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With the advancement in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) infrastructure, network security issues have become a serious concern for hospitals and medical facilities. For this, a variety of customized network security tools and frameworks are used to distract several generalized attacks such as botnet-based distributed denial of services attacks (DDoS) and zero-day network attacks. Thus, it becomes difficult to operate routine IoMT services and tasks in between the under-attack scenario. This paper discusses a novel approach named Duo-Secure IoMT framework that uses multi-modal sensory signals’ data to differentiate the attack pattern and routine IoMT devices’ data. The proposed model uses a combination of two techniques such as dynamic Fuzzy C-Means clustering along with customized Bi-LSTM technique that processes sensory medical data securely along with identifying attack patterns within the IoMT network. As a case study, we are using a dataset to evaluate heart disease which consists of 36 attributes and 18940 instances. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed model evaluates a) prediction of heart issues and b) identification of network malware with an individual accuracy of 92.95% and multi-modal joint accuracy of 89.67% in the IoMT-based distributed network environment.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) facilitates patients with all-time-connected medical devices through cost-effective solutions and a feeling of comfort with round-the-clock hospital support. The patients who cannot visit hospitals for routine checkups prefer the usage of IoMT devices. The healthcare facilities also rely on the real-time statistics of IoMT machines and diagnose problems and their solutions within a small interval of time. This could only be possible when a robust convergence of technologies is used with IoMT devices. This review study discusses how we may apply the convergence of IoMT devices with trending technologies and focuses on delivering a new dimension of novel IoMT usage through broad multi-homing dense networks. It also discusses various applied machine learning algorithms available in the healthcare industry. It compares a variety of disease predictions and the accuracy of the equipment and decision recommendations. The review study also discusses various IoMT convergence open challenges and opportunities through the labor industry healthcare system.

The increasing energy consumption is a legacy of the fast improvement of ICT (Information and Communication Technology). It is also contrary to the current energy conservation and emission reduction concept. There are several reasons for high energy consumption. Among them, we find that the increase in base station density of the 5G heterogeneous network (5G HetNets) is prominent. We present a micro base station deployment strategy in 5G HetNets for obtaining high energy efficiency. It optimizes target values as are trade-offs at different user distribution probabilities to improve adaptation to different user distribution scenarios. An energy deployment algorithm based on high efficiency for micro base stations is considered as jointly optimizing micro base station’s number, deployment location, and power configuration. Simulation results show that the proposed combinatorial optimization strategy effectively improves the system energy efficiency compared to the deployment method, regardless of the power factor. Moreover, it verifies that the micro base station power affects the energy efficiency in HetNets.

The increased addition of DERs, their intermittent nature, and the high cost of ESSs are the key hurdles for interconnected multi-microgrids to operate economically. It is important to have a system that is simple to adopt, computationally inexpensive, does not share private data. In this paper, an energy management scheme is proposed for multiple interconnected renewable energy resources within the multi-microgrid paradigm. The core objectives aimed at minimizing the operational cost of each microgrid and utilize RER most economically without any load interruptions. The proposed scheme is performed in two steps. In the first step, the load is shifted in accordance with the daily price curve via resource scheduling i.e., charging and discharging of battery storage, day-ahead forecast of RER generation, and respective loads. In the second stage, the cost of energy is further reduced using opportunistic trading with neighboring microgrids in real-time. The mismatch between forecasted generation and load is also adjusted via either energy trading or with efficient scheduling of available power that is stored during off-peak hours. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is applied to a test system consisting of four interconnected microgrids. Results indicate that daily average power imported from the utility grid and peak demand is changed from 103 kW to 162 kW, and from 661 kW to 527 kW, respectively. Likewise, as per comparison, significantly favorable results have been achieved in terms of efficient available resources utilization, market trading, and reduction of the respective bills.

AbstractText-to-SQL is the problem of converting a user question into an SQL query, when the question and database are given. In this article, we present a neural network approach called RYANSQL (Recursively Yielding Annotation Network for SQL) to solve complex Text-to-SQL tasks for cross-domain databases. Statement Position Code (SPC) is defined to transform a nested SQL query into a set of non-nested SELECT statements; a sketch-based slot-filling approach is proposed to synthesize each SELECT statement for its corresponding SPC. Additionally, two input manipulation methods are presented to improve generation performance further. RYANSQL achieved competitive result of 58.2% accuracy on the challenging Spider benchmark. At the time of submission (April 2020), RYANSQL v2, a variant of original RYANSQL, is positioned at 3rd place among all systems and 1st place among the systems not using database content with 60.6% exact matching accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/kakaoenterprise/RYANSQL.

Open-domain question answering aims to get answers for given questions from a set of documents. Recently, dual encoder architecture is widely adopted to dense passage retrieval for question answering. In-batch negative sampling is typically used to gather extra negative samples during training. In this paper, we propose adaptive batch scheduling to enhance the performance of in-batch negative sampling. The proposed algorithm schedules training batches to increase the difficulty of the sampled negatives by in-batch negative sampling during training. We evaluated the proposed approach on the two well-known document retrieval benchmark datasets MSMARCO and Natural Questions. The evaluation result shows that the proposed adaptive batch scheduling could significantly improve the document retrieval performances of dual encoder architecture document retrieval systems.

Shape from Focus (SFF) has been studied extensively in computer vision for 3D shape and depth recovery. The first stage in SFF methods is to compute the focus value of every pixel by converting the colored images into gray scale and then apply the focus measure operator. Converting colored values in the images into gray scale values may lead to imprecise mapping of pixels with different colored values onto the same gray scale value, this affects the overall accuracy of the system. In a colored image, the focused pixels maintain a considerable color difference from their neighboring pixels as compared to the defocused ones, which are blended into their neighborhood. This article presents an alternative method to measure the degree of focus by directly processing colored images. The color differences of the neighbor pixels with respect to the central pixel are obtained and summed together, this is followed by calculating their spread. The sum and the spread are combined to measure the degree of focus of the pixel in consideration. The proposed focus measure is then used for shape recovery of various simulated and real objects and is compared with previous techniques. The comparison results show the proposed method has the highest correlation and smallest RMSE values confirming the effectiveness of using color images for shape recovery.

Shape from Focus (SFF) is one of the passive techniques to recover the shape of an object under consideration. It utilizes the focus cue present in the stack of images, obtained by a single camera. In SFF when the images are acquired, the inter-frame distance, also known as the sampling step size, is assumed to be constant. However, in practice, due to mechanical constraints, sampling step size cannot remain constant. The inconsistency in the sampling step size causes the problem of jitter, and produces Jitter noise in focus curves. This Jitter noise is not visible in images, because each pixel in an image (of the stack) will be subjected to the same error in focus. Thus, traditional image denoising techniques will not work. This paper formulates a model of the Jitter noise, followed by the design of system and measurement models for Kalman filter. Then, the jittering problem for SFF systems is solved using the proposed filtering technique. Experiments are performed on simulated and real objects. Ten noise levels are considered for simulated, and four for real objects. RMSE and Correlation are used to measure the reconstructed shape. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

This paper attempts to analyze the Korean sentence classification system. Sentence classification is the task of classifying an input sentence based on predefined categories. However, spelling or space error contained in the input sentence causes problems in morphological analysis and tokenization. This paper proposes a novel approach of Integrated Eojeol (Korean syntactic word separated by space) Embedding to reduce the effect of poorly analyzed morphemes on sentence classification. The paper also proposes two noise insertion methods that further improve classification performance. Our evaluation results indicate that by applying the proposed methods on the existing sentence classifiers, the sentence classification accuracy on erroneous sentences is increased by 8% to 15%.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been very successful in classification and object recognition. A lot of related work has been done to modify the performance of the networks, but they could either perform better with accuracy at high cost or decrease the time taken by a model on training datasets. We propose a deep neural network model ’Multi-Blocked Model’ which tends to decrease this gap and is efficient and accurate with less convolutional layers, easy to deploy online or embedded systems. We choose three datasets that are publicly available and popular for their own uniqueness among the datasets in deep neural networks. These three diverse datasets are: Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST), Street View House Number (SVHN) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research with 10 Cases (CIFAR-10). Our stateof-the-art Multi-Blocked model is presented well on all three data sets. Dropout is added to overcome the overfitting problem. The multi-blocked model is designed in a way that it uses a minimum number of parameters so that it is able to run on a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), which requires less power. The experimental results show that our proposed Multi-Blocked model tends to achieve the accuracy of these datasets by 99.40%, 90.8%, 88.07% consuming under 2 GB of graphical memory.

Smart community setups nowadays are subjected to complicated issues such as instability, intermittent integration of the load at the demand side, and lack of intelligent two-way communication process. These issues need to be addressed in terms of a balanced power demand dispatch (DD) in the real-time or day-ahead duplex signal regime under multi-microgrids. This paper offers an intelligent multi-agent-based approach that works between different levels of communication and their respective layers for a community-based system to optimize the power in community-based multi-microgrids model. This will further enhance user personal comfort. Constraints relative to cost minimization also have a relation with this model. A three-level structure with various layers of autonomous agents take intelligent decisions based on prioritized particle swarm optimization (P-PSO), prioritized plug and play (PPnP), and knapsack; considering DD as the main driver of the system to address objectives like price and power consumption uncertainties. Distinct smart home models, depending upon their living habits, are keenly observed providing their power infrastructure and personal comfort. Load appliances considered as load agents are individually contemplated for maximum proficiency. Furthermore, two-way communication between utility and consumers lowers down the risk of the inefficiency of the system.

The increasing demand of energy in the traditional grids is getting more complex, less feasible, harmful, uneconomical and high in power losses. This paper presents an efficient energy management approach to mitigate such issues with smart micro grid (SMG) and aims at a solution that is both cost effective and eco-friendly, within energy market paradigm. Goals are achieved with the help of Home Energy Management Controller (HEMC), Energy Market Management Controller (EMMC) and Control Agent (CA). The individual load is managed in the presence of local generation, storage system, user comfort, DGs and Utility within energy market paradigm. Two level energy management approach is proposed to achieve concerned goals. First is to manage load and schedule storage with respect to individual local generation and market pricing. Second is to manage energy market with the help of four different types of priorities and control agent input. The problem is solved with a variant of meta-heuristic method, Multi Objective Grey Wolf Optimization (MOGWO), which gives more comprehensive solution by comparing with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The proposed methodology is implemented on a SMG based-community test system. Homes within that community have different economic conditions and personal priorities. Simulation results demonstrates achievement of aimed goals in presented work.

Modern distribution mechanisms within the smart grid paradigm are considered both reliable in nature and interconnected in topology. In this paper, a multiple-criteria-based sustainable planning (MCSP) approach is presented that serves as a future planning tool for interconnected distribution mechanisms and aims to find a feasible solution among conflicting criteria of various genres. The proposed methodology is based on three stages. In the stage 1, a weighted voltage stability index (VSI_W) and loss minimization condition (LMC) based approach aims at optimal asset optimization (sitting and sizing). In this stage, an evaluation of alternatives (solutions) is carried out across four dimensions (technical, economic, environmental, and social) of performance metrics. The assets considered in the evaluations include distributed generation (DG), renewable DGs, i.e., photovoltaic (PV), wind, and distributed static compensator (D-STATCOM) units. In the stage 2, various multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies are applied to ascertain the best trade-off among the available solutions in terms of techno-cost (economic) (TCPE), environment-o-social (ESPE), and techno-economic-environmental-socio (TEES) performance evaluations (OPE). In the stage 3, the alternatives are evaluated across multiple load growth horizons of 5 years each. The proposed MCSP approach is evaluated across a mesh-configured 33-bus active distribution network (ADN) and an actual NUST (which is a university in Islamabad, Pakistan) microgrid (MG), with various variants of load growth. The numerical findings of the proposed MCSP approach are compared with reported works the literature supports its validity and can serve as an important planning tool for interconnected distribution mechanisms for researchers and planning engineers.

In the pharmaceutical field, early detection of lung nodules is indispensable for increasing patient survival. We can enhance the quality of the medical images by intensifying the radiation dose. High radiation dose provokes cancer, which forces experts to use limited radiation. Using abrupt radiation generates noise in CT scans. We propose an optimal Convolutional Neural Network model in which Gaussian noise is removed for better classification and increased training accuracy. Experimental demonstration on the LUNA16 dataset of size 160 GB shows that our proposed method exhibit superior results. Classification accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, Precision, Recall, F1 measurement, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the model performance are taken as evaluation metrics. We conducted a performance comparison of our proposed model on numerous platforms, like Apache Spark, GPU, and CPU, to depreciate the training time without compromising the accuracy percentage. Our results show that Apache Spark, integrated with a deep learning framework, is suitable for parallel training computation with high accuracy.

Big data analytics has simplified the processing complexity of extremely large data sets through ecosystems, such as Hadoop, MapR, and Cloudera. Apache Hadoop is an open-source ecosystem that manages large data sets in a distributed environment. MapReduce is a programming model that processes massive amount of unstructured data sets over Hadoop cluster. Recently, Hadoop enhances its homogeneous storage function to heterogeneous storage and stores data sets into multiple storage media, i.e., SSD, RAM, and DISK. This development increases the performance of data block placement strategy and allows a client to store large data sets into multiple storage media efficiently than homogeneous storage. However, this evolution increases the consumption of computing capacity and memory usage over MapReduce job scheduling. The scheduler processes MapReduce job into homogeneous container having configuration of CPU, memory, DISK volume, and network I/O, and accesses, processes, and stores data sets over heterogeneous storage media. This produces a processing latency of locating and pairing source data set to MapReduce tasks and results an abnormal high consumption of computing capacity and memory usage in a Datanode. Similarly, when scheduler assigns MapReduce jobs to multiple Datanodes, the same processing latency can severely affect the performance of whole cluster. In this paper, we present Storage-Tag-Aware Scheduler (STAS) that reduces processing latency by scheduling MapReduce jobs into heterogeneous storage containers, i.e., SSD, DISK, and RAM container. STAS endorses job with a tag of storage media, such as JobSSD, JobDISK, and JobRAM and parses them into heterogeneous shared-queues, which assign processing configuration to enlist jobs. STAS manager then schedules shared-queue jobs into heterogeneous MapReduce containers and generates an output into storage media of the cluster. The experimental evaluation shows that STAS optimizes the consumption of computing capacity and memory usage efficiently than available schedulers in a Hadoop cluster.

The integration of commercial onshore large-scale wind farms into a national grid comes with several technical issues that predominately ensure power quality in accordance with respective grid codes. The resulting impacts are complemented with the absorption of larger amounts of reactive power by wind generators. In addition, seasonal variations and inter-farm wake effects further deteriorate the overall system performance and restrict the optimal use of available wind resources. This paper presented an assessment framework to address the power quality issues that have arisen after integrating large-scale wind farms into weak transmission grids, especially considering inter-farm wake effect, seasonal variations, reactive power depletion, and compensation with a variety of voltage-ampere reactive (Var) devices. Herein, we also proposed a recovery of significant active power deficits caused by the wake effect via increasing hub height of wind turbines. For large-scale wind energy penetration, a real case study was considered for three wind farms with a cumulative capacity of 154.4 MW integrated at a Nooriabad Grid in Pakistan to analyze their overall impacts. An actual test system was modeled in MATLAB Simulink for a composite analysis. Simulations were performed for various scenarios to consider wind intermittency, seasonal variations across four seasons, and wake effect. The capacitor banks and various flexible alternating current transmission systems (FACTS) devices were employed for a comparative analysis with and without considering the inter-farm wake effect. The power system parameters along with active and reactive power deficits were considered for comprehensive analysis. Unified power flow controller (UPFC) was found to be the best compensation device through comparative analysis, as it maintained voltage at nearly 1.002 pu, suppressed frequency transient in a range of 49.88–50.17 Hz, and avoided any resonance while maintaining power factors in an allowable range. Moreover, it also enhanced the power handling capability of the power system. The 20 m increase in hub height assisted the recovery of the active power deficit to 48%, which thus minimized the influence of the wake effect.

In this paper, we present an architecture of a personalized glucose monitoring system (PGMS). PGMS consists of both invasive and non-invasive sensors on a single device. Initially, blood glucose is measured invasively and non-invasively, to train the machine learning models. Then, paired data and corresponding errors are divided scientifically into six different clusters based on blood glucose ranges as per the patient’s diabetic conditions. Each cluster is trained to build the unique error prediction model using an adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm. Later, these error prediction models undergo personalized calibration based on the patient’s characteristics. Once, the errors in predicted non-invasive values are within the acceptable error range, the device gets personalized for a patient to measure the blood glucose non-invasively. We verify PGMS on two different datasets. Performance analysis shows that the mean absolute relative difference (MARD) is reduced exceptionally to 7.3% and 7.1% for predicted values as compared to 25.4% and 18.4% for measured non-invasive glucose values. The Clarke error grid analysis (CEGA) plot for non-invasive predicted values shows 97% data in Zone A and 3% data in Zone B for dataset 1. Moreover, for dataset 2 results echoed with 98% and 2% in Zones A and B, respectively.

The modern distribution networks under the smart grid paradigm have been considered both interconnected and reliable. In grid modernization concepts, the optimal asset optimization across a certain planning horizon is of core importance. Modern planning problems are more inclined towards a feasible solution amongst conflicting criteria. In this paper, an integrated decision-making planning (IDMP) approach is proposed. The proposed methodology includes voltage stability assessment indices linked with loss minimization condition-based approach, and is integrated with different multi-criteria decision-making methodologies (MCDM), followed by unanimous decision making (UDM). The proposed IDMP approach aims at optimal assets sitting and sizing in a meshed distribution network to find a trade-off solution with various asset types across normal and load growth horizons. An initial evaluation is carried out with assets such as distributed generation (DG), photovoltaic (PV)-based renewable DG, and distributed static compensator (D-STATCOM) units. The solutions for various cases of asset optimization and respective alternatives focusing on technical only, economic only, and techno-economic objectives across the planning horizon have been evaluated. Later, various prominent MCDM methodologies are applied to find a trade-off solution across different cases and scenarios of assets optimization. Finally, UDM is applied to find trade-off solutions amongst various MCDM methodologies across normal and load growth levels. The proposed approach is carried out across a 33-bus meshed configured distribution network. Findings from the proposed IDMP approach are compared with available works reported in the literature. The numerical results achieved have validated the effectiveness of the proposed planning approach in terms of better performance and an effective trade-off solution across various asset types.

A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system is a complex, high cost, and long-life product. It is a widely known fact that performing a system reliability test of a MRI system during the development phase is a challenging task. The major challenges include sample size, high test cost, and long test duration. This paper introduces a novel approach to perform a MRI system reliability test in a reasonably acceptable time with one sample size. Our approach is based on an accelerated reliability growth test, which consists of test cycle made of a very high-energy time-of-flight three-dimensional (TOF3D) pulse sequence representing an actual hospital usage scenario. First, we construct a nominal day usage scenario based on actual data collected from an MRI system used inside the hospital. Then, we calculate the life-time stress based on a usage scenario. Finally, we develop an accelerated reliability growth test cycle based on a TOF3D pulse sequence that exerts highest vibration energy on the gradient coil and MRI system. We use a vibration energy model to map the life-time stress and reduce the test duration from 537 to 55 days. We use a Crow AMSAA plot to demonstrate that system design reaches its useful life after crossing the infant mortality phase.

This paper offers a new improved voltage stability assessment index (VSAI_B)-centered planning approach, aiming at the attainment of technical and cost related objectives with simultaneous multiple asset deployment in a mesh distribution systems (MDS). The assets such as multiple distributed generation (DG) and distributed static compensator (D-STATCOM) units have been utilized; aiming at voltage stabilization, loss minimization, and associated objectives. The proposed planning approach incorporates expressions of VSAI_B aiming at initial simultaneous assets placement followed by loss minimization conditions (LMC) for appropriate asset sizing, which is further utilized for performance evaluations. The VSAI_B-LMC-based integrated planning approach is applied to configured MDS models such as a 33-bus test distribution system (TDS) for detailed analysis. The performance evaluations with the presented approach have been conducted for different cases along with respective scenarios considering various technical and cost-economic performance metrics. First, three cases referring to multiple DGs sitting and sizing for various power factors have been presented, followed later by two cases of multiple DGs and D-STATCOMs with respective evaluation scenarios. Finally, benchmark analysis is conducted on a 69-bus TDS for validity demonstration of the proposed approach. The comparison of achieved results in comparison with the available literature points out toward the validity and improved performance of the proposed approach.

Wireless sensor networks require energy-efficient data transmission because the sensor nodes have limited power. A cluster-based routing method is more energy-efficient than a flat routing method as it can only send specific data for user requirements and aggregate similar data by dividing a network into a local cluster. However, previous clustering algorithms have some problems in that the transmission radius of sensor nodes is not realistic and multi-hop based communication is not used both inside and outside local clusters. As energy consumption based on clustering is dependent on the number of clusters, we need to know how many clusters are best. Thus, we propose an optimal number of cluster-heads based on multi-hop routing in wireless sensor networks. We observe that a local cluster made by a cluster-head influences the energy consumption of sensor nodes. We determined an equation for the number of packets to send and relay, and calculated the energy consumption of sensor networks using it. Through the process of calculating the energy consumption, we can obtain the optimal number of cluster-heads in wireless sensor networks.

The authors wish to make the following corrections to their paper [...]

This paper offers an enhanced voltage stability assessment index (VSAI) and loss minimalize condition (LMC) centered integrated planning approach. The proposed method aims at the simultaneous attainment of voltage stability, loss minimizations and various other related objectives with the employment of multiple distributed generation (DG) units, in mesh distribution systems (MDS). The approach presents two enhanced VSAI expressions based on a multiple-loops configured equivalent MDS model. The main objective of each VSAI expression is to find the weakest buses as potential candidates for single and multiple DG placements with initial optimal DG sizes for aimed objectives attainment in MDS. Later, mathematical expressions for LMC have been presented, based on equivalent MDS model. The LMC aims to achieve significant loss minimization with optimal DG sizes and attain negligible voltage difference across tie-line branches via reduction of respective loop currents. The proposed integrated VSAI-LMC based planning approach is employed with two computation variants and tested on two well-known, 33-Bus and 69-Bus, test distribution systems (TDS). The performance analysis of each TDS is conducted with two cases and respective scenarios, across various performance evaluation indicators (PEIs). The paper also offers a comparative analysis of achieved numerical outcomes of the proposed planning approach with the available research works found in the literature. The numerical results attained have better performance in comparison with the presented literature data and thus shows the effectiveness and validity of the proposed planning approach.

This paper presents a new planning approach based on voltage stability index (VSI) together with improved loss minimization (LM) formulations. The method has employed for application of distributed generation (DG) unit placement (location and size) in a loop (configured) test distribution network (LDN). Initially, VSI relationship for equivalent loop model has employed to find out potential locations for DG placement in LDN. Later, loss minimization formulations and loss minimization conditions (LMC) have been derived on the basis of an equivalent electrical model of LDN, for single and two DGs operating at various power factors, respectively. The proposed approach is comprised of two variants and has demonstrated on the 69-bus test distribution network. The first planning variant as a single case has applied for DG allocation (location, size, number) in LDN under normal load. Similarly, the second planning variant has demonstrated with three cases (six scenarios per case), evaluated under normal load and impact of load growth (across five years), respectively. The proposed approach has analyzed in terms of various performance indicators and results obtained have compared and found in close agreement with existed works in literature. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed planning approach and establish that LDN performs better than radial distribution network from the perspective of load growth.

Smart grids (SGs), as an emerging grid modernization concept, is spreading across diverse research areas for revolutionizing power systems. SGs realize new key concepts with intelligent technologies, maximizing achieved objectives and addressing critical issues that are limited in conventional grids. The SG modernization is more noticeable at the distribution grid level. Thus, the transformation of the traditional distribution network (DN) into an intelligent one, is a vital dimension of SG research. Since future DNs are expected to be interconnected in nature and operation, hence traditional planning methods and tools may no longer be applicable. In this paper, the smart distribution network (SDN) concept under the SG paradigm, has presented and reviewed from the planning perspective. Also, developments in the SDN planning process have been surveyed on the basis of SG package (SGP). The package presents a SDN planning foundation via major SG-enabling technologies (SGTF), anticipated functionalities (SGAF), new consumption models (MDC) as potential SDN candidates, associated policies and pilot projects and multi-objective planning (MOP) as a real-world optimization problem. In addition, the need for an aggregated SDN planning model has also been highlighted. The paper discusses recent notable related works, implementation activities, various issues/challenges and potential future research directions; all aiming at SDN planning.

Distribution networks (DNWs) are facing numerous challenges, notably growing load demands, environmental concerns, operational constraints and expansion limitations with the current infrastructure. These challenges serve as a motivation factor for various distribution network planning (DP) strategies, such as timely addressing load growth aiming at prominent objectives such as reliability, power quality, economic viability, system stability and deferring costly reinforcements. The continuous transformation of passive to active distribution networks (ADN) needs to consider choices, primarily distributed generation (DG), network topology change, installation of new protection devices and key enablers as planning options in addition to traditional grid reinforcements. Since modern DP (MDP) in deregulated market environments includes multiple stakeholders, primarily owners, regulators, operators and consumers, one solution fit for all planning scenarios may not satisfy all these stakeholders. Hence, this paper presents a review of several planning techniques (PTs) based on mult-objective optimizations (MOOs) in DNWs, aiming at better trade-off solutions among conflicting objectives and satisfying multiple stakeholders. The PTs in the paper spread across four distinct planning classifications including DG units as an alternative to costly reinforcements, capacitors and power electronic devices for ensuring power quality aspects, grid reinforcements, expansions, and upgrades as a separate category and network topology alteration and reconfiguration as a viable planning option. Several research works associated with multi-objective planning techniques (MOPT) have been reviewed with relevant models, methods and achieved objectives, abiding with system constraints. The paper also provides a composite review of current research accounts and interdependence of associated components in the respective classifications. The potential future planning areas, aiming at the multi-objective-based frameworks, are also presented in this paper.