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Despite the effectiveness of deep neural networks, feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs) continue to play a crucial role in many applications, especially when dealing with limited data availability. The primary challenge in FFNNs is determining the optimal weights during the training process, aiming to minimise the disparity between actual and predicted outputs. Although gradient-based techniques like backpropagation (BP) have traditionally been popular for FFNN training, they come with inherent limitations, such as sensitivity to initial weights and susceptibility to getting trapped in local optima. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel approach based on the Gaining-Sharing Knowledge-based(GSK) algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first exploration of GSK for neural network training. After obtaining the appropriate weights for the FFNN by the GSK, the weights and biases are utilised to initialise a Levenberg–Marquardt backpropagation (LMBP) algorithm, serving as a local search component. In other words, our proposed algorithm, GSK-LocS, leverages the global search capabilities of the GSK algorithm and combines them with the local search capabilities of LMBP for neural network training. This integration mitigates sensitivity to initial values and reduces the risk of being trapped in local optima. Experimental results conducted on classification and approximation problems provide compelling evidence that our proposed algorithm is highly competitive compared to other existing methods.

Abstract Parameter identification of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is crucial for the PV system modeling. However, finding optimal parameters of PV models is an intractable problem due to the highly nonlinear characteristics between currents and voltages in different environments. To address this problem, whale optimization algorithm (WOA)-based meta-heuristic algorithm has turned out to be a feasible and effective approach. As a highly promising optimization algorithm, different enhanced WOA variants have been proposed. Nevertheless, there has been no comparative study of WOA and its variants for parameter identification of PV models so far. To further investigate and analyze the performance of WOA in the studied problem, this work applied and compared WOA and ten enhanced WOA variants for identifying five PV model parameters. Different evaluation indices including solution accuracy, search robustness, and convergence curve were employed to reveal their performance variation. Based on the simulation results, a multi-model statistical analysis with the Friedman test at a confidence level 0.05 was conducted to rank all algorithms. EWOA that hybridizes the sorting-based differential mutation operator and the Lévy flight strategy ranked first and its performance was further verified. Besides, according to the simulation results, possible effective improvement directions for WOA in tackling this intractable problem are concluded to guide future work.

In the field of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, the accurate and reliable extraction of parameters from PV models is crucial for effective simulation, evaluation, and control. Although various optimization algorithms have been widely used for parameter extraction in solar PV systems, the accuracy and reliability of the parameters extracted by these methods usually fall short of the expected standards. To address these shortcomings, a novel hybrid algorithm that combines the improved marine predators algorithm (MPA) with the equilibrium optimizer (EO), named IMPAEO, is proposed. In the IMPAEO, an elite opposition-based learning strategy is introduced to expand the exploration range of the algorithm to enhance population diversity; an adaptive weight coefficient is employed to improve the updating rule of the MPA, facilitating a balance between global exploration and local exploitation; the EO operator is integrated to enhance the performance of the MPA in the local exploitation phase to improve the solution quality and convergence speed; and the linear population size reduction (LPSR) technique is introduced to dynamically reduce the population size and improve the search performance. The effectiveness of the proposed IMPAEO is validated using the CEC2017 benchmark test suite, which is also applied to extract parameters of the single diode model, the double diode model, and three different PV modules. Comparative analysis with other algorithms demonstrates that the IMPAEO exhibits significant advantages in terms of solution quality, convergence speed, and algorithm stability. Consequently, the proposed IMPAEO not only proves to be efficient and reliable in parameter extraction for solar PV models but also offers a promising alternative in this field.

Diabetic retinopathy, known as one of the most crucial neurovascular barriers to diabetes, has affected the retina, leading to a potential risk of blindness. The harm is not isolated to personal health, with negative effects felt at the economic and social level in entire communities. The consequences of vision loss secondary to diabetic retinopathy on quality of life, independent living, and employment can be significant. It is necessary to adopt a comprehensive approach for effective management of underlying diabetes, which includes early detection, timely intervention, supportive care, and management of comorbid conditions. Critical to this is a precise classification of its stages for disease analysis. A manual diagnosis, on the other hand, requires qualified individuals to recognize the subtle nuances of the condition, making it a lengthy process. This study aims to develop a computer-assisted system for analyzing retinal fundus images to identify and classify different stages of diabetic retinopathy. A dataset of eye fundus images was used by the proposed network to classify the presence and severity of blindness and its stages. The proposed model uses a non-uniform squash function in capsule neural networks. The motive behind employing a non-uniform squash function was to encourage the model to allocate greater attention and stability to intricate images throughout the training phase. The proposed model's efficiency is assessed meticulously with pre-trained CNN methods like InceptionV3, VGG16, VGG19, and Xception. The proposed capsule network model has been revamped to address the shortcomings of prior research with care. The method stands out with an impressive 99.84 % training accuracy and 98.68 % validation accuracy. Diabetic retinopathy, though rare in occurrence, poses significant challenges due to the high cost of diagnosis, rendering it inaccessible to rural and remote communities with limited access to tests and check-ups.

Cancelable biometrics (CB) has been principally proposed to solve some issues related to the security, privacy, and revocability of users’ stored templates in traditional biometric systems. Its basic idea is to design a transformation function that creates a pseudo identity starting from the original biometric template while respecting mainly two properties irreversibility and revocability. The first property seeks the protection of the user data by ensuring the impossibility of recovering the original template from the transformed one. The second property permits to issue multiple pseudo identities related to one biometric trait originated from the same user. Although great efforts have been made in the literature to ensure these two properties, most of the proposed transform functions are vulnerable to several attacks and their effectiveness is still under study. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to boost the security analysis of CB by reviewing existing attacks against cancelable biometric systems. We discuss the vulnerabilities of some protection schemes that attract multiple security issues and enable the attacker to penetrate the protection system. The robustness evaluation of such schemes against some known attacks has been outlined. Also, some taxonomies related to attack approaches are presented. Furthermore, we provide comparisons between multiple attacks on cancelable biometric systems in terms of many valuable factors, after which we build a rigorous framework to evaluate a protection scheme and mitigate these attacks. As a result, our study serves as a wake-up call for the research community focused on cancelable biometric template protection, drawing attention to the vulnerabilities in these protection systems and raising awareness in this area to mitigate serious attacks. By identifying weaknesses and assessing their impacts, we hope to stimulate further research and development to enhance the security of CB systems.

The widespread integration of software into all parts of our lives has led to the need for software of higher reliability. Ensuring reliable software usually necessitates some form of formal methods in the early stages of the development process which requires strenuous effort. Hence, researchers in the field of software reliability introduced Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) as a relatively inexpensive approach to software reliability prediction. Conventional parameter estimation methods of SRGMs were ineffective and left more to be desired. Consequently, researchers sought out swarm intelligence to combat its flaws, resulting in significant improvements. While similar surveys exist within the domain, the surveys are broader in scope and do not cover many swarm intelligence algorithms. Moreover, the broader scope has resulted in the occasional omission of information regarding the design for reliability predictions. A more comprehensive survey containing 38 studies and 18 different swarm intelligence algorithms in the domain is presented. Each design proposed by the studies was systematically analyzed where relevant information including the measures used, datasets used, SRGMs used, and the effectiveness of each proposed design, were extracted and organized into tables and taxonomies to be able to identify the current trends within the domain. Some notable findings include the distance-based approach providing a high prediction accuracy and an increasing trend in hybridized variants of swarm intelligence algorithms designs to predict software reliability. Future researchers are encouraged to include Mean Square Error (MSE) or Root MSE as the measures offer the largest sample size for comparison.

Abstract This study presents an advanced metaheuristic approach termed the Enhanced Gorilla Troops Optimizer (EGTO), which builds upon the Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) to enhance the search capabilities of the Gorilla Troops Optimizer (GTO). Like numerous other metaheuristic algorithms, the GTO encounters difficulties in preserving convergence accuracy and stability, notably when tackling intricate and adaptable optimization problems, especially when compared to more advanced optimization techniques. Addressing these challenges and aiming for improved performance, this paper proposes the EGTO, integrating high and low-velocity ratios inspired by the MPA. The EGTO technique effectively balances exploration and exploitation phases, achieving impressive results by utilizing fewer parameters and operations. Evaluation on a diverse array of benchmark functions, comprising 23 established functions and ten complex ones from the CEC2019 benchmark, highlights its performance. Comparative analysis against established optimization techniques reveals EGTO's superiority, consistently outperforming its counterparts such as tuna swarm optimization, grey wolf optimizer, gradient based optimizer, artificial rabbits optimization algorithm, pelican optimization algorithm, Runge Kutta optimization algorithm (RUN), and original GTO algorithms across various test functions. Furthermore, EGTO's efficacy extends to addressing seven challenging engineering design problems, encompassing three-bar truss design, compression spring design, pressure vessel design, cantilever beam design, welded beam design, speed reducer design, and gear train design. The results showcase EGTO's robust convergence rate, its adeptness in locating local/global optima, and its supremacy over alternative methodologies explored.

Abstract Establishing sustainable communities requires bridging the gap between academic knowledge and societal requirements; this is where entrepreneurial education comes in. The first phase involved a comprehensive review of the literature and extensive consultation with experts to identify and shortlist the components of entrepreneurship education that support sustainable communities. The second phase involved Total Interpretative Structural Modelling to explore or ascertain how the elements interacted between sustainable communities and entrepreneurial education. The factors are ranked and categorized using the Matrice d'impacts croises multiplication appliquee an un classement (MICMAC) approach. The MICMAC analysis classifies partnerships and incubators as critical drivers, identifying Student Entrepreneurship Clubs and Sustainability Research Centers as dependent elements. The study emphasizes alumni networks and curriculum designs as key motivators. The results highlight the critical role that well-designed entrepreneurial education plays in developing socially conscious entrepreneurs, strengthening communities, and generating long-term job prospects. The study provides a valuable road map for stakeholders dedicated to long-term community development agendas by informing the creation of strategic initiatives, curriculum updates, and policies incorporating entrepreneurial education.

Many companies are now moving their business to the cloud because the cloud provides user with unlimited resources and uninterrupted service. The aim of the paper is to rank services provided by a set of cloud-providers based on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. The ranking of the cloud-providers set is based on the Interval neutrosophic set theory (INS). The paper proposes INS and TOPSIS techniques to help users and experts express their evaluations and rank cloud-providers based on various criteria. INS is used to deal with the imprecise knowledge, generated by the ambiguity from the experts' evaluations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, the closeness index (CI) values of CSPs were ranked in decreasing order. A numerical example for a case study for a set 6 CSP and 10 criteria is presented. The numerical results show that SoftLayer's is the best cloud-provider with a CI value equal to 0.69. The worst cloud-provider is Microsoft Azure with a CI value equal to 0.20. A sensitivity analysis was performed to check the consistency and robustness of the model.

The feature selection problem involves selecting a subset of relevant features to enhance the performance of machine learning models, crucial for achieving model accuracy. Its complexity arises from the vast search space, necessitating the application of metaheuristic methods to efficiently identify optimal feature subsets. In this work, we employed a recently proposed metaheuristic algorithm named the Great Wall Construction Algorithm to address this challenge – a powerful optimizer with promising results. To enhance the algorithm’s performance in terms of exploration, exploitation, and avoidance of local optima, we integrated opposition-based learning and Gaussian mutation techniques. The proposed algorithm underwent a comprehensive comparative analysis against ten influential state-of-the-art methodologies, encompassing seven contemporary algorithms and three classical counterparts. The evaluation covered 22 datasets of varying sizes, ranging from 9 to 856 features, and included the utilization of six distinct evaluation metrics related to accuracy, classification error rate, number of selected features, and completion time to facilitate comprehensive comparisons. The obtained numerical results underwent rigorous scrutiny through several non-parametric statistical tests, including the Friedman test, the post hoc Dunn’s test, and the Wilcoxon signed ranks test. The resulting mean ranks and p-values unequivocally demonstrate the superior efficacy of the proposed algorithm in addressing the feature selection problem. The Matlab source code for the proposed approach is available for access via the link “https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/159728-an-opposition-based-gwca-for-thefs-problem”.

The edge devices will produce enormous quantities of data daily as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) expands in scope. Still, most IIoT data is stored in data centers, making it challenging to transfer data between domains safely. Smart logistic products have dramatically changed due to the prevalence of decentralized edge computing and blockchain in the industry sector. To address the need to exchange data between logistics networks, we proposed a novel decentralized hierarchical attribute-based encryption (HABE) scheme combining edge computing and blockchain. To begin, we offer an IoT data encryption strategy in which edge devices can send data to a nearby cloud network for data processing while maintaining privacy. In addition, we developed a blockchain-integrated data-sharing scheme that makes it possible for users to share data via the use of edge and cloud storage. In particular, an IoT device incorporates an encryption-based authentication system to verify users’ access rights at the network’s periphery in a decentralized manner. Using HABE, we provide a blockchain-integrated architecture for the IoT that protects user privacy. The suggested design utilizes the edge and cloud network paradigms and HABE to maintain privacy and works well with smart logistics applications. The authentication time of the proposed model is reduced by 1.5 times compared with the centralized model. The analyses and experimental findings show that the proposed blockchain-integrated edge computing architecture is better than the existing schemes in terms of data sharing, data privacy, and security.

In this paper, an ensemble metaheuristic algorithm (denoted as LX-BBSCA) is introduced. It combines the strengths of Laplacian biogeography-based optimization (LX-BBO) and the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) to address structural engineering design optimization problems. Our primary objective is to mitigate the risk of getting stuck in local minima and accelerate the algorithm's convergence rate. We evaluate the proposed LX-BBSCA algorithm on a set of 23 benchmark functions, including both unimodal and multimodal problems of varying complexity and dimensions. Additionally, we apply LX-BBSCA to tackle five real-world structural engineering design problems, comparing the results with those obtained using other metaheuristics in terms of objective function values and convergence behavior. To ensure the statistical validity of our findings, we employ rigorous tests such as the t-test and the Wilcoxon rank test. The experimental outcomes consistently demonstrate that the ensemble LX-BBSCA algorithm outperforms not only the basic versions of BBO, SCA and LX-BBO but also other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute to strengthening the global market by creating new jobs. Interactions among these companies may indeed be facilitated via e-commerce platforms. However, e-commerce activities seem to be a virtual face-to-face transactions, highly digital, and mutable. E-commerce based SMEs are frequently exposed to virtuous risks and competitive intensity. Blockchain is a digital database with the features of truthfulness, assurance, accountability, and intractability. It is made up of decentralized data storage, a consensus algorithm, and smart contracts. As a result, integrating e-commerce platforms and blockchain networks to help SMEs overcome their security difficulties. Conventional e-commerce platforms and storage depends on authorized intermediary networks or distributed cloud storage. Still, the failure of a single device is a danger, and third parties access, and data storage systems might be subject to data theft attacks. This paper presents a proof-of-authority (PoA) based consensus mechanism for e-commerce platforms in SMEs to address security issues in the network. This manuscript initially developed an energy-efficient PoA based consensus mechanism supported by e-commerce platforms for SMEs. We construct a comprehensive PoA consensus model based on pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and accumulated validators number (AVN) for adding a new block in the conceptual framework. Finally, we demonstrate the security performance of the proposed consensus mechanism to help SMEs solve finance and trading issues. To evaluate the energy performance of the proposed model, we did a CPU utilization analysis and compared it with existing consensus protocols.

Optimization problems are prevalent in a variety of real-world applications, including medical, engineering, chemical, and others, and must be precisely solved to enhance the performance of these applications. Unfortunately, finding near-optimal solutions to these problems is regarded as a hard challenge due to their various characteristics. In a new attempt to solve these problems, this paper presents a new variant of the artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO) called ranking-based GTO (RGTO). This variant uses two strategies known as the ranking-based update strategy and the convergence acceleration strategy to improve both the classical GTO's exploitation and exploration capabilities. The first strategy is proposed to enhance each gorilla's local and global search abilities, whereas the latter is intended to enhance GTO's global search abilities to reach better solutions as quickly as possible. First, a recent and challenging benchmark, namely CEC-2017, is utilized to assess the RGTO's explorative and exploitative capabilities. After that, RGTO is used to solve three engineering optimization problems, including parameter estimation problems for both photovoltaic (PV) models and proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), as well as some engineering design problems, to demonstrate how well it performs for real-world optimization problems. Compared to several rival optimizers, the proposed algorithm provides outstanding outcomes for the three engineering optimization benchmark problems considered.

Abstract Malaria is an acute fever sickness caused by the Plasmodium parasite and spread by infected Anopheles female mosquitoes. It causes catastrophic illness if left untreated for an extended period, and delaying exact treatment might result in the development of further complications. The most prevalent method now available for detecting malaria is the microscope. Under a microscope, blood smears are typically examined for malaria diagnosis. Despite its advantages, this method is time-consuming, subjective, and requires highly skilled personnel. Therefore, an automated malaria diagnosis system is imperative for ensuring accurate and efficient treatment. This research develops an innovative approach utilizing an urgent, inception-based capsule network to distinguish parasitized and uninfected cells from microscopic images. This diagnostic model incorporates neural networks based on Inception and Imperative Capsule networks. The inception block extracts rich characteristics from images of malaria cells using a pre-trained model, such as Inception V3, which facilitates efficient representation learning. Subsequently, the dynamic imperative capsule neural network detects malaria parasites in microscopic images by classifying them into parasitized and healthy cells, enabling the detection of malaria parasites. The experiment results demonstrate a significant improvement in malaria parasite recognition. Compared to traditional manual microscopy, the proposed system is more accurate and faster. Finally, this study demonstrates the need to provide robust and efficient diagnostic solutions by leveraging state-of-the-art technologies to combat malaria.

Abstract Differential evolution (DE) is one of the most efficient evolution algorithms (ES) for dealing with nonlinear, complicated and difficult global optimization problems. The main contribution of this paper can be summarized in three directions: Firstly, a novel crossover rate (CR) generation scheme based on the zscore value of fitness, named fcr, is introduced. For a minimization problem, the proposed CR generation strategy always assigns a smaller CR value to individual with smaller fitness value. Therefore, the parameters of individuals with better fitness are inherited by their offspring with high probability. In the second direction, the control parameters are adjusted by unused bimodal settings in which each parameter setting is selected according to the evolution status of individual. The third direction of our work is introducing the L1 norm distance as the weights for updating the mean value of crossover rate and scale factor. Theoretically, compared with L2 norm, L1-norm is more efficient to suppress outliers in the difference vector. These modifications are first integrated with the mutation strategy of JADE, then a modified version, named JADEfcr, is proposed. In addition, to improve the optimization ability further, another variant LJADEfcr by using a linear population reduction mechanism is considered. So as to confirm and examine the performance of JADEfcr and LJADEfcr, numerical experiments are conducted on 29 optimization problems defined by CEC2017 benchmark. For JADEfcr, its experimental results are made a comparison with twelve state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparative study demonstrates that in terms of robustness, stability and solution quality, JADEfcr are better and highly competitive with these well-known algorithms. For LJADEfcr, its results are compared with JADEfcr and other nine powerful algorithms including four recent algorithms and five top algorithms on CEC2017 competition. Experimental results indicate that LJADEfcr is superior and statistically competitive with these excellent algorithms in terms of robustness, stability and the quality of the obtained solutions.

Abstract Large-scale multi-objective feature selection problems are widely existing in the fields of text classification, image processing, and biological omics. Numerous features usually mean more correlation and redundancy between features, so effective features are usually sparse. SparseEA is an evolutionary algorithm for solving Large-scale Sparse Multi-objective Optimization Problems (i.e., most decision variables of the optimal solutions are zero). It determines feature Scores by calculating the fitness of individual features, which does not reflect the correlation between features well. In this manuscript, ReliefF was used to calculate the weights of features, with unimportant features being removed first. Then combine the weights calculated by ReliefF with Scores of SparseEA to guide the evolution process. Moreover, the Scores of features remain constant throughout all runs in SparseEA. Therefore, the fitness values of excellent and poor individuals in each iteration are used to update the Scores. In addition, difference operators of Differential Evolution are introduced into SparseEA to increase the diversity of solutions and help the algorithm jump out of the local optimal solution. Comparative experiments are performed on large-scale datasets selected from scikit-feature repository. The results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the original SparseEA and the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this paper, a novel attempt is made to incorporate the two effective algorithm strategies, where BBO has a strong exploration and Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is used for exploitation of the search space. The proposed algorithm is tested on IEEE CEC 2014 and statistical, convergence graphs are given. The proposed algorithm is also applied to 10 real life problems and compared with its counterpart algorithm. Results obtained by above experiments have demonstrated the outperformance of the hybrid version of BBO over other algorithms.

Abstract Wearable devices are a growing field of research that can have a wide range of applications. The energy harvester is the most common source of power for wearable devices as well as in wireless sensor networks that require a battery-free operation. However, their power is restricted; consequently, power saving is crucial for wearable devices. Finding the best schedule for the various tasks that run on the wearable device can help to reduce power consumption. This paper presents a task scheduler for wearable medical devices based on Gaining–Sharing Knowledge (GSK) algorithm. The purpose of this task scheduler is to handle the tasks of a heart rate sensor and a temperature sensor to optimize the energy consumption throughout wearable medical devices. The proposed GSK-based scheduling algorithm is assessed against the state-of-the-art technique. The data used in our experiments are collected from an in-lab prototype.

On a global scale, 213 countries and territories have been affected by the coronavirus outbreak. According to researchers, underlying co-morbidity, which includes conditions like diabetes, hypertension, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and chronic respiratory disease, impacts mortality. The current situation requires for immediate delivery of solutions. The diagnosis should therefore be more accurate. Therefore, it's essential to determine each person's level of risk in order to prioritise testing for those who are subject to greater risk. The COVID-19 pandemic's onset and the cases of COVID-19 patients who have cardiovascular illness require specific handling. The paper focuses on defining the symptom rule for COVID-19 sickness in cardiovascular patients. The patient's chronic condition was taken into account while classifying the symptoms and determining the likelihood of fatality. The study found that a large proportion of people with fever, sore throats, and coughs have a history of stroke, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Patients with stroke were more likely to experience chest discomfort, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. Additionally, the strategy scales well for large datasets and the computing time required for the entire rule extraction procedure is faster than the existing state-of-the-art method.

Despite major diagnostic progress and treatment progress, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) continue to be the world's leading cause of disease and mortality. Artificial intelligence methods provide the ability to drastically alter cardiology healthcare, by improving the reliability and optimizing the CVD prediction and response accuracy. Medical knowledge can also be improved by AI techniques like machine learning and depth learning due to the availability of healthcare data related relevant cardio clinical information. The focus of this research is to diagnose coronary artery disease among patients based on their clinical data using a deep neural network. The paper focuses on the dual approach where in the first phase diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD) is carried out using a deep neural network. The Deep learning-based model has achieved the highest prediction accuracy of 96.2% and a lowest error rate of 3.8 %. Further to handle the overfitting Gaussian noise is introduced into the model to improve the performance and in the second phase the severity of the disease is checked using case-based reasoning approach (CBR).

This paper presents a binary variant of a novel physics-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, namely Light spectrum optimizer (LSO), for tackling both the 0–1 knapsack (KP01) and multidimensional knapsack problems (MKP). Because of the continuous nature of the standard LSO that contradicts the knapsack problem's discrete nature, two various transfer functions: S-shaped and X-shaped, are used to convert the continuous values produced by LSO into discrete ones. Some binary solutions produced by the binary LSO (BLSO) may be infeasible, so an improvement-repair strategy is used to convert those solutions into feasible ones by making some improvements on them. Moreover, the classical LSO was modified in this study to propose a new binary variant, namely BMLSO, with better exploration and exploitation operators for overcoming the knapsack problems. Additionally, a novel method, which simulates the swarm intelligence behaviors and the simulated binary crossover (SBX) to accelerate the convergence speed with avoiding stuck into local minima, has been proposed for producing a new binary variant of MLSO known as BHLSO. To verify the performance of the proposed binary variants of LSO, 45 benchmark instances of KP01 and 30 benchmark instances of MKP used commonly in the literature have been used in our experiments. The experimental findings show the superiority of BHLSO for both KP01 and MKP compared with several well-known algorithms in terms of CPU time, convergence speed, and accuracy.

One of the most complex areas of image processing is image classification, which is heavily relied upon in clinical care and educational activities. However, conventional models have reached their limits in effectiveness and require extensive time and effort to extract and choose classification variables. In addition, the large volume of medical image data being produced makes manual procedures ineffective and prone to errors. Deep learning has shown promise for many classification problems. In this study, a deep learning-based classification model is developed to decrease misclassifications and handle large amounts of data. The Adaptive Guided Bilateral Filter is used to filter images, and texture and edge attributes are gathered using the Spectral Gabor Wavelet Transform. The Black Widow Optimization method is used to choose the best features, which are then input into the Red Deer Optimization-enhanced Gated Deep Reinforcement Learning network model for classification. The brain tumor MRI dataset was used to test the model on the MATLAB platform, and the results showed an accuracy of 98.8%.

Sensors are now used by farmers and agronomists to help them improve their operations. They use sensor data transmitted via IoT to remotely monitor their crops. Farmers today manage crops in a controlled environment to increase yields in the name of modern farming. Crop productivity, on the other hand, is influenced by the severity of the weather and disease variations. The primary objective of this paper is to present a novel Multisensor Machine-Learning Approach (MMLA) for classifying multisensor data. The fusion strategy supports high-quality data analysis in agricultural contexts for cultivation recommendations. Based on the proposed recommendation system, eight crops were classified: cotton, gram, groundnut, maize, moong, paddy, sugarcane, and wheat. Crop species were classified using three machine learning algorithms: J48 Decision Tree, Hoeffding Tree, and Random Forest. To evaluate the performance of the proposed multi-text classifier, only the top eight classes were investigated. The classifier’s performance is measured in terms of precision, recall, F-measure, MCC, ROC Area, and PRC Area class, and the results are compared with the state-of-the-art classifiers. The Random forest algorithm has the lowest error measure of RMSE at 13%, RAE at 38.67%, and RRSE at 44.21%, demonstrating effectiveness in classifying the agriculture text. Thus, the use of a multisensor data fusion approach based on crop recommendation provides greater precision in prediction, resulting in a significant increase in crop yield while also creating awareness in the condition-based environmental monitoring system.

A variety of algorithms handles processes on the CPU. The round-robin algorithm is an efficient CPU scheduling mechanism for a time-sharing operating system. The system processes the methods based on the time slice; however, determining the time slice has proven highly challenging for the researchers. As a result, a variety of dynamic time quantum scheduling techniques are presented by various academics to address this challenge. This study aims to determine how to best schedule resources to maximize efficiency. It is important to note that this scheduling mechanism rotates between the processes after the static quantum time is complete. However, the quantum decision affects how effectively and efficiently the procedures may be scheduled. Additionally, the quantum decision has an impact on the scheduling of processes. The average waiting time, turnaround time, and context switch times of the Round Robin scheduling algorithm are high enough to influence the system's performance. To get over the round-drawbacks, robin's the authors in this study suggest using the improved algorithm Median-Average Round Robin (MARR). Using the median and average of the burst time of each process, the author proposes a dynamic time quantum for the system. The authors compared the proposed model with four other scheduling algorithms. The results vividly depict that the proposed algorithms successfully give effective results with reduced average turnaround time and waiting time. In the future, cost and RAM utilization will be considered to enhance the algorithm.

Deep neural network models can achieve greater performance in numerous machine learning tasks by raising the depth of the model and the amount of training data samples. However, these essential procedures will proportionally raise the cost of training deep neural network models. Accelerating the training process of deep neural network models in a distributed computing environment has become the most often utilized strategy for developers in order to better cope with a huge quantity of training overhead. The current deep neural network model is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) technique. It is one of the most widely used training techniques in network models, although it is prone to gradient obsolescence during parallelization, which impacts the overall convergence. The majority of present solutions are geared at high-performance nodes with minor performance changes. Few studies have taken into account the cluster environment in high-performance computing (HPC), where the performance of each node varies substantially. A dynamic batch size stochastic gradient descent approach based on performance-aware technology is suggested to address the aforesaid difficulties (DBS-SGD). By assessing the processing capacity of each node, this method dynamically allocates the minibatch of each node, guaranteeing that the update time of each iteration between nodes is essentially the same, lowering the average gradient of the node. The suggested approach may successfully solve the asynchronous update strategy’s gradient outdated problem. The Mnist and cifar10 are two widely used image classification benchmarks, that are employed as training data sets, and the approach is compared with the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) technique. The experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has better performance as compared with existing algorithms.

Queues or waiting lines are a natural occurrence in the everyday lives of consumers and the process of every business. Being customers' first point of contact with the business, a customer’s experience in the queue becomes a determining factor of their first impression of the business. Queuing provides the cornerstone of efficiency to businesses as they assist employees and managers in tracking, prioritising, and ensuring the delivery of services and transactions. Inefficiencies in queues are undesired as they can result in substantial losses to a business, such as bad reputation and loss of customers due to balking or reneging behaviour.Previous research has shown that the application of queuing theory enables businesses to analyse their queuing system and the trends of demand for their services. This allows the business to effectively identify measures to improve their queuing system and serve demand at the desired level of service.In this paper, where it examined Cairo International Airport (CAI)’s existing departure queue system and benchmarked it against the optimum wait time suggested in the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Level of Service (LoS) concept. The application of Kendall-Lee’s Notation is applied to describe the existing queuing system of the airport. It also suggested areas of improvement after the analysis and recommended that the CAI focus on improving service time for its Check-in, Security, and Boarding process. Although the Immigration process has met IATA’s recommended optimal wait time, training could be provided to employees to enable them to progressively work towards a better service time and prepare for the future higher traffic volume. The team has also suggested for CAI to introduce autonomous technology for the departure process and software which analyses passenger flow and projects a forecast value based on the airport growth trends.

Machine learning and parallel processing are extremely commonly used to enhance computing power to induce knowledge from an outsized volume of data. To deal with the problem of complexity and high dimension, machine learning algorithms like Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) are used, while parallel processing algorithms like Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PPSO) are parallelized to speed up the operation and reduce the processing time to train the neural network. Due to the arrival of a large number of incoming tasks in the cloud environment, load balancing is an important issue. To solve this problem, the datacenter controller or an agent makes an intelligent decision to handle a large number of tasks within a minimum time period or at high speed. In this work, we proposed an effective scheduling algorithm named Deep Reinforcement Learning with Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (DRLPPSO) to solve the load balancing problem and its various parameters with greater accuracy and high speed. Our experimental results show that our proposed scheduling algorithm increases the reward by 15.7%, 12%, and 13.1% when the task set is 2000 and improves the reward by 17.5%, 12.6%, and 15.3% when the task set is 4000, as compared to the Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), and Deep Q-Network (DQN) techniques.

For the solar photovoltaic (PV) system to operate efficiently, it is necessary to effectively establish an equivalent model of PV cell and extract the relevant unknown model parameters accurately. This paper introduces a new metaheuristic algorithm, i.e., gaining-sharing knowledge based algorithm (GSK) to solve the solar PV model parameter extraction problem. This algorithm simulates the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing in the human life cycle and is with strong competitiveness in solving optimization problems. It includes two significant phases. The first phase is the beginner–intermediate or junior acquisition and sharing stage, and the second phase is the intermediate–expert or senior acquisition and sharing stage. In order to verify the effectiveness of GSK, it is applied to five PV models including the single diode model, double diode model, and three PV modules. The influence of population size on the algorithm performance is empirically investigated. Besides, it is further compared with some other excellent metaheuristic algorithms including basic algorithms and advanced algorithms. Among the five PV models, the root mean square error values between the measured data and the calculated data of GSK are 9.8602E−04 ± 2.18E−17, 9.8280E−04 ± 8.72E−07, 2.4251E−03 ± 1.04E−09, 1.7298E−03 ± 6.25E−18, and 1.6601E−02 ± 1.44E−16, respectively. The results show that GSK has overall better robustness, convergence, and accuracy.

Differential evolution (DE) is a stochastic optimization technique that imitates the evolution process in nature. This paper uses an improved adaptive differential evolution to solve gravity inversion with multiplicative regularization. Compared with additive regularization, the advantage of multiplicative regularization is that it does not require the regularization parameter in the search process. The contributions in this paper mainly focus on two aspects: accelerating the convergence speed of adaptive DE and balancing the effect of model and data misfits in the objective function. The effectiveness of the proposed inversion method is verified by synthetic and field cases. For the synthetic cases, it is concluded that, based on the obtained results and analysis, the presented DE method is superior and competitive with its original version. Additionally, the designed parameter adaptation for multiplicative regularization is useful for trading off the effect of data and model misfits. For the field cases, two successful applications from China were conducted, and the obtained density source distributions were in accordance with those obtained from drilling wells. The synthetic and practical examples demonstrate that high-quality inversion results can be obtained using improved adaptive differential evolution and multiplicative regularization.

Metaheuristics in recent years has proven its effectiveness; however, robust algorithms that can solve real-world problems are always needed. In this paper, we suggest the first extended version of the recently introduced gaining–sharing knowledge optimization (GSK) algorithm, named multiobjective gaining–sharing knowledge optimization (MOGSK), to deal with multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). MOGSK employs an external archive population to store the nondominated solutions generated thus far, with the aim of guiding the solutions during the exploration process. Furthermore, fast nondominated sorting with crowding distance was incorporated to sustain the diversity of the solutions and ensure the convergence towards the Pareto optimal set, while the ϵ-dominance relation was used to update the archive population solutions. ϵ-dominance helps provide a good boost to diversity, coverage, and convergence overall. The validation of the proposed MOGSK was conducted using five biobjective (ZDT) and seven three-objective test functions (DTLZ) problems, along with the recently introduced CEC 2021, with fifty-five test problems in total, including power electronics, process design and synthesis, mechanical design, chemical engineering, and power system optimization. The proposed MOGSK was compared with seven existing optimization algorithms, including MOEAD, eMOEA, MOPSO, NSGAII, SPEA2, KnEA, and GrEA. The experimental findings show the good behavior of our proposed MOGSK against the comparative algorithms in particular real-world optimization problems.

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a symbol of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) by integrating physical and computational processes which can associate with humans in various ways. In short, the relationship between Cyber networks and the physical component is known as CPS, which is assisting to incorporate the world and influencing our ordinary life significantly. In terms of practical utilization of CPS interacting abundant difficulties. Currently, CPS is involved in modern society very vastly with many uptrend perspectives. All the new technologies by using CPS are accelerating our journey of innovation. In this paper, we have explained the research areas of 14 important domains of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) including aircraft transportation systems, battlefield surveillance, chemical production, energy, agriculture (food supply), healthcare, education, industrial automation, manufacturing, mobile devices, robotics, transportation, and vehicular. We also demonstrated the challenges and future direction of each paper of all domains. Almost all articles have limitations on security, data privacy, and safety. Several projects and new dimensions are mentioned where CPS is the key integration. Consequently, the researchers and academicians will be benefited to update the CPS workspace and it will help them with more research on a specific topic of CPS. 158 papers are studied in this survey as well as among these, 98 papers are directly studied with the 14 domains with challenges and future instruction which is the first survey paper as per the knowledge of authors.

Energy is an important denominator for evaluating the development of any country. Energy consumption, energy production and steps towards obtaining green energy are important factors for sustainable development. With the advent of forecasting technologies, these factors can be accessed earlier, and the planning path for sustainable development can be chalked out. Forecasting technologies pertaining to grey systems are in the spotlight due to the fact that they do not require many data points. In this work, an optimized model with grey machine learning architecture of a polynomial realization was employed to predict power generation, power consumption and CO2 emissions. A nonlinear kernel was taken and optimized with a recently published algorithm, the augmented crow search algorithm (ACSA), for prediction. It was found that as compared to conventional grey models, the proposed framework yields better results in terms of accuracy.

In recent years, various deep neural networks with different learning paradigms have been widely employed in various applications, including medical diagnosis, image analysis, self-driving vehicles and others. The activation functions employed in deep neural networks have a huge impact on the training model and the reliability of the model. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) has recently emerged as the most popular and extensively utilized activation function. ReLU has some flaws, such as the fact that it is only active when the units are positive during back-propagation and zero otherwise. This causes neurons to die (dying ReLU) and a shift in bias. However, unlike ReLU activation functions, Swish activation functions do not remain stable or move in a single direction. This research proposes a new activation function named NIPUNA for deep neural networks. We test this activation by training on customized convolutional neural networks (CCNN). On benchmark datasets (Fashion MNIST images of clothes, MNIST dataset of handwritten digits), the contributions are examined and compared to various activation functions. The proposed activation function can outperform traditional activation functions.

Feature selection is a critical and prominent task in machine learning. To reduce the dimension of the feature set while maintaining the accuracy of the performance is the main aim of the feature selection problem. Various methods have been developed to classify the datasets. However, metaheuristic algorithms have achieved great attention in solving numerous optimization problem. Therefore, this paper presents an extensive literature review on solving feature selection problem using metaheuristic algorithms which are developed in the ten years (2009-2019). Further, metaheuristic algorithms have been classified into four categories based on their behaviour. Moreover, a categorical list of more than a hundred metaheuristic algorithms is presented. To solve the feature selection problem, only binary variants of metaheuristic algorithms have been reviewed and corresponding to their categories, a detailed description of them explained. The metaheuristic algorithms in solving feature selection problem are given with their binary classification, name of the classifier used, datasets and the evaluation metrics. After reviewing the papers, challenges and issues are also identified in obtaining the best feature subset using different metaheuristic algorithms. Finally, some research gaps are also highlighted for the researchers who want to pursue their research in developing or modifying metaheuristic algorithms for classification. For an application, a case study is presented in which datasets are adopted from the UCI repository and numerous metaheuristic algorithms are employed to obtain the optimal feature subset.

As optimization algorithms have a great power to solve nonlinear, complex, and hard optimization problems, nature-inspired algorithms have been applied extensively in distinct fields in order to solve real life optimization cases. In this paper, modifications for the recently proposed Gaining-Sharing-Knowledge based algorithm (GSK) are presented for enhancing its performance. Gaining-Sharing-Knowledge algorithm is considered as a perfect example of modern nature-inspired algorithm that considered the human life behavior as a source of inspiration in order to solve optimization problems. GSK algorithm mimics the naturalistic phenomenon of gaining knowledge and sharing knowledge back in human being through two major phasis: junior phase and senior phase. The junior phase is based on generating a set of initial solutions (juniors) to start the search process. Subsequently, all individuals move to the senior phase through the interaction with the surrounding environment and the cooperation with other individuals throughout the search process. The main idea in this presented work is extending and improving the original GSK algorithm through proposing a new idea for adaptively obtain the values for the two significant control parameters in GSK: the knowledge factor and the knowledge ratio. Those two significant parameters have the responsibility of controlling the gaining and sharing knowledge during the junior and senior phases throughout the optimization process. Moreover, an adaptive scheme is presented to control the knowledge rate in order to simulate the gaining and sharing experience throughout the human being life span for a specific population by taking into consideration the diverse nature of any population. a non-linear reduction for the population size is used to improve the GSK algorithm’s performance. Finally, a larger initial value of the initial population size (NP) for all dimensions are applied. The presented algorithm (APGSK) is tested on a very recent benchmark testbed on bound constrained numerical optimization that composed of distinct challenging optimization problems with different dimensions. The presented algorithm (APGSK) showed a superior performance comparing with the original GSK and with other four state-of-the-arts algorithms and the winners of CEC2020 competition.

During last two decades, Differential Evolution (DE) proved to be one of the most popular and successful evolutionary algorithms for solving global optimization problems over continuous space. Proposing new mutation strategies to improve the optimization performance of (DE) is considered a significant research study. In DE, mutation operation plays a vital role in the performance of the algorithm. Therefore, in this paper, comprehensive analysis of the contributions on basic and novel mutation strategies that were proposed between 1995 and 2020 is presented. A new taxonomy based on the structure of the novel mutations is proposed. Numerical experiments on a set of 30 test problems from the CEC2017 benchmark for 10, 30, 50 and 100 dimensions, including a comparison with classical DE schemes and recent mutations schemes are executed. Furthermore, theoretical, and empirical convergence behavior analysis of all mutations is discussed. The paper also presents many recommendations, guidelines, insights, and suggestions for experienced practitioners and interested researchers in designing and developing effective and efficient DE algorithms to address various optimization problems in different fields.

This paper introduces a heuristic solver based on neural networks and deep learning for the knapsack problem. The solver is inspired by mechanisms and strategies used by both algorithmic solvers and humans. The neural model of the solver is based on introducing several biases in the architecture. We introduce a stored memory of vectors that holds up items representations and their relationship to the capacity of the knapsack and a module that allows the solver to access all the previous outputs it generated. The solver is trained and tested on synthetic datasets that represent a variety of instance types with different complexities. The solver neural model capabilities to generalize were tested on instances with up to 200 items, the model succeed to obtain near optimal solutions better than the greedy algorithm for instances in which there exists a correlation between items values and weights. The results also show that the capacity of the knapsack has a role in learning useful representations for each item in an instance and for the instance itself. Although the proposed solver may be not superior to other solvers, the results described here are insights for how the connection between combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and cognitive science could serve a great purpose in the operation research field. The goal of this work is not to design a state of the art solver, rather it full-fills some of the holes in the recent line of research that incorporates learning in combinatorial optimization problems.

It is feasible and safe to use unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as the data collection platform of the Internet of things (IoT). In order to save the energy loss of the platform and make the UAV perform the collection work effectively, it is necessary to optimize the deployment of UAV. The objective problem is to minimize the sum of the lost energy of UAV and the loss of data transmission of Internet of things devices. The key to solving the problem is to calculate the location of the docking points and the number of docking points when the UAV is working to collect data. This paper proposes a coding scheme based on swarm intelligence optimization, which encapsulates the docking position of UAV into a dimension, so the number of docking points to be calculated is the dimension number of optimization objective. This problem is considered as a dynamic dimension optimization problem. Each individual in swarm intelligence algorithm is a solution. When adjusting the dimension, the best individual is added or deleted to achieve dynamic search in the evolutionary process. Collaborative search among multiple individuals can improve the local optimal limit of search to a certain extent. Finally, the validity of the swarm intelligence-based coding approach is verified by simulation under seven IoT device distribution scenarios. The swarm intelligence algorithms we used are flower pollination algorithm (FPA), salp swarm algorithm (SSA), sine cosine algorithm (SCA). FPA and SCA perform most efficiently in three and four scenarios among the seven IoT device scenarios, respectively.

As a powerful optimization algorithm for solving nonlinear, complex and tough global optimization problems, differential evolution (DE) has been widely applied in various science and engineering fields. In this article, considering that the evolution direction of each individual is not fully exploited to guide the search process in most DE algorithms, a new DE variant (named ADEwSE), which incorporates the successful experience of evolved individuals into classic “current-to-pbest/1” mutation strategy to reduce the randomness of search direction, is proposed. Moreover, crossover matrix sorting scheme based on real crossover rate, opposition learning of crossover rate and adaptive adjustment of top p% values are combined with the new mutation strategy to improve the global search ability. In addition, to improve the searching ability of ADEwSE further, an ADEwSE variant by introducing the linear reduction of population size is proposed. In order to verify and analyze the performance of ADEwSE, numerical experiments on a set of 29 test problems from CEC2017 benchmark for 30, 50 and 100 dimensions are executed. And the experimental results are compared with that of 21 state-of-art DE-based algorithms. Comparative analysis indicates that the ADEwSE and its improved version are competitive with these state-of-art DE variants in terms of solution quality obtained.

Prediction of the infectious disease is a potential research area from the decades. With the progress in medical science, early anticipation of the disease spread becomes more meaningful when the resources are limited. Also spread prediction with limited data pose a deadly challenge to the practitioners. Hence, the paper presents a case study of the Corona virus (COVID-19). COVID-19 has hit the major parts of the world and implications of this virus, is life threatening. Research community has contributed significantly to understand the spread of virus with time, along with meteorological conditions and other parameters. Several forecasting techniques have already been deployed for this. Considering the fact, the paper presents a proposal of two Rolling horizon based Cubic Grey Models (RCGMs). First, the mathematical details of Cubic Polynomial based simple grey model is presented than two models based on time series rolling are proposed. The models are developed with the time series data of different locations, considering diverse overlap period and rolling values. It is observed that the proposed models yield satisfactory results as compared with the conventional and advanced grey models. The comparison of the performance has been carried out with calculation of standard error indices. At the end, some recommendations are also framed for the authorities, that can be helpful for decision making in tough time.

With the development of restructured power markets, the profit-making competitive business environment has emerged. With the help of different advanced technologies, generating companies are taking decisions regarding trading electricity with imperfect information about marketing operating conditions. The forecasting of the market clearing price (MCP) is a potential issue in these markets. Early information on the MCP can be a proven beneficial tool for accumulating profit. In this work, a local grey prediction model based on a cubic polynomial function is presented to estimate the MCP with the help of historical data. The mathematical framework of this grey model was established and evaluated for different market conditions and databases. The comparison between traditional grey models and some advanced grey models reveals that the proposed model yields accurate results.

Lung ultrasound images have shown great promise to be an operative point-of-care test for the diagnosis of COVID-19 because of the ease of procedure with negligible individual protection equipment, together with relaxed disinfection. Deep learning (DL) is a robust tool for modeling infection patterns from medical images; however, the existing COVID-19 detection models are complex and thereby are hard to deploy in frequently used mobile platforms in point-of-care testing. Moreover, most of the COVID-19 detection models in the existing literature on DL are implemented as a black box, hence, they are hard to be interpreted or trusted by the healthcare community. This paper presents a novel interpretable DL framework discriminating COVID-19 infection from other cases of pneumonia and normal cases using ultrasound data of patients. In the proposed framework, novel transformer modules are introduced to model the pathological information from ultrasound frames using an improved window-based multi-head self-attention layer. A convolutional patching module is introduced to transform input frames into latent space rather than partitioning input into patches. A weighted pooling module is presented to score the embeddings of the disease representations obtained from the transformer modules to attend to information that is most valuable for the screening decision. Experimental analysis of the public three-class lung ultrasound dataset (PCUS dataset) demonstrates the discriminative power (Accuracy: 93.4%, F1-score: 93.1%, AUC: 97.5%) of the proposed solution overcoming the competing approaches while maintaining low complexity. The proposed model obtained very promising results in comparison with the rival models. More importantly, it gives explainable outputs therefore, it can serve as a candidate tool for empowering the sustainable diagnosis of COVID-19-like diseases in smart healthcare.

Demand side management initiatives have gained attention recently because of the development of the smart grid and consumer-focused regulations. The demand side management programme has numerous goals. One of the main goals is to control energy demand by altering customer demand. This can be done in several ways, including financial discounts and behaviour changes brought about by providing knowledge to support the grid’s stressed conditions. In this study, demand side management techniques for future smart grids are presented, including load shifting and strategic conservation. There are many controlled devices on the grid. The load shifting and day before strategic conservation approaches mentioned in this study are derived analytically for the minimization problem. For resolving this minimization issue, the RUNge Kutta optimizer (RUN) was developed. On a test smart grid with two service zones, one with residential consumers and the other with commercial consumers, simulations are performed. By contrasting the outcomes with the slime mould algorithm (SMA), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), moth–flame optimization (MFO), and whale optimization algorithm (WOA), RUN demonstrates its effectiveness. The simulation findings demonstrate that the suggested demand side management solutions produce significant cost savings while lowering the smart grid’s peak load demand.

The transmission of high-speed data over communication channels is the function of digital communication systems. Due to linear and nonlinear distortions, data transmitted through this process is distorted. In a communication system, the channel is the medium through which signals are transmitted. The useful signal received at the receiver becomes corrupted because it is associated with noise, ISI, CCI, etc. The equalizers function at the front end of the receiver to eliminate these factors, and they are designed to make them work efficiently with proper network topology and parameters. In the case of highly dispersive and nonlinear channels, it is well known that neural network-based equalizers are more effective than linear equalizers, which use finite impulse response filters. An alternative approach to training neural network-based equalizers is to use metaheuristic algorithms. Here, in this work, to develop the symmetry-based efficient channel equalization in wireless communication, this paper proposes a modified form of bat algorithm trained with ANN for channel equalization. It adopts a population-based and local search algorithm to exploit the advantages of bats’ echolocation. The foremost initiative is to boost the flexibility of both the variants of the proposed algorithm and the utilization of proper weight, topology, and the transfer function of ANN in channel equalization. To evaluate the equalizer’s performance, MSE and BER can be calculated by considering popular nonlinear channels and adding nonlinearities. Experimental and statistical analyses show that, in comparison with the bat as well as variants of the bat and state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms them significantly, based on MSE and BER.

This paper contains two main parts, Part I and Part II, which discuss the local and global minimization problems, respectively. In Part I, a fresh conjugate gradient (CG) technique is suggested and then combined with a line-search technique to obtain a globally convergent algorithm. The finite difference approximations approach is used to compute the approximate values of the first derivative of the function f. The convergence analysis of the suggested method is established. The comparisons between the performance of the new CG method and the performance of four other CG methods demonstrate that the proposed CG method is promising and competitive for finding a local optimum point. In Part II, three formulas are designed by which a group of solutions are generated. This set of random formulas is hybridized with the globally convergent CG algorithm to obtain a hybrid stochastic conjugate gradient algorithm denoted by HSSZH. The HSSZH algorithm finds the approximate value of the global solution of a global optimization problem. Five combined stochastic conjugate gradient algorithms are constructed. The performance profiles are used to assess and compare the rendition of the family of hybrid stochastic conjugate gradient algorithms. The comparison results between our proposed HSSZH algorithm and four other hybrid stochastic conjugate gradient techniques demonstrate that the suggested HSSZH method is competitive with, and in all cases superior to, the four algorithms in terms of the efficiency, reliability and effectiveness to find the approximate solution of the global optimization problem that contains a non-convex function.

Optimization problems are prevalent in almost all areas and hence optimization algorithms are crucial for a myriad of real-world applications. Deterministic optimization algorithms tend to be computationally costly and time-consuming. Hence, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms are more favoured as they provide near-optimal solutions in an acceptable amount of time. Swarm intelligence algorithms are being increasingly used for optimization problems owing to their simplicity and good performance. The Dragonfly Algorithm (DA) is one which is inspired by the swarming behaviours of dragonflies, and it has been proven to have a superior performance than other algorithms in multiple applications. Hence, it is worth considering its application to the traveling salesman problem which is a predominant discrete optimization problem. The original DA is only suitable for solving continuous optimization problems and, although there is a binary version of the algorithm, it is not easily adapted for solving discrete optimization problems like TSP. We have previously proposed a discrete adapted DA algorithm suitable for TSP. However, it has low effectiveness, and it has not been used for large TSP problems. In this paper, we propose an optimized discrete adapted DA by using the steepest ascent hill climbing algorithm as a local search. The algorithm is applied to a TSP problem modelling a package delivery system in the Kuala Lumpur area and to benchmark TSP problems, and it is found to have a higher effectiveness than the discrete adapted DA and some other swarm intelligence algorithms. It also has a higher efficiency than the discrete adapted DA.

Successful privatization in other sectors leads to a restructuring in the power sector. The same practice has been adopted in the electrical industry with a deregulated electricity market (EM). This enables competition among generating companies (Genco’s) for maximizing their profit and it plays a central role. With this aim, each Genco gives a higher bid that may result in a risk of losing the opportunity to get selected at auction. The big challenge in front of a Genco is to acquire an optimal bid and this process is known as the Optimal Bidding Strategy (OBS) of a Genco. In this manuscript, a new variant of whale optimization (WOA) termed the Amended Whale Optimization Algorithm (AWOA) is proposed, to attain the OBS of thermal Genco in an EM. Once the effectiveness of new AWOA is proved on 23 benchmark functions, it is applied to five Genco strategic bidding problems in a spot market with uniform price. The results obtained from the proposed AWOA are compared with other competitive algorithms. The results reflect that AWOA outperforms in terms of the profit and convergence rate. Simulations also indicate that the proposed AWOA can successfully be used for an OBS in the EM.

In this paper, a new Modified Meta-Heuristic algorithm is proposed. This method contains some modifications to improve the performance of the simulated-annealing algorithm (SA). Most authors who deal with improving the SA algorithm presented some improvements and modifications to one or more of the five standard features of the SA algorithm. In this paper, we improve the SA algorithm by presenting some suggestions and modifications to all five standard features of the SA algorithm. Through these suggestions and modifications, we obtained a new algorithm that finds the approximate solution to the global minimum of a non-convex function. The new algorithm contains novel parameters, which are updated at each iteration. Therefore, the variety and alternatives in choosing these parameters demonstrated a noticeable impact on the performance of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, it has multiple formulas by which the candidate solutions are generated. Diversity in these formulas helped the proposed algorithm to escape a local point while finding the global minimizer of a non-convex function. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is reported through extensive numerical experiments on some well-known test problems. The performance profiles are used to evaluate and compare the performance of our proposed algorithm against the other five meta-heuristic algorithms. The comparison results between the performance of our suggested algorithm and the other five algorithms indicate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with, and in all cases superior to, the five algorithms in terms of the efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness for finding the global minimizers of non-convex functions. This superiority of the new proposed algorithm is due to those five modified standard features.

Power quality has emerged as a sincere denominator in the planning and operation of a power system. Various events affect the quality of power at the distribution end of the system. Detection of these events has been a major thrust area in the last decade. This paper presents the application of Support Vector Machine (SVM) in classifying the power quality events. Well-known signal processing techniques, namely Hilbert transform and Wavelet transform, are employed to extract the potential features from the observation sets of voltages. Supervised architecture consisting of SVM has been constructed by tuning the parameters of SVM by various algorithms. It has been observed that Augmented Crow Search Algorithm (ACSA) yields the best accuracy compared to other contemporary optimizers. Further, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is employed to choose the most significant features from the available features. On the basis of PCA, three different models of tuned SVMs are constructed. Comparative analysis of these three models, along with recently published approaches, is exhibited. Results are validated by the statistical one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) method. It is observed that SVM, which contains attributes from both signal-processing techniques, gives satisfactory results.