodak image dataset and assessed using several standard measures. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm can satisfactorily surpass many other algorithms that used the same image enhancement approach as well as other traditional image enhancement methods deemed here for comparison. Specifically, the findings on ten color images revealed that the performance of HWOA in terms of average peak signal-to-noise ratio, average structural similarity index, and average values of entropy results are more than 33.0, 96.6%, and 7.3, respectively, and these results are much better than all other comparative methods in the corresponding evaluation criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Industry 4.0, the focus of task scheduling is more on smart services such as robotic services under the paradigm of mobile edge computing, which are widely used to improve the efficiency of smart manufacturing. Existing scheduling research efforts on optimizing efficiency such as swarm algorithm, reinforcement learning, but with little real-time dynamic scheduling. Online learning and adaptation is a critical function when tackling real challenges in unpredictable and dynamically changing edge computing environments. Our goal is to propose algorithms that can meet the real-time dynamic task scheduling even reach the level of communication. We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based online real-time task scheduling method which has the new exploration and exploitation strategy using the improved sparrow search algorithm (ISSA). We replace the traditional strategy with a meta-heuristic algorithm, while introducing natural disturbances and modifying the population position update formula to converge to the optimal position. The algorithm has two layers. The first layer is scheduling generation layer, which is responsible for making decisions, and the second layer is scheduling policy update layer, which optimizes the strategy and finds the best set of hyperparameters. The experimental results show that the running time of the method to solve the problem can reach 0.0092 seconds, and the real-time performance reaches up to the millisecond communication level. At the same time other methods are compared, effectively reducing the running cost and meeting the requirements of production scheduling tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness that can negatively affect emotions, thoughts, social interaction, motor behavior, attention, and perception. Early diagnosis is still challenging and is based on the disease's symptoms. However, electroencephalography (EEG) signals yield incredibly detailed information about the activities and functions of the brain. In this study, a hybrid algorithm approach is proposed to improve the search performance of the marine predator algorithm (MPA) based on chaotic maps. For evaluating the performance of the proposed chaotic-based marine predator algorithm (CMPA), benchmark datasets are used. The results of the suggested variation method on the benchmarks show that the Sine Chaotic-based MPA (SCMPA) significantly outperforms the other MPA variants. The algorithm was verified using a public dataset consisting of 14 subjects. Moreover, the proposed SCMPA is essential for EEG electrode selection because it minimizes model complexity and selects the best representative features for providing optimal solutions. The extracted features for each subject were used in the decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and extra tree (ET) methods. Performance measures showed that the proposed model was successful at differentiating schizophrenia patients (SZ) from healthy controls (HC). In the end, it was demonstrated that the feature selection technique SCMPA, which is the subject of this research, performs significantly better in regard to classification using EEG signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software defect prediction is a critical challenge within software engineering aimed at enhancing software quality by proactively identifying potential defects. This approach involves selecting defect-prone modules ahead of the testing phase, thereby reducing testing time and costs. Machine learning methods provide developers with valuable models for categorising faulty software modules. However, the challenge arises from the numerous elements present in the training dataset, which frequently reduce the accuracy and precision of classification. Addressing this, selecting effective features for classification from the dataset becomes an NP-hard problem, often tackled using metaheuristic algorithms. This study introduces a novel approach, the Binary Chaos-based Olympiad Optimisation Algorithm, specifically designed to select the most impactful features from the training dataset. By selecting these influential features for classification, the precision and accuracy of software module classifiers can be notably improved. The study's primary contributions involve devising a binary variant of the chaos-based Olympiad optimisation algorithm to meticulously select effective features and construct an efficient classification model for identifying faulty software modules. Five real-world and standard datasets were utilised across both the training and testing phases of the classifier to evaluate the proposed method's effectiveness. The findings highlight that among the 21 features within the training datasets, specific metrics such as basic complexity, the sum of operators and operands, lines of code, quantity of lines containing code and comments, and the sum of operands have the most significant influence on software defect prediction. This research underscores the combined effectiveness of the proposed method and machine learning algorithms, significantly boosting accuracy (91.13%), precision (92.74%), recall (97.61%), and F1 score (94.26%) in software defect prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithms play a vital role in addressing optimization problems. Nowadays, exponential distribution optimizer (EDO) can be considered to be one of the most recent among these algorithms. Although it has achieved many promising results, it has a set of shortcomings, for example, the decelerated convergence, and provides local optima solution as it cannot escape from local regions in addition to imbalance between diversification and intensification. Therefore, in this study, an enhanced variant of EDO called mEDO was proposed to address these shortcomings by combining two efficient search mechanisms named orthogonal learning (OL) and local escaping operator (LEO). In mEDO, the LEO has been exploited to escape local optima and improve the convergence behavior of the EDO by employing random operators to maximize the search process and to effectively discover the globally optima solution. Then the OL has been combined to keep the two phases (i.e., exploration and exploitation) balanced. To validate the effectiveness and performance of the mEDO algorithm, the proposed method has been evaluated over ten functions of the IEEE CEC'2020 test suite as well as eight real-world applications (engineering design optimization problems), Furthermore we test the applicability of the proposed algorithm by tackling 21 instance of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). The experimental and statistical results of the proposed algorithm have been compared against seven other common metaheuristic algorithms (MAs), including the basic EDO. The results show the supremacy of the mEDO algorithm over the other algorithms and reveal the applicability and effectiveness of the mEDO algorithm compared to well-established metaheuristic algorithms. The experimental results and different statistical measures revealed the reliability and applicability of the mEDO method in solving the global, engineering design, and combinatorial optimization problems by achieving a reasonable solution in terms of scoring a global optima solutions and avoiding premature convergence by increasing the population's diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) are a popular and promising field of research that can be used in many different fields. The battery life and storage space of the sensors are limited, due to this it is hard to keep the network up for longer. Combining wireless energy transfer and wireless data gathering devices on a Mobile Vehicle (MV) is one solution to this challenge. The objective of this work is to reduce the number of dead sensors and packet delivery delay. We proposed the circle-covering based algorithm to determine sojourn point based on energy consumption rates and the location of sensors. An Improved Grey Wolf Optimization (IGWO) meta-heuristic algorithm partitions the network into the minimum number of regions, assigns a MV to each region, and ensures balanced sub-tour lengths among the regions. A novel weight function is proposed to determine the order of the sojourn points. To accomplish our objectives, we propose a heuristic partial charging and data gathering strategy to determine the sojourn times of the MVs at the sojourn points. The performance of our proposed PCDGS scheme is compared with IMPSS, PMCDC, MOAC and JERDC schemes. The simulation results show that our proposed PCDGS scheme outperforms the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of cloud-, edge-, and Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications that produce sensitive and personal data has rapidly increased in recent years. The IoT is a new model that integrates physical objects and the Internet and has become one of the principal technological evolutions of computing. Cloud computing is a paradigm for centralized computing that gathers resources in one place and makes them available to consumers via the Internet. Despite the vast array of resources that cloud computing offers, real-time mobile applications might not find it acceptable because it is typically located far from users. However, in applications where low latency and high dependability are required, edge computing—which disperses resources to the network edge—is becoming more and more popular. Though it has less processing power than traditional cloud computing, edge computing offers resources in a decentralized way that can react to customers' needs more quickly. There has been a sharp increase in attackers stealing data from these applications since the data is so sensitive. Thus, a powerful Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that can identify intruders is required. IDS are essential for the cybersecurity of the IoT, cloud, and edge architectures. Investigators have mostly embraced the use of deep learning algorithms as a means of protecting the IoT environment. However, these techniques have some issues with computational complexity, long processing times, and poor precision. Feature selection approaches can be utilized to overcome these problems. Optimization methods, including bio-inspired algorithms, are applied as feature selection approaches to enhance the classification accuracy of IDS systems. Based on the cited sources, it appears that no study has looked into these difficulties in depth. This research thoroughly analyzes the current literature on intrusion detection and using nature-inspired algorithms to safeguard IoT and cloud/edge settings. This article examines pertinent analyses and surveys on the aforementioned subjects, dangers, and outlooks. It also examines many frequently used algorithms in the development of IDSs used in IoT security. The findings demonstrate their efficiency in addressing IoT and cloud/edge ecosystem security issues. Moreover, it has been shown that the methods put out in the literature might improve IDS security and dependability in terms of precision and execution speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meta-heuristic algorithms, due to their high search speed and strong generalization ability, are frequently applied in programs mainly to discover the corresponding optimal strategy for any problem in view of their defined rules. After years of collision evolution, they have been continuously used to solve the complex, unordered and diverse optimization problems and improve efficiency. Aiming at the problems of low convergence accuracy and easy to fall into local optima of the traditional Harris hawks optimization algorithm, a compound improved Harris Hawks Optimization algorithm (CIHHO) is proposed. Firstly, the early circling exploration and later attack exploitation phase of the dynamic adjustment algorithm for environmental factors is introduced to regulate the energy of Harris hawks; Secondly, the concept of Versoria function is introduced to modify the random jump strength and raise the data grabbing ability of local space; Introducing the Levy flight function to adjust the factor and reduce the disturbance impact of Levy flight is beneficial for getting rid of the local space after entering the exploitation phase, and introducing random white noise to reduce step size and improve algorithm accuracy. Taking CEC 2017 test function suite set as the core, the performance of CIHHO algorithm is analyzed. Firstly, the performance of CIHHO algorithm is compared with HHO, HHO_JOS, LHHO, LMHHO and NCHHO. Secondly, the performance of unimodal function, multimodal function, mixed function and compound function is compared with other 7 improved algorithms. Finally, ablation experiments are carried out. The convergence value of the iterative curve obtained is more quantitative than the improved algorithm, The generality of the improved CIHHO algorithm in solving multiple optimization problems with different dimensions is verified. Further applying the CIHHO algorithm to three different engineering experiments, the minimum cost calculation results directly demonstrate that the CIHHO algorithm obtained has certain advantages in dealing with search space problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honey Badger algorithm (HBA) is an intelligent adaptive meta-heuristic optimization algorithm with few parameters, fast convergence and good convergence accuracy for single-objective problems. However, many real-world optimization problems involve multiple conflicting objectives that need to be optimized simultaneously. A new multi-objective Honey Badger algorithm is proposed to solve the combined economic and environmental power scheduling problem. The proposed MOHBA combines the HBA with the Pareto dominance principle to produce a non-dominated solution. It uses an external elite storage mechanism with congested distance ordering to maintain the diversity of the distribution during the evolution of the Pareto optimal solutions. Furthermore, a fuzzy decision strategy is used to select the best compromise solution from the obtained Pareto bound. Then, to validate the performance of the proposed MOHBA, 20 different benchmark test functions are used to test it against other multi-objective optimization techniques. Moreover, the method is implemented on the multi-objective CEEPD problem for the IEEE 30-bus 6 generator and IEEE 118-bus 14 generator systems. Various objective function s in a multi-objective optimization space is confirmed by comparative studies with minimization schemes and fuzzy decision strategies are utilized to achieve the best scheduling solution for energy and emissions savings. The predominance of the algorithm and its potentiality to handle CEEPD problem several other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various popular multiplayer battle royale games share a lot of common elements. Drawing from our observations, we summarized these shared characteristics and subsequently proposed a novel heuristic algorithm named multiplayer battle game-inspired optimizer (MBGO). The proposed MBGO streamlines mainstream multiplayer battle royale games into two discrete phases: movement and battle. Specifically, the movement phase incorporates the principles of commonly encountered "safe zones" to incentivize participants to relocate to areas with a higher survival potential. The battle phase simulates a range of strategies players adopt in various situations to enhance the diversity of the population. To evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed MBGO, we executed it alongside ten other algorithms, including three classics and five latest ones, across multiple diverse dimensions within the CEC2017 and CEC2020 benchmark functions. In addition, we employed several industrial design problems to evaluate the scalability and practicality of the proposed MBGO. The statistical analysis results reveal that the novel MBGO demonstrates significant competitiveness, excelling in convergence speed and achieving high levels of convergence accuracy across both benchmark functions and real-world problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Harris hawk Optimization (HHO) has the advantage of employing various local search strategies to adapt to different situations during the exploitation phase. Hence, HHO can search deeper into discovered prospective regions. The reason of poor robustness is that HHO exhibits high randomness in the exploration phase. In the scene of optimizing high-dimensional or multimodal Tasks, the increased dimensionality and parameter correlation lead to the problem of local optimal regions, which affects the accuracy and convergence of the solution. To address these issues, we propose Dynamic Random Mutation Hybrid Harris hawk Optimization (DRM-HHHO). In the hybrid algorithm, the Kepler Optimization Algorithm (KOA) was enhanced (called EKOA) to replace the exploration phase of HHO to solve the problem of excessive diffusion. At the end of each iteration, the leader's position is perturbed by the Dynamic Random Mutation (DRM) algorithm. The mutation probability is adjusted based on the dimension to suit problems of different scales. We conduct ablation experiment to test the effectiveness of the two improved mechanisms. Testing our method on the CEC2017 and CEC2019 benchmark functions, we find that the significance of mutation probability differences decreases with increasing dimensionality. Compared to other Metaheuristic Algorithms (MAs), such as WOA, TSA, and so on, DRM-HHHO shows superior overall performance, especially in solving high-dimensional problems. Furthermore, we successfully apply DRM-HHHO to optimize the Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (KELM) critical parameters. DRM-HHHO-KELM outperforms four traditional machine learning methods and five MAs-KELM strategies on the Australian Credit and Pima Indian Diabetes datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the demand for optimization techniques has grown due to rising complexity in real-world problems. Hence, this work introduces the Hyperbolic Sine Optimizer (HSO), an innovative metaheuristic specifically designed for scientific optimization. Unlike conventional approaches, HSO takes a unique approach by engaging individual members of the population, ensuring a comprehensive exploration of solution spaces. Employing distinctive exploration and exploitation phases, coupled with hyperbolic sinh function convergence, the optimizer enhances speed, simplify parameter adjustment, alleviates slow convergence, and demonstrates efficiency in high-dimensional optimization. This approach is designed to tackle optimization challenges and enhance adaptability in unpredictable real-world scenarios. The evaluation of HSO's performance unfolds through four distinct testing phases. Initially, a set of 65 widely recognized benchmark functions is employed. These functions cover both unimodal and multi-modal varieties across dimensions of 30, 100, 500, and 1000, including fixed-dimensional functions, to comprehensively assess the exploration, exploitation, local optima avoidance, and convergence capabilities of the proposed algorithm. The results of the HSO algorithm are then compared to those of 15 state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms and 8 recently published algorithms. Secondly, HSO's performance is assessed in comparison with the benchmark suite from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). This suite includes 15 benchmark functions for CEC-2015 and an additional 30 benchmark functions for CEC-2017. During the third phase, HSO tackles seven real-world classical engineering design problems by addressing both the constrained and unconstrained optimization challenges of IEEE CEC-2020. Finally, HSO undertakes training for a multilayer perceptron, utilizing four distinct datasets. To qualitatively assess HSO's performance, two statistical analyses—the Friedman and T tests—are employed. The findings of HSO showcase its adaptability and effectiveness as a high-performing optimizer in engineering optimization challenges. Note that the source code of the HSO algorithm are publicly accessible via https://github.com/Shivankur07/Hyperbolic-Sine-Optimizer.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sleep Apnea (SA) is a breathing disorder that many people experience during sleep. Polysomnography is the best way to diagnose SA, but it requires significant time, cost, and effort. A practical and efficient method of diagnosing SA is using a wearable sensor to record Electrocardiography (ECG) signals. Machine learning algorithms can be used to classify SA by extracting features from ECG signals. Recently, deep learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have been used to identify features from ECG data automatically. However, the large number of hyperparameters in CNN makes it challenging to perform this task manually. Metaheuristic algorithms such as Honey Badger Algorithm (HBA) have been successfully applied to tune CNN hyperparameters, but it still has issues with premature convergence. To address these issues, the Bare-Bones Honey Badger Algorithm (BBHBA) is proposed as an improved version of HBA. It improves the exploitation potential of solutions, reduces diversity spillover, and maintains solution diversity. The method generates new candidate solutions using Gaussian search equations and an inverse hyperbolic cosine control mechanism. The greedy selection strategy is used to improve the searcher's capabilities effectively. To validate the proposed deep learning model, the PhysioNet Apnea-ECG database is used. The model achieves an accuracy of 90.92%, a sensitivity of 91.24%, a specificity of 90.36%, and an F1 score of 92.76% on the validation dataset. Overall, the proposed method provides a practical and efficient way to diagnose SA using wearable sensors and deep learning techniques. The BBHBA algorithm improves the performance of CNN by effectively tuning hyperparameters, providing more accurate results in SA diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anomaly detection (AD) in the industrial internet of things (IIoT) platform is said to be the major module of security the consistency, safety, and efficacy of industrial procedures. In IIoT, several sensors and devices always gather massive data counts from tools, infrastructure, and equipment. Ensuring the safety of IIoT AD systems is vital for protecting against cyber-attacks. AD and Intrusion detection are required to work in tandem to maintain industrial procedures. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches generally employed for AD in IIoT. These methods allow automated AD and pattern detection. With this motivation, this study develops an enhanced pelican optimization model with an ensemble voting-based anomaly detection (EPOA-EVAD) approach. Primarily, the SMOTE approach is used for class imbalance data handling. The presented EPOA-EVAD technique integrates the EPOA-based feature selection and ensemble voting classifier to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of AD in IIoT environments. In addition, the group teaching optimization algorithm with SMOTE approach is used for the purpose of class imbalance data handling. EPOA optimally chooses the related features from the complex and high-dimensional IIoT data. For AD, the EPOA-EVAD technique involves an ensemble learning process comprising gated recurrent unit (GRU), bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), and stacked autoencoder (SAE). Lastly, the seagull optimization (SGO) algorithm fine-tunes the parameters compared with the DL approaches. The simulation values exhibited that the proposed system outperforms standard approaches, offering robust and adaptive AD capabilities in dynamic IIoT settings. The proposed EPOA-EVAD technique contributes to the advancement of AD techniques crucial for maintaining the integrity and efficiency of industrial processes in the era of IIoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, global use of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has increased. The rising use of OSN makes protecting users' privacy from OSN attacks difficult. Finally, it affects the basic commitment to protect OSN users from such invasions. The lack of a distributed, dynamic, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based privacy-preserving strategy for performance trade-offs is a research challenge. We propose the Distributed Privacy Preservation (DPP) for OSN using Artificial Intelligence (DPP-OSN-AI) to reduce Information Loss (IL) and improve privacy preservation from different OSN threats. DPP-OSN-AI uses AI to design privacy notions in distributed OSNs. DPP-OSN-AI consists of AI-based clustering, l-diversity, and t-closeness phases to achieve the DPP for OSN. The AI-based clustering is proposed for dynamic and optimal clustering of OSN users to ensure personalized k-anonymization to protect from AI-based threats. First, the optimal number of clusters is discovered dynamically with simple computations, and then the Whale Optimization Algorithm is designed to optimally place the OSN users across the clusters such that it helps to protect them from AI-based threats. Because k-anonymized OSN clusters are insufficient to handle all privacy concerns in a distributed OSN environment, we systematically applied the l-diversity privacy idea followed by the t-closeness to it, resulting in higher DPP and lower IL. The DPP-OSN-AI model is assessed for IL Efficiency (ILE), Degree of Anonymization (DoA,) and computational complexity using publically accessible OSN datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art, DPP-OSN-AI model DoA is 15.57% higher, ILE is 17.85% higher, and computational complexity is 3.61% lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization techniques, particularly meta-heuristic algorithms, are highly effective in optimizing and enhancing efficiency across diverse models and systems, renowned for their ability to attain optimal or near-optimal solutions within a reasonable timeframe. In this work, the Puma Optimizer (PO) is proposed as a new optimization algorithm inspired from the intelligence and life of Pumas in. In this algorithm, unique and powerful mechanisms have been proposed in each phase of exploration and exploitation, which has increased the algorithm's performance against all kinds of optimization problems. In addition, a new type of intelligent mechanism, which is a type of hyper-heuristic for phase change, is presented. Using this mechanism, the PO algorithm can perform a phase change operation during the optimization operation and balance both phases. Each phase is automatically adjusted to the nature of the problem. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, 23 standard functions and CEC2019 functions were used and compared with different types of optimization algorithms. Moreover, using the statistical test T-test and the execution time to solve the problem have been discussed. Finally, it has been tested using four machine learning and data mining problems, and the results obtained from all the analysis signifies the excellent performance of this algorithm against all kinds of problems compared to other optimizers. This algorithm has performed better than the compared algorithms in 27 benchmarks out of 33 benchmarks and has obtained better results in solving the clustering problem in 7 data sets out of 10 data sets. Furthermore, the results obtained in the problems of community detection and feature selection and MLP were superior. The source codes of the PO algorithm are publicly available at https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/157231-puma-optimizer-po. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has facilitated different human-related activities and, therefore, has extended to a wide range of applications. However, these networks have the limited resources that must be utilized in an efficient manner. Hence, various studies have introduced several methods and algorithms for better managing these resources. Although these approaches produce acceptable solutions, their performance still needs improvement because of an increasing number of IoT devices and application services. To address such a limitation, the present study proposed a novel IoT environments-specific bandwidth allocation method, which dynamically distributes the wireless bandwidth among the devices according to their heterogeneous nature and the existence of various traffic services. To this end, the Trader metaheuristic algorithm was developed for the discrete problems and formulated as a multi-objective algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it was applied to the six gold standard datasets generated based on the Poisson distribution. The outcomes indicated that the proposed approach surpasses the other introduced state-of-the-art methods in terms of the service success rate by 6.32%, network throughput by 5.79%, and resource efficiency by 3.13%. The results also showed that based on the different statistical criteria, the proposed discrete metaheuristic algorithm yields better outcomes compared to the other efficient algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for cloud-based computation is increasing exponentially in the age of information technology virtualization, which is increasing data centre energy consumption and service level agreement (SLA) violations. This contributes to global warming and excessive load on existing infrastructure. As a result, it is critical to improve the resource utilisation of cloud data centres (CDCs). Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is the most effective method for optimising resource utilisation in CDCs. In this context, this research proposes the global optimal search-based meta-heuristic algorithm black widow adaptive VM placement (BWAVP) approach-based VM consolidation that combines energy conservation, resource utilisation and required quality of services with accurate VM-PM mapping. The investigation of the BWAVP approach shows that it reduces energy consumption by 18% on average when compared to other VM placement approaches, and reduces SLA violations, and VM migrations by more than 80%. Further, The research proposed a localized adaptive over and underutilisation host detection technique that further reduces energy consumption by 10% while maintaining the quality of services (QoSs) at the same level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, cloud computing is widely used in various fields and is booming day by day with different services offered to users according to their needs and contracts. However, this has brought many challenges and constraints that organizations must to be aware of and address to fully harness its power. In practice, the most important issue that has gained significant influence in improving system performances is task scheduling. Unfortunately, it is commonly known that this problem is NP-hard and the use of both heuristics and metaheuristics is required to obtain near optimal solutions but in a reasonable amount of computation time. Despite the fact that several studies have been published in the literature, there are still interesting and relevant questions to be addressed. For instance, when it comes to the stagnation phenomenon of local solutions and the premature convergence of the search process, it is crucial to execute the exploration and exploitation stages carefully as improperly performed stages may result in inefficient task mapping solutions. Consequently, to overcome the limitations of existing techniques in terms of local optimality trap and immature convergence, a novel hybrid optimization algorithm is proposed to deal with multi-objective task scheduling in heterogeneous IaaS cloud environments. It is based on the combination of the pollination behavior of flowers with the search exploration capability of the grey wolf optimizer strategy. In addition, it makes use of the evolutionary algorithms crossover operators to strike a good balance between exploring new solutions and exploiting the already discovered ones. Based on the CloudSim framework, different test-bed scenarios and both synthetic and standard workload traces were considered to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm by evaluating its objective function in terms of four optimization criteria, namely time makespan, resource utilization, degree of imbalance and throughput. Our proposal was compared to the well-known optimization-based scheduling techniques in the literature, like TSMGWO, GGWO, LPGWO and FPA approach. The obtained results corroborate the merits of the new designed hybrid algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cooperative coevolution framework was introduced to address the shortcomings of metaheuristic algorithms in solving continuous large-scale global optimization problems. By dividing the problem into subcomponents which can be optimized separately, the framework can improve on both the solution's quality as well as the computational speed by exposing a degree of parallelism. Distributed computing platforms, such as Apache Spark, have long been used to improve the speed of different algorithms in solving computational problems. This work proposes a distributed implementation of the cooperative coevolution framework for solving large-scale global optimization problems on the Apache Spark distributed computing platform. By using a formerly outlined distributed variant of the cooperative coevolution framework, features of the Spark platform are utilized to enhance the computational speed of the algorithm while maintaining comparable search quality to other works in the literature. To test for the proposed implementation's improvement in computational speed, the CEC 2010 large-scale global optimization benchmark functions are used due to the diversity they offer in terms of complexity, separability and modality. Results of the proposed distributed implementation suggest that a speedup of up to ×3.36 is possible on large-scale global optimization benchmarks using the Apache Spark platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart agriculture is a popular domain due to its intensified growth in recent times. This domain aggregates the advantages of several computing technologies, where the IoT is the most popular and beneficial. In this work, a novel and effective deep learning-based framework is developed to detect intrusions in smart farming systems. The architecture is three-tier, with the first tier being the sensor layer, which involves the placement of sensors in agricultural areas. The second tier is the Fog Computing Layer (FCL), which consists of Fog nodes, and the proposed IDS is implemented in each Fog node. The gathered information is transferred to this fog layer for further data analysis. The third tier is the cloud computing layer, which provides data storage and end-to-end services. The proposed model includes a fused CNN model with the bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) model to detect and classify intruders. An attention mechanism is included within the BiGRU model to find the key features responsible for identifying the DDoS attack. In addition, the accuracy of the classification model is improved by using a nature-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the Wild Horse Optimization (WHO) algorithm. The last layer is the cloud layer, which collects data from fog nodes and offers storage services. The proposed system will be implemented in the Python platform, using ToN-IoT and APA-DDoS attack datasets for assessment. The proposed system outperforms the existing methods in accuracy (99.35%), detection rate (98.99%), precision (99.9%) and F-Score (99.08%) for the APA DDoS attack dataset and the achieved accuracy of the ToN-IoT dataset (99.71%), detection rate (99.02%), precision (99.89%) and F-score (99.05%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is crucial for enabling dynamic spectrum management. CR allows opportunistic spectrum sharing with licensed primary radio (PR) users by allowing the so-called secondary users to dynamically access the under-utilized parts of the frequency bands that are allocated/licensed to the PR networks (PRNs). The CR system pays a utilization-dependent price to PRNs for utilizing the unused spectrum. An essential challenge in this domain is how to characterize the economic implications of spectrum sharing between the CR system and PRNs. Specifically, we consider a CR system with two competing CR service providers. This market model is known as the "duopoly model," a market structure premise that consists of two companies providing the same type of service. For such a model, we investigate the problem of maximizing the overall achieved profit in the CR system. Specifically, we mathematically formulate the profit-maximization spectrum assignment problem for the two CR providers subject to spectrum sharing, power distribution, spectrum pricing, and quality of service constraints. We demonstrate that this optimization problem is an NP-hard binary nonlinear programming problem. Therefore, we adopt a meta-heuristic optimization method based on Antlion Optimization to solve the problem suboptimally. Simulation results revealed that our proposed profit-aware optimization significantly outperforms traditional CR-based spectrum access mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy consumption forecasting is a hot field of research; despite the number of developed models, projecting electric consumption in residential buildings remains problematic owing to the significant unpredictability of occupant energy use behavior. Discovering the electricity consumption knowledge from the multi-dimensional data streams (MDDS) of electricity logs is a challenging research problem. We propose a novel electricity knowledge discovery model proposed from the MDDS using clustering and machine learning. Context-aware clustering with whale optimization algorithm (CAC-WOA) is proposed to discover the predictive features from the electricity MDDS and perform the predictions using WOA. The CAC-WOA consists of two phases context-aware group formation and a WOA-based machine learning predictive model. In the CAC algorithm, group formation using electricity contextual information to estimate the robust predictive features are proposed. Using such predictive features, the predictive model using the WOA-based artificial neural network (ANN) is built. The modified ANN technique using the WOA algorithm is used to reduce the error rates and improve the prediction accuracy. The experimental outcomes using publicly available electricity consumption datasets prove the efficiency of the CAC-WOA model. Overall prediction accuracy is improved by 3.27% and prediction time is reduced by 11.31% using CAC-WOA compared state-of-the-art solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefiting from cloud computing's elasticity, scalability, and pay-per-use model, more and more scientific applications are deployed in or migrated to the cloud. Workflow scheduling still faces many challenges due to the growing scales of workflows and the diversified user QoS requirements. In this work, we propose a Mutation-driven and population Grouping Poor and Rich Optimization algorithm (MG-PRO) for scheduling workflows in the cloud to minimize makespan while satisfying the budget constraints. Specifically, we first adopt the middle-class sub-population into the original Poor and Rich Optimization algorithm (PRO), and develop the update strategies for rich and middle-class sub-populations to increase the randomness and search diversity. Secondly, the update mechanism for rich individuals is enriched, and the middle-class sub-population is guided by elite rich individuals, which enhances the information exchange and sharing among sub-populations. Finally, an evolution-aware mutation strategy is designed, where the mutation probability is adjusted adaptively as the dynamic monitoring of the population update process, and the two-point and triangular crossover-based mutations are used alternately to intervene the evolution trajectory according to the degree of objective optimization, resulting in a better balance between exploration and exploration. Extensive experiments are conducted on well-known scientific workflows with different types and scales through WorkflowSim. The experimental results show that, in most cases, MG-PRO outperforms existing algorithms in terms of constraint satisfiability, solution quality and stability. It can generate near-optimal solutions with the different budget constraints satisfied in a relatively short time, for example, the makespan resulting from MG-PRO is at most 59.95% shorter than other meta-heuristic algorithms, and at least 7.33% shorter than all its peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Quality of Service (QoS) and cost reduction are the main achievement of using resource rich cloud computing in IoT environments, the centralized architecture of cloud computing paradigms and long distance between IoT applications and resources causes to some inefficacy especially in real time applications. Hence, fog computing was joined into cloud computing as a new paradigm to overcome these limitations. Fog computing can provide required resources for IoT devices at the edge of network without involving the cloud. This causes processing, analysis, and storage be closer to the clients and data creation locations, thus efficiency can be improved. Each real time IoT application includes a set of services with different QoS requirements. The resources required for these services can be provided by deploying on fog nodes. This study addresses the IoT Service Placement Problem (SPP) as an autonomous planning model in fog computing. The Imperialist Competitive Algorithm as a metaheuristic approach to solving this problem was developed. Resource distribution is leveraged during allocation process considering fog nodes with sufficient resources because they can host multiple IoT services. The proposed algorithm prioritizes IoT services to reduce delay and solves SPP as a multi-objective problem. Service cost, energy consumption, resource utilization, delay cost and throughput are the specified objectives. In addition, conceptual framework is considered for expressing the proposed autonomous planning model and describing the interactions between the components of the cloud-fog-IoT ecosystem. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by simulation on a synthetic fog environment compared to its counterparts. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm can effectively improve service placement performance 9–17 percent against state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In software engineering, the planning and budgeting stages of a software project are of great importance to all stakeholders, including project managers as well as clients. The estimated costs and scheduling time needed to develop any software project before and/or during startup form the basis of a project's success. The main objective of soft- ware estimation techniques is to determine the actual effort and/or time required for project development. The use of machine learning methods to address the estimation problem has, in general, proven remarkably successful for many engineering problems. In this study, a fully connected neural network (FCNN) model and a metaheuristic, gray wolf optimizer (GWO), called GWO-FC, is proposed to tackle the software development effort estimation (SEE) problem. The GWO is integrated with FCNN to optimize the FCNN parameters in order to enhance the accuracy of the obtained results by improving the FCNN's ability to explore the parameter search field and avoid falling into local optima. The proposed technique was evaluated utilizing various benchmark SEE datasets. Furthermore, various recent algorithms from the literature were employed to verify the GWO-FC performance. In terms of accuracy, comparative outcomes reveal that the GWO-FC performs better than other methods in most datasets and evaluation criteria. Experimental outcomes reveal the strong potential of the GWO-FC method to achieve reliable estimation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]