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The autonomous vehicle (AV) is one of the emerging technologies of the new age that has the potential to restructure transportation infrastructure. AVs are able to sense their surroundings and move around with control and self-sufficiency. AVs can contribute towards reducing traffic congestion on the roads, improving the quality of life, and achieving the highest levels of traffic safety. Thus, this type of vehicle can be integrated into the logistics industry. Due to the presence of several AVs, selecting a standard and efficient AV for logistics planning is a great challenge. The selection of an AV depends on many conflicting and essential criteria. Given its efficiency and reliability in dealing with conflicting criteria, a comprehensive multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach was applied to solve the problem of selecting the optimal AV. However, the MCDM selection process is based on human judgment, which can be ambiguous. Accordingly, uncertainty was handled using type-2 neutrosophic numbers (T2NN). Initially, the method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) was extended under T2NN and employed to assess and prioritize criteria. Then, the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method was extended under T2NN and applied to rank the candidate substitutions. To confirm the feasibility of the applied approach, an illustrative case study of four AVs was introduced. A sensitivity analysis was performed by changing the weights of the criteria and some other parameters to confirm the validity and stability of the proposed approach. In addition, a comparison analysis with other MCDM approaches was conducted to show the effectiveness and reliability of the applied approach. This research provides useful information for policymakers in the field of logistics. Finally, the results indicate that the velocity of AVs criterion is the most influential criterion in the selection of an intelligent AV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for efficient and reliable disease diagnosis in smart cities has become increasingly serious. In this study, we introduce a novel blockchain-based federated learning framework tailored specifically for the diagnosis of pandemic diseases in smart cities, called BFLPD, with a focus on COVID-19 as a case study. The proposed BFLPD takes advantage of the decentralized nature of blockchain technology to design collaborative intelligence for automated diagnosis without violating trustworthiness metrics, such as privacy, security, and data sharing, which are encountered in healthcare systems of smart cities. Cheon–Kim–Kim–Song (CKKS) encryption is intelligently redesigned in BFLPD to ensure the secure sharing of learning updates during the training process. The proposed BFLPD presents a decentralized secure aggregation method that safeguards the integrity of the global model against adversarial attacks, thereby improving the overall efficiency and trustworthiness of our system. Extensive experiments and evaluations using a case study of COVID-19 ultrasound data demonstrate that BFLPD can reliably improve diagnostic accuracy while preserving data privacy, making it a promising tool with which smart cities can enhance their pandemic disease diagnosis capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in technology have led to a surge in interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are remote-controlled aircraft that rely on cameras or sensors to gather information about their surroundings during flight. A UAV requires a path-planning technique that can swiftly recalculate a viable and quasi-optimal path in flight if a new obstacle or hazard is recognized or if the target is moved during the mission. In brief, the planning of UAV routes might optimize a specific problem determined by the application, such as the moving target problem (MTP), flight time and threats, or multiobjective navigation. The complexity of MTP ranges from NP-hard to NEXP-complete because there are so many probabilistic variables involved. Therefore, it is hard to detect a high-quality solution for this problem using traditional techniques such as differential calculus. Therefore, this paper hybridizes differential evolution (DE) with two newly proposed updating schemes to present a new evolution-based technique named hybrid differential evolution (HDE) for accurately tackling the MTP in a reasonable amount of time. Using Bayesian theory, the MTP can be transformed into an optimization problem by employing the target detection probability as the fitness function. The proposed HDE encodes the search trajectory as a sequence of UAV motion pathways that evolve with increasing the current iteration for finding the near-optimal solution, which could maximize this fitness function. The HDE is extensively compared to the classical DE and several rival optimizers in terms of several performance metrics across four different scenarios with varying degrees of difficulty. This comparison demonstrates the proposal's superiority in terms of the majority of used performance metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19-like pandemics are a major threat to the global health system have the potential to cause high mortality across age groups. The advance of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technologies paves the way toward developing reliable solutions to combat these pandemics. Medical images (i.e., X-rays, computed tomography (CT)) provide an efficient tool for disease detection and diagnosis. The cost, time, and efforts for acquiring and annotating, for instance, large CT datasets make it complicated to obtain large numbers of samples from a single institution. However, owing to the necessity to preserve the privacy of patient data, it is challenging to build a centralized dataset from many institutions, especially during a pandemic. Moreover, heterogeneity between institutions presents a barrier to building efficient screening solutions. Thus, this paper presents a fog-based federated generative domain adaption framework (FGDA), where fog nodes aggregate patients' data necessary to collaboratively train local deep-learning models for disease screening in medical images from different institutions. Local differential privacy is presented to protect the local gradients against attackers during the global model aggregation. In FGDA, the generative domain adaptation (DA) method is introduced to handle data discrepancies. Experimental evaluation on a case study of COVID-19 segmentation demonstrated the efficiency of FGDA over competing learning approaches with statistical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Task scheduling is one of the most significant challenges in the cloud computing environment and has attracted the attention of various researchers over the last decades, in order to achieve cost-effective execution and improve resource utilization. The challenge of task scheduling is categorized as a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem, which cannot be tackled with the classical methods, due to their inability to find a near-optimal solution within a reasonable time. Therefore, metaheuristic algorithms have recently been employed to overcome this problem, but these algorithms still suffer from falling into a local minima and from a low convergence speed. Therefore, in this study, a new task scheduler, known as hybrid differential evolution (HDE), is presented as a solution to the challenge of task scheduling in the cloud computing environment. This scheduler is based on two proposed enhancements to the traditional differential evolution. The first improvement is based on improving the scaling factor, to include numerical values generated dynamically and based on the current iteration, in order to improve both the exploration and exploitation operators; the second improvement is intended to improve the exploitation operator of the classical DE, in order to achieve better results in fewer iterations. Multiple tests utilizing randomly generated datasets and the CloudSim simulator were conducted, to demonstrate the efficacy of HDE. In addition, HDE was compared to a variety of heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms, including the slime mold algorithm (SMA), equilibrium optimizer (EO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), classical DE, first come first served (FCFS), round robin (RR) algorithm, and shortest job first (SJF) scheduler. During trials, makespan and total execution time values were acquired for various task sizes, ranging from 100 to 3000. Compared to the other metaheuristic and heuristic algorithms considered, the results of the studies indicated that HDE generated superior outcomes. Consequently, HDE was found to be the most efficient metaheuristic scheduling algorithm among the numerous methods researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a novel physical-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called "Light Spectrum Optimizer (LSO)" for continuous optimization problems. The inspiration for the proposed algorithm is the light dispersions with different angles while passing through rain droplets, causing the meteorological phenomenon of the colorful rainbow spectrum. In order to validate the proposed algorithm, three different experiments are conducted. First, LSO is tested on solving CEC 2005, and the obtained results are compared with a wide range of well-regarded metaheuristics. In the second experiment, LSO is used for solving four CEC competitions in single objective optimization benchmarks (CEC2014, CEC2017, CEC2020, and CEC2022), and its results are compared with eleven well-established and recently-published optimizers, named grey wolf optimizer (GWO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA), evolutionary algorithms like differential evolution (DE), and recently-published optimizers including gradient-based optimizer (GBO), artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO), Runge–Kutta method (RUN) beyond the metaphor, African vultures optimization algorithm (AVOA), equilibrium optimizer (EO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Reptile Search Algorithm (RSA), and slime mold algorithm (SMA). In addition, several engineering design problems are solved, and the results are compared with many algorithms from the literature. The experimental results with the statistical analysis demonstrate the merits and highly superior performance of the proposed LSO algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies in recent decades focused on transforming linear economics into circular through recovering and remanufacturing the products. Circular Economies (CE) aim to minimize the usage of resources by utilizing the waste in production as new or raw materials. Interconnectivity between parties in the industrial system provides decision-makers with rich information and anticipation of failure. Industry 4.0 technologies (I4.0) allow for handling such issues, protecting the environment by utilizing resources efficiently, and restructuring the industry to be smarter as well. This paper contributes to achieving cleaner production (CP), CE, and social for manufacturers through the linkage between 6R methodology with new technologies of I4.0 such as Blockchain technology (BCT) and big data analytical technology (BDA). In this paper, the authors proposed a Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) decision framework based on the best-worst method (BWM), Decision-Making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), Technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS). The authors contributed to addressing the weaknesses and problems of these subjective MCDM methods through the cooperation of the neutrosophic theory with the usage of MCDM methods in this work. In the first stage, all criteria that influence sustainable manufacturer selection are specified using literature research on this topic. BWM-based neutrosophic theory was combined to get the criteria's weights with the aid of DEMATEL-based neutrosophic to obtain the least and best criteria used in BWM in the second stage. The optimal sustainable manufacturer was selected based on TOPSIS and COPRAS under neutrosophic theory in the third and fourth stages, respectively. Furthermore, a case study performed indicated manufacturer 2 (A2) is an optimal sustainable manufacturer in two ranking methods otherwise, manufacturer 4 (A4) is the worst sustainable manufacturer. The contribution of this work is to propose a hybrid MCDM with an uncertainty theory of neutrosophic for sustainable manufacturer selection based BDA-BCT with 6R. Sensitivity analyses were carried out to show the decision's flexibility in various scenarios. Finally, the consequences for management viewpoints were considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber-attacks are getting increasingly complex, and as a result, the functional concerns of intrusion-detection systems (IDSs) are becoming increasingly difficult to resolve. The credibility of security services, such as privacy preservation, authenticity, and accessibility, may be jeopardized if breaches are not detected. Different organizations currently utilize a variety of tactics, strategies, and technology to protect the systems' credibility in order to combat these dangers. Safeguarding approaches include establishing rules and procedures, developing user awareness, deploying firewall and verification systems, regulating system access, and forming computer-issue management groups. The effectiveness of intrusion-detection systems is not sufficiently recognized. IDS is used in businesses to examine possibly harmful tendencies occurring in technological environments. Determining an effective IDS is a complex task for organizations that require consideration of many key criteria and their sub-aspects. To deal with these multiple and interrelated criteria and their sub-aspects, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCMD) approach was applied. These criteria and their sub-aspects can also include some ambiguity and uncertainty, and thus they were treated using q-rung orthopair fuzzy sets (q-ROFS) and q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers (q-ROFNs). Additionally, the problem of combining expert and specialist opinions was dealt with using the q-rung orthopair fuzzy weighted geometric (q-ROFWG). Initially, the entropy method was applied to assess the priorities of the key criteria and their sub-aspects. Then, the combined compromised solution (CoCoSo) method was applied to evaluate six IDSs according to their effectiveness and reliability. Afterward, comparative and sensitivity analyses were performed to confirm the stability, reliability, and performance of the proposed approach. The findings indicate that most of the IDSs appear to be systems with high potential. According to the results, Suricata is the best IDS that relies on multi-threading performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A blockchain, as a form of distributed ledger technology, represents the unanimity of replication, synchronization, and sharing of data among various geographical sites. Blockchains have demonstrated impressive and effective applications throughout many aspects of the business. Blockchain technology can lead to the advent of the construction of Digital Twins (DTs). DTs involve the real representation of physical devices digitally as a virtual representation of both elements and dynamics prior to the building and deployment of actual devices. DT products can be built using blockchain-based technology in order to achieve sustainability. The technology of DT is one of the emerging novel technologies of Industry 4.0, along with artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, the present study adopts intelligent decision-making techniques to conduct a biased analysis of the drivers, barriers, and risks involved in applying blockchain technologies to the sustainable production of DTs. The proposed model illustrates the use of neutrosophic theory to handle the uncertain conditions of real-life situations and the indeterminate cases evolved in decision-makers' judgments and perspectives. In addition, the model applies the analysis of Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods through the use of ordered weighted averaging (OWA) and the Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to achieve optimal rankings for DT production providers based on consistent weighted decision-maker's judgments in order to maintain and to assure sustainability. An empirical study is applied to the uncertain environment to aid decision-makers in achieving ideal decisions for DT providers with respect to various DT challenges, promoting sustainability and determining the best service providers. The Monte Carlo simulation method is used to illustrate, predict, and forecast the importance of the weights of decision-makers' judgments as well as the direct impact on the sustainability of DT production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) have attracted great interest for automatic management of industrial infrastructures, such as water and wastewater systems. A range of technologies can be employed for wastewater treatment CPS to manage risks and protect the infrastructures of water systems and their wastewater against cyberattacks. In this paper, we develop a novel risk assessment framework, named RAF-CPWS, which perfectly estimates the risks of water and wastewater technologies. To do this, a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) approach is designed by neutrosophic theory to assess the risks of wastewater treatment technologies (WWTTs). The proposed approach evaluates the best WWTTs, considering various economic, environmental, technological and cybersecurity, and social factors. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is employed to evaluate the significance of the adopted factors in a real testbed setting. The proposed approach contributes to a comprehensive measure of WWTTs through several factors, revealing its high sustainability and security in assessing the risks of cyber-physical water and wastewater systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the generalized normal distribution algorithm (GNDO) performance for tackling the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP). Because PFSSP is a discrete problem and GNDO generates continuous values, the largest ranked value rule is used to convert those continuous values into discrete ones to make GNDO applicable for solving this discrete problem. Additionally, the discrete GNDO is effectively integrated with a local search strategy to improve the quality of the best-so-far solution in an abbreviated version of HGNDO. More than that, a new improvement using the swap mutation operator applied on the best-so-far solution to avoid being stuck into local optima by accelerating the convergence speed is effectively applied to HGNDO to propose a new version, namely a hybrid-improved GNDO (HIGNDO). Last but not least, the local search strategy is improved using the scramble mutation operator to utilize each trial as ideally as possible for reaching better outcomes. This improved local search strategy is integrated with IGNDO to produce a new strong algorithm abbreviated as IHGNDO. Those proposed algorithms are extensively compared with a number of well-established optimization algorithms using various statistical analyses to estimate the optimal makespan for 41 well-known instances in a reasonable time. The findings show the benefits and speedup of both IHGNDO and HIGNDO over all the compared algorithms, in addition to HGNDO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional selection is a significant task for any organization that aims to select the most appropriate candidates to fill well-defined vacancies up. In the recruitment process, various individual characteristics are involved, such as leadership, analytical skills, independent thinking, innovation, stamina and personality, ambiguity and imprecision. It outlines staff contribution and therefore plays a significant part in human resources administration. Additionally, in the era of the Internet of Things and Big Data (IoTBD), professional selection would face several challenges not only to the safe selection and security but also to make wise and prompt decisions especially in the large-scale candidates and criteria from the Cloud. However, the process of professional selection is often led by experience, which contains vague, ambiguous and uncertain decisions. It is therefore necessary to design an efficient decision-making algorithm, which could be further escalated to IoTBD. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid neutrosophic multi criteria decision making (MCDM) framework that employs a collection of neutrosophic analytical network process (ANP), and order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) under bipolar neutrosophic numbers. The MCDM framework is applied for chief executive officer (CEO) selection in a case study at the Elsewedy Electric Group, Egypt. The proposed approach allows us to assemble individual evaluations of the decision makers and therefore perform accurate personnel selection. The outcomes of the proposed method are compared with those of the related works such as weight sum model (WSM), weight product model (WPM), analytical hierarchy process (AHP), multi-objective optimization based on simple ratio analysis (MOORA) and ANP methods to prove and validate the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is a favorable renewable energy source to overcome environmental pollution and save electricity. However, the mathematical model of the PEMFC contains some unknown parameters which have to be accurately estimated to build an accurate PEMFC model; this problem is known as the parameter estimation of PEMFC and belongs to the optimization problem. Although this problem belongs to the optimization problem, not all optimization algorithms are suitable to solve it because it is a nonlinear and complex problem. Therefore, in this paper, a new optimization algorithm known as the artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO), which simulates the collective intelligence of gorilla troops in nature, is adapted for estimating this problem. However, the GTO is suffering from local optima and low convergence speed problems, so a modification based on replacing its exploitation operator with a new one, relating the exploration and exploitation according to the population diversity in the current iteration, has been performed to improve the exploitation operator in addition to the exploration one. This modified variant, named the modified GTO (MGTO), has been applied for estimating the unknown parameters of three PEMFC stacks, 250 W stack, BCS-500W stack, and SR-12 stack, used widely in the literature, based on minimizing the error between the measured and estimated data points as the objective function. The outcomes obtained by applying the GTO and MGTO on those PEMFC stacks have been extensively compared with those of eight well-known optimization algorithms using various performance analyses, best, average, worst, standard deviation (SD), CPU time, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean absolute error (MAE), in addition to the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, to show which one is the best for solving this problem. The experimental findings show that MGTO is the best for all performance metrics, but CPU time is competitive among all algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the incorporation of solar panels in many applications is a booming trend, which necessitates accurate simulations and analysis of their performance under different operating conditions for further decision making. In this paper, various optimization algorithms are addressed comprehensively through a comparative study and further discussions for extracting the unknown parameters. Efficient use of the iterations within the optimization process may help meta-heuristic algorithms in accelerating convergence plus attaining better accuracy for the final outcome. In this paper, a method, namely, the premature convergence method (PCM), is proposed to boost the convergence of meta-heuristic algorithms with significant improvement in their accuracies. PCM is based on updating the current position around the best-so-far solution with two-step sizes: the first is based on the distance between two individuals selected randomly from the population to encourage the exploration capability, and the second is based on the distance between the current position and the best-so-far solution to promote exploitation. In addition, PCM uses a weight variable, known also as a controlling factor, as a trade-off between the two-step sizes. The proposed method is integrated with three well-known meta-heuristic algorithms to observe its efficacy for estimating efficiently and effectively the unknown parameters of the single diode model (SDM). In addition, an RTC France Si solar cell, and three PV modules, namely, Photowatt-PWP201, Ultra 85-P, and STM6-40/36, are investigated with the improved algorithms and selected standard approaches to compare their performances in estimating the unknown parameters for those different types of PV cells and modules. The experimental results point out the efficacy of the PCM in accelerating the convergence speed with improved final outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a modified flower pollination algorithm (MFPA) is proposed to improve the performance of the classical algorithm and to tackle the nonlinear equation systems widely used in engineering and science fields. In addition, the differential evolution (DE) is integrated with MFPA to strengthen its exploration operator in a new variant called HFPA. Those two algorithms were assessed using 23 well-known mathematical unimodal and multimodal test functions and 27 well-known nonlinear equation systems, and the obtained outcomes were extensively compared with those of eight well-known metaheuristic algorithms under various statistical analyses and the convergence curve. The experimental findings show that both MFPA and HFPA are competitive together and, compared to the others, they could be superior and competitive for most test cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient and accurate estimations of unidentified parameters of photovoltaic (PV) models are essential to their simulation. This study suggests two new variants of the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) for identifying the nine parameters of the three-diode PV model. The first variant abbreviated as RWOA is based on integrating the WOA with ranking methods under a novel updating scheme to utilize each whale within the population as much as possible during the optimization process. The second variant, namely HWOA, has been based on employing a novel cyclic exploration-exploitation operator with the RWOA to promote its local and global search for averting stagnation into local minima and accelerating the convergence speed in the right direction of the near-optimal solution. Experimentally, RWOA and HWOA are validated on a solar cell (RTC France) and two PV modules (Photowatt-PWP201 and Kyocera KC200GT). Further, these proposed variants are compared with five well-known parameter extraction models in order to demonstrate their notable advantages over the other existing competing algorithms for minimizing the root mean squared error (RMSE) between experimentally measured data and estimated one. The experimental findings show that RWOA is superior in some observed cases and superior in the other cases in terms of final accuracy and convergence speed; yet, HWOA is superior in all cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of sustainable green buildings (GBs) is a major contribution to the preservation of the environment. Sustainable thinking in GB construction is not a supplementary element, but rather necessary to achieve the building's functional, economic, and environmental efficiency in order to preserve resources and meet current and future needs. In particular, developing countries can apply the idea of sustainability in GBs by following international policies and standards, combined with their local characteristics, to construct GBs that are aligned with the environment and are in line with the available local capabilities and resources. The paper focuses on the dimensions and indicators of sustainable design for GBs in developing countries to achieve the positive dimensions of building sustainability, such as preserving energy and natural resources, water management, adaptation to the surrounding environment, and respecting the needs of its users. We assess and prioritize the dimensions and indicators of GBs through the use of a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method under a neutrosophic environment. Initially, the Delphi method is employed to capture preference and to determine the dimensions and their indicators in addition to provide preference among sub-indicators. The relative importance of the selected dimensions and indicators is assessed through the analytical hierarchy method (AHP) method. The results indicate that the water efficiency dimension is the most significant, with a weight of 0.330, while the energy efficiency dimension is the least significant for GBs in developing countries, with a weight of 0.100. The paper concludes with a set of administrative implications for applying sustainable development strategies in GBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key challenges in cyber-physical systems (CPS) is the dynamic fitting of data sources under multivariate or mixture distribution models to determine abnormalities. Equations of the models have been statistically characterized as nonlinear and non-Gaussian ones, where data have high variations between normal and suspicious data distributions. To address nonlinear equations of these distributions, a cuckoo search algorithm is employed. In this paper, the cuckoo search algorithm is effectively improved with a novel strategy, known as a convergence speed strategy, to accelerate the convergence speed in the direction of the optimal solution for achieving better outcomes in a small number of iterations when solving systems of nonlinear equations. The proposed algorithm is named an improved cuckoo search algorithm (ICSA), which accelerates the convergence speed by improving the fitness values of function evaluations compared to the existing algorithms. To assess the efficacy of ICSA, 34 common nonlinear equations that fit the nature of cybersecurity models are adopted to show if ICSA can reach better outcomes with high convergence speed or not. ICSA has been compared with several well-known, well-established optimization algorithms, such as the slime mould optimizer, salp swarm, cuckoo search, marine predators, bat, and flower pollination algorithms. Experimental outcomes have revealed that ICSA is superior to the other in terms of the convergence speed and final accuracy, and this makes a promising alternative to the existing algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To simulate the behaviors of photovoltaic (PV) systems properly, the best values of the uncertain parameters of the PV models must be identified. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel optimization framework for estimating the parameters of the triple-diode model (TDM) of PV units with different technologies. The proposed methodology is based on the generalized normal distribution optimization (GNDO) with two novel strategies: (i) a premature convergence method (PCM), and (ii) a ranking-based updating method (RUM) to accelerate the convergence by utilizing each individual in the population as much as possible. This improved version of GNDO is called ranking-based generalized normal distribution optimization (RGNDO). RGNDO is experimentally investigated on three commercial PV modules (Kyocera KC200GT, Ultra 85-P and STP 6-120/36) and a solar unit (RTC Si solar cell France), and its extracted parameters are validated based on the measured dataset points extracted at generalized operating conditions. It can be reported here that the best scores of the objective function are equal to 0.750839 mA, 28.212810 mA, 2.417084 mA, and 13.798273 mA for RTC cell, KC200GT, Ultra 85-P, and STP 6-120/36; respectively. Additionally, the principal performance of this methodology is evaluated under various statistical tests and for convergence speed, and is compared with a number of the well-known recent state-of-the-art algorithms. RGNDO is shown to outperform the other algorithms in terms of all the statistical metrics as well as convergence speed. Finally, the performance of the RGNDO is validated in various operating conditions under varied temperatures and sun irradiance levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reverse logistics (RL) is considered the reverse manner of gathering and redeploying goods at the end of their lifetime span from consumers to manufacturers in order to reutilize, dispose, or remanufacture. Whereas RL has many economic benefits, it presents compromises to businesses that wish to remain competitive but be responsible global citizens in terms of social, environmental, risk, and safety aspects of sustainable development. Managing RL systems therefore is considered a multifaceted mission that necessities a significant level of technology, infrastructure, experience, and competence. Consequently, various commerce institutions are looking to outsourcing their RL actions to third-party reverse logistics providers (3PRLPs). In this work, a novel hybrid multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework is proposed to classify and choose 3PRLPs, which comprises the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique, and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) technique under neutrosophic environment. Accordingly, AHP is availed for defining weights of key dimensions and their subindices. In addition, TOPSIS was adopted for ranking the specified 3PRLPs. The efficiency of the proposed approach is clarified through application on a considered car parts manufacturing industry case in Egypt, which shows the features of the combined MCDM methods. A comparative and sensitivity analyses were performed to highlight the benefits of the incorporated MCDM methods and for clarifying the effect of changing weights in selecting the sustainable 3PRLP alternative, respectively. The suggested framework is also shown to present more functional execution when dealing with uncertainties and qualitative inputs, demonstrating applicability to a broad range of applications. Ultimately, the best sustainable 3PRLPs were selected and results show that social, environmental, and risk and safety sustainability factors have the greatest influence when determining 3PRLPs alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimization of photovoltaic (PV) systems relies on the development of an accurate model of the parameter values for the solar/PV generating units. This work proposes a modified artificial jellyfish search optimizer (MJSO) with a novel premature convergence strategy (PCS) to define effectively the unknown parameters of PV systems. The PCS works on preserving the diversity among the members of the population while accelerating the convergence toward the best solution based on two motions: (i) moving the current solution between two particles selected randomly from the population, and (ii) searching for better solutions between the best-so-far one and a random one from the population. To confirm its efficacy, the proposed method is validated on three different PV technologies and is being compared with some of the latest competitive computational frameworks. The numerical simulations and results confirm the dominance of the proposed algorithm in terms of the accuracy of the final results and convergence rate. In addition, to assess the performance of the proposed approach under different operation conditions for the solar cells, two additional PV modules (multi-crystalline and thin-film) are investigated, and the demonstrated scenarios highlight the utility of the proposed MJSO-based methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, a new approach for tackling the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) is proposed. This algorithm is based on the steps of the elitism continuous genetic algorithm improved by two strategies and used the largest rank value (LRV) rule to transform the continuous values into discrete ones for enabling of solving the combinatorial PFSSP. The first strategy is combining the arithmetic crossover with the uniform crossover to give the algorithm a high capability on exploitation in addition to reducing stuck into local minima. The second one is re-initializing an individual selected randomly from the population to increase the exploration for avoiding stuck into local minima. Afterward, those two strategies are combined with the proposed algorithm to produce an improved one known as the improved efficient genetic algorithm (IEGA). To increase the exploitation capability of the IEGA, it is hybridized a local search strategy in a version abbreviated as HIEGA. HIEGA and IEGA are validated on three common benchmarks and compared with a number of well-known robust evolutionary and meta-heuristic algorithms to check their efficacy. The experimental results show that HIEGA and IEGA are competitive with others for the datasets incorporated in the comparison, such as Carlier, Reeves, and Heller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chain sustainability has become one of the most attractive decision management topics. There are many articles that have focused on this field presenting many different points of view. This research is centred on the evaluation of supply chain sustainability based on two critical dimensions. The first is the importance of evaluation metrics based on economic, environmental and social aspects, and the second is the degree of difficulty of information gathering. This paper aims to increase the accuracy of the evaluation. The proposed method is a combination of quality function deployment (QFD) with plithogenic aggregation operations. The aggregation operation is applied to aggregate: Firstly, the decision maker's opinions of requirements that are needed to evaluate the supply chain sustainability; secondly, the evaluation metrics based on the requirements; and lastly, the evaluation of information gathering difficulty. To validate the proposed model, this study presented a real world case study of Thailand's sugar industry. The results showed the most preferred and the lowest preferred metrics in order to evaluate the sustainability of the supply chain strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many companies have observed the significant benefits they can get via using internet. Since then, large companies have been able to develop business transactions with customers at anytime, anywhere, and in relation to anything, so that we now need a more comprehensive concept than the internet. This concept is the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT will influence decision making style in various phases of selling, buying and marketing process. Therefore, every individual and company should know precisely what IoT is, and how and why they should incorporate it in their operations. This motivated us to propose a smart system based on IoT to help companies and marketers make a powerful marketing strategy via utilizing obtained data from IoT devices. Not only this, but the proposed system can also solve the problems which face companies and customers in online shopping. Since there are different types of the same product, and also different criteria for purchasing which can be different between individuals, customers will need a decision support system to recommend them with the best selection. This motivates us to also propose a neutrsophic technique to deal with unclear and conflicting information which exists usually in the purchasing process. Therefore, the smart system and neutrosophic technique is considered as a comprehensive system which links between customers, companies, marketers to achieve satisfaction for each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research introduces a neutrosophic forecasting approach based on neutrosophic time series (NTS). Historical data can be transformed into neutrosophic time series data to determine their truth, indeterminacy and falsity functions. The basis for the neutrosophication process is the score and accuracy functions of historical data. In addition, neutrosophic logical relationship groups (NLRGs) are determined and a deneutrosophication method for NTS is presented. The objective of this research is to suggest an idea of first-and high-order NTS. By comparing our approach with other approaches, we conclude that the suggested approach of forecasting gets better results compared to the other existing approaches of fuzzy, intuitionistic fuzzy, and neutrosophic time series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most significant competitive strategies for organizations is sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). The vital part in the administration of a sustainable supply chain is the sustainable supplier selection, which is a multi-criteria decision-making issue, including many conflicting criteria. The valuation and selection of sustainable suppliers are difficult problems due to vague, inconsistent and imprecise knowledge of decision makers. In the literature on supply chain management for measuring green performance, the requirement for methodological analysis of how sustainable variables affect each other, and how to consider vague, imprecise and inconsistent knowledge, is still unresolved. This research provides an incorporated multi-criteria decision-making procedure for sustainable supplier selection problems (SSSPs). An integrated framework is presented via interval-valued neutrosophic sets to deal with vague, imprecise and inconsistent information that exists usually in real world. The analytic network process (ANP) is employed to calculate weights of selected criteria by considering their interdependencies. For ranking alternatives and avoiding additional comparisons of analytic network processes, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used. The proposed framework is turned to account for analyzing and selecting the optimal supplier. An actual case study of a dairy company in Egypt is examined within the proposed framework. Comparison with other existing methods is implemented to confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every organization seeks to set strategies for its development and growth and to do this, it must take into account the factors that affect its success or failure. The most widely used technique in strategic planning is SWOT analysis. SWOT examines strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O) and threats (T), to select and implement the best strategy to achieve organizational goals. The chosen strategy should harness the advantages of strengths and opportunities, handle weaknesses, and avoid or mitigate threats. SWOT analysis does not quantify factors (i.e., strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and it fails to rank available alternatives. To overcome this drawback, we integrated it with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The AHP is able to determine both quantitative and the qualitative elements by weighting and ranking them via comparison matrices. Due to the vague and inconsistent information that exists in the real world, we applied the proposed model in a neutrosophic environment. A real case study of Starbucks Company was presented to validate our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big Data is a large-sized and complex dataset, which cannot be managed using traditional data processing tools. Mining process of big data is the ability to extract valuable information from these large datasets. Association rule mining is a type of data mining process, which is indented to determine interesting associations between items and to establish a set of association rules whose support is greater than a specific threshold. The classical association rules can only be extracted from binary data where an item exists in a transaction, but it fails to deal effectively with quantitative attributes, through decreasing the quality of generated association rules due to sharp boundary problems. In order to overcome the drawbacks of classical association rule mining, we propose in this research a new neutrosophic association rule algorithm. The algorithm uses a new approach for generating association rules by dealing with membership, indeterminacy, and non-membership functions of items, conducting to an efficient decision-making system by considering all vague association rules. To prove the validity of the method, we compare the fuzzy mining and the neutrosophic mining. The results show that the proposed approach increases the number of generated association rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]