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Blockchain technology was bestowed through bitcoin; research has continuously stretched out its applications in different sectors, proving blockchain as a versatile technology expanded in non-financial use cases. In the healthcare industry, blockchain is relied upon to have critical effects. Although exploration here is generally new yet developing quickly, along these lines, researchers in computer science, healthcare information technology, and professionals are continually geared to stay up with research progress. The study presents an exhaustive study on blockchain as a technology in depth from all possible perspectives and its adoption in the healthcare sector. A mapping study has been conducted to search different scientific databases to identify the existing challenges in healthcare management systems and to analyze the existing blockchain-based healthcare applications. Though blockchain has inherent highlights, such as distributed ledger, encryption, consensus, and immutability, blockchain adoption in healthcare has challenges. This paper also provides insights into the research challenges in blockchain and proposes solution taxonomy through comparative analysis.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most prominent fields in autonomous vehicles (AVs). With the help of AI, the stress levels of drivers have been reduced, as most of the work is executed by the AV itself. With the increasing complexity of models, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques work as handy tools that allow naive people and developers to understand the intricate workings of deep learning models. These techniques can be paralleled to AI to increase their interpretability. One essential task of AVs is to be able to follow the road. This paper attempts to justify how AVs can detect and segment the road on which they are moving using deep learning (DL) models. We trained and compared three semantic segmentation architectures for the task of pixel-wise road detection. Max IoU scores of 0.9459 and 0.9621 were obtained on the train and test set. Such DL algorithms are called “black box models” as they are hard to interpret due to their highly complex structures. Integrating XAI enables us to interpret and comprehend the predictions of these abstract models. We applied various XAI methods and generated explanations for the proposed segmentation model for road detection in AVs.

A coronavirus outbreak caused by a novel virus known as SARS-CoV-2 originated towards the latter half of 2019. COVID-19’s abrupt emergence and unchecked global expansion highlight the inability of the current healthcare services to respond to public health emergencies promptly. This paper reviews the different aspects of human life comprehensively affected by COVID-19. It then discusses various tools and technologies from the leading domains and their integration into people’s lives to overcome issues resulting from pandemics. This paper further focuses on providing a detailed review of existing and probable Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Blockchain-based solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic brings several challenges from the viewpoint of the nation’s healthcare, security, privacy, and economy. AI offers different predictive services and intelligent strategies for detecting coronavirus signs, promoting drug development, remote healthcare, classifying fake news detection, and security attacks. The incorporation of AI in the COVID-19 outbreak brings robust and reliable solutions to enhance the healthcare systems, increases user’s life expectancy, and boosts the nation’s economy. Furthermore, AR/VR helps in distance learning, factory automation, and setting up an environment of work from home. Blockchain helps in protecting consumer’s privacy, and securing the medical supply chain operations. IoT is helpful in remote patient monitoring, distant sanitising via drones, managing social distancing (using IoT cameras), and many more in combating the pandemic. This study covers an up-to-date analysis on the use of blockchain technology, AI, AR/VR, and IoT for combating COVID-19 pandemic considering various applications. These technologies provide new emerging initiatives and use cases to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we discuss challenges and potential research paths that will promote further research into future pandemic outbreaks.

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has emerged as a potential Internet architecture that supports name-based content retrieval mechanism in contrast to the current host location-oriented IP architecture. The in-network caching capability of CCN ensures higher content availability, lesser network delay, and leads to server load reduction. It was observed that caching the contents on each intermediate node does not use the network resources efficiently. Hence, efficient content caching decisions are crucial to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) for the end-user devices and improved network performance. Towards this, a novel content caching scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme first clusters the network nodes based on the hop count and bandwidth parameters to reduce content redundancy and caching operations. Then, the scheme takes content placement decisions using the cluster information, content popularity, and the hop count parameters, where the caching probability improves as the content traversed toward the requester. Hence, using the proposed heuristics, the popular contents are placed near the edges of the network to achieve a high cache hit ratio. Once the cache becomes full, the scheme implements Least-Frequently-Used (LFU) replacement scheme to substitute the least accessed content in the network routers. Extensive simulations are conducted and the performance of the proposed scheme is investigated under different network parameters that demonstrate the superiority of the proposed strategy w.r.t the peer competing strategies.

The escalated growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has started to reform and reshape our lives. The deployment of a large number of objects adhered to the internet has unlocked the vision of the smart world around us, thereby paving a road towards automation and humongous data generation and collection. This automation and continuous explosion of personal and professional information to the digital world provides a potent ground to the adversaries to perform numerous cyber-attacks, thus making security in IoT a sizeable concern. Hence, timely detection and prevention of such threats are pre-requisites to prevent serious consequences. The survey conducted provides a brief insight into the technology with prime attention towards the various attacks and anomalies and their detection based on the intelligent intrusion detection system (IDS). The comprehensive look-over presented in this paper provides an in-depth analysis and assessment of diverse machine learning and deep learning-based network intrusion detection system (NIDS). Additionally, a case study of healthcare in IoT is presented. The study depicts the architecture, security, and privacy issues and application of learning paradigms in this sector. The research assessment is finally concluded by listing the results derived from the literature. Additionally, the paper discusses numerous research challenges to allow further rectifications in the approaches to deal with unusual complications.

The lifetime of a node in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is directly responsible for the longevity of the wireless network. The routing of packets is the most energy-consuming activity for a sensor node. Thus, finding an energy-efficient routing strategy for transmission of packets becomes of utmost importance. The opportunistic routing (OR) protocol is one of the new routing protocol that promises reliability and energy efficiency during transmission of packets in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this paper, we propose an intelligent opportunistic routing protocol (IOP) using a machine learning technique, to select a relay node from the list of potential forwarder nodes to achieve energy efficiency and reliability in the network. The proposed approach might have applications including e-healthcare services. As the proposed method might achieve reliability in the network because it can connect several healthcare network devices in a better way and good healthcare services might be offered. In addition to this, the proposed method saves energy, therefore, it helps the remote patient to connect with healthcare services for a longer duration with the integration of IoT services.

In this paper, the historical power load data from the National Electricity Market (Australia) is used to analyze the characteristics and regulations of electricity (the average value of every eight hours). Then, considering the inverse of Euclidean distance as the weight, this paper proposes a novel short-term load forecasting model based on the weighted k-nearest neighbor algorithm to receive higher satisfied accuracy. In addition, the forecasting errors are compared with the back-propagation neural network model and the autoregressive moving average model. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed forecasting model could reflect variation trend and has good fitting ability in short-term load forecasting.

For operational management of power plants, it is desirable to possess more precise short-term load forecasting results to guarantee the power supply and load dispatch. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm have been successfully hybridized with the support vector regression (SVR) to produce satisfactory forecasting performance in previous studies. Decomposed intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), could be further defined as three items: item A contains the random term and the middle term; item B contains the middle term and the trend (residual) term, and item C contains the middle terms only, where the random term represents the high-frequency part of the electric load data, the middle term represents the multiple-frequency part, and the trend term represents the low-frequency part. These three items would be modeled separately by the SVR-PSO model, and the final forecasting results could be calculated as A+B-C (the defined item D). Consequently, this paper proposes a novel electric load forecasting model, namely H-EMD-SVR-PSO model, by hybridizing these three defined items to improve the forecasting accuracy. Based on electric load data from the Australian electricity market, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed H-EMD-SVR-PSO model receives more satisfied forecasting performance than other compared models.

Electric load forecasting is an important issue for a power utility, associated with the management of daily operations such as energy transfer scheduling, unit commitment, and load dispatch. Inspired by strong non-linear learning capability of support vector regression (SVR), this paper presents a SVR model hybridized with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method and auto regression (AR) for electric load forecasting. The electric load data of the New South Wales (Australia) market are employed for comparing the forecasting performances of different forecasting models. The results confirm the validity of the idea that the proposed model can simultaneously provide forecasting with good accuracy and interpretability.

Accurate electric load forecasting has become the most important issue in energy management; however, electric load demonstrates a seasonal/cyclic tendency from economic activities or the cyclic nature of climate. The applications of the support vector regression (SVR) model to deal with seasonal/cyclic electric load forecasting have not been widely explored. The purpose of this paper is to present a SVR model which combines the seasonal adjustment mechanism and a chaotic immune algorithm (namely SSVRCIA) to forecast monthly electric loads. Based on the operation procedure of the immune algorithm (IA), if the population diversity of an initial population cannot be maintained under selective pressure, then IA could only seek for the solutions in the narrow space and the solution is far from the global optimum (premature convergence). The proposed chaotic immune algorithm (CIA) based on the chaos optimization algorithm and IA, which diversifies the initial definition domain in stochastic optimization procedures, is used to overcome the premature local optimum issue in determining three parameters of a SVR model. A numerical example from an existing reference is used to elucidate the forecasting performance of the proposed SSVRCIA model. The forecasting results indicate that the proposed model yields more accurate forecasting results than the ARIMA and TF-ε-SVR-SA models, and therefore the SSVRCIA model is a promising alternative for electric load forecasting.

Compared with a large power grid, a microgrid electric load (MEL) has the characteristics of strong nonlinearity, multiple factors, and large fluctuation, which lead to it being difficult to receive more accurate forecasting performances. To solve the abovementioned characteristics of a MEL time series, the least squares support vector machine (LS-SVR) hybridizing with meta-heuristic algorithms is applied to simulate the nonlinear system of a MEL time series. As it is known that the fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA) has several embedded drawbacks that lead to problems, this paper applies a quantum computing mechanism (QCM) to empower each fruit fly to possess quantum behavior during the searching processes, i.e., a QFOA algorithm. Eventually, the cat chaotic mapping function is introduced into the QFOA algorithm, namely CQFOA, to implement the chaotic global perturbation strategy to help fruit flies to escape from the local optima while the population’s diversity is poor. Finally, a new MEL forecasting method, namely the LS-SVR-CQFOA model, is established by hybridizing the LS-SVR model with CQFOA. The experimental results illustrate that, in three datasets, the proposed LS-SVR-CQFOA model is superior to other alternative models, including BPNN (back-propagation neural networks), LS-SVR-CQPSO (LS-SVR with chaotic quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm), LS-SVR-CQTS (LS-SVR with chaotic quantum tabu search algorithm), LS-SVR-CQGA (LS-SVR with chaotic quantum genetic algorithm), LS-SVR-CQBA (LS-SVR with chaotic quantum bat algorithm), LS-SVR-FOA, and LS-SVR-QFOA models, in terms of forecasting accuracy indexes. In addition, it passes the significance test at a 97.5% confidence level.

Along with the high growth rate of economy and fast increasing air pollution, clean energy, such as the natural gas, has played an important role in preventing the environment from discharge of greenhouse gases and harmful substances in China. It is very important to accurately forecast the demand of natural gas in China is for the government to formulate energy policies. This paper firstly proposes a combined forecasting model, name GM-S-SIGM-GA model, to forecast the demand of natural gas in China from 2011 to 2017, by constructing the grey model (GM(1,1)) and the self-adapting intelligent grey model (SIGM), respectively; then, it employs a genetic algorithm to determine the combined weight coefficients between these two models. Finally, using the tendency index (the annual changes of the share of natural gas consumption from the total energy consumption), which completely reveal the annual natural gas consumption share among the market, to successfully adjust the fluctuated changes for each data period. The natural gas demand data from 2002 to 2010 in China are used to model the proposed GM-S-SIGM-GA model, and the data from 2011 to 2017 are used to evaluate the forecasting accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GM-S-SIGM-GA model is superior to other single forecasting models in terms of the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE; 4.48%), the root mean square error (RMSE; 11.59), and the mean absolute error (MAE; 8.41), respectively, and the forecasting performances also receive the statistical significance under 97.5% and 95% confident levels, respectively.

Providing accurate electric load forecasting results plays a crucial role in daily energy management of the power supply system. Due to superior forecasting performance, the hybridizing support vector regression (SVR) model with evolutionary algorithms has received attention and deserves to continue being explored widely. The cuckoo search (CS) algorithm has the potential to contribute more satisfactory electric load forecasting results. However, the original CS algorithm suffers from its inherent drawbacks, such as parameters that require accurate setting, loss of population diversity, and easy trapping in local optima (i.e., premature convergence). Therefore, proposing some critical improvement mechanisms and employing an improved CS algorithm to determine suitable parameter combinations for an SVR model is essential. This paper proposes the SVR with chaotic cuckoo search (SVRCCS) model based on using a tent chaotic mapping function to enrich the cuckoo search space and diversify the population to avoid trapping in local optima. In addition, to deal with the cyclic nature of electric loads, a seasonal mechanism is combined with the SVRCCS model, namely giving a seasonal SVR with chaotic cuckoo search (SSVRCCS) model, to produce more accurate forecasting performances. The numerical results, tested by using the datasets from the National Electricity Market (NEM, Queensland, Australia) and the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO, NY, USA), show that the proposed SSVRCCS model outperforms other alternative models.

As a kind of clean and renewable energy, wind power is winning more and more attention across the world. Regarding wind power utilization, safety is a core concern and such concern has led to many studies on predicting wind speed. To obtain a more accurate prediction of the wind speed, this paper adopts a new hybrid forecasting model, combing empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the general regression neural network (GRNN) optimized by the fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA). In this new model, the original wind speed series are first decomposed into a collection of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue. Next, the inherent relationship (partial correlation) of the datasets is analyzed, and the results are then used to select the input for the forecasting model. Finally, the GRNN with the FOA to optimize the smoothing factor is used to predict each sub-series. The mean absolute percentage error of the forecasting results in two cases are respectively 8.95% and 9.87%, suggesting that the hybrid approach outperforms the compared models, which provides guidance for future wind speed forecasting.

Hybridizing evolutionary algorithms with a support vector regression (SVR) model to conduct the electric load forecasting has demonstrated the superiorities in forecasting accuracy improvements. The recently proposed bat algorithm (BA), compared with classical GA and PSO algorithm, has greater potential in forecasting accuracy improvements. However, the original BA still suffers from the embedded drawbacks, including trapping in local optima and premature convergence. Hence, to continue exploring possible improvements of the original BA and to receive more appropriate parameters of an SVR model, this paper applies quantum computing mechanism to empower each bat to possess quantum behavior, then, employs the chaotic mapping function to execute the global chaotic disturbance process, to enlarge bat’s search space and to make the bat jump out from the local optima when population is over accumulation. This paper presents a novel load forecasting approach, namely SVRCQBA model, by hybridizing the SVR model with the quantum computing mechanism, chaotic mapping function, and BA, to receive higher forecasting accuracy. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SVRCQBA model is superior to other alternative models in terms of forecasting accuracy.

Providing accurate load forecasting plays an important role for effective management operations of a power utility. When considering the superiority of support vector regression (SVR) in terms of non-linear optimization, this paper proposes a novel SVR-based load forecasting model, namely EMD-PSO-GA-SVR, by hybridizing the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) with two evolutionary algorithms, i.e., particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). The EMD approach is applied to decompose the load data pattern into sequent elements, with higher and lower frequencies. The PSO, with global optimizing ability, is employed to determine the three parameters of a SVR model with higher frequencies. On the contrary, for lower frequencies, the GA, which is based on evolutionary rules of selection and crossover, is used to select suitable values of the three parameters. Finally, the load data collected from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) in the United States of America (USA) and the New South Wales (NSW) in the Australian electricity market are used to construct the proposed model and to compare the performances among different competitive forecasting models. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model that it can provide more accurate forecasting results and the interpretability than others.

Stable and accurate forecasting of icing thickness is of great significance for the safe operation of the power grid. In order to improve the robustness and accuracy of such forecasting, this paper proposes an innovative combination forecasting model using a modified Back Propagation Neural Network-Support Vector Machine-Extreme Learning Machine with Kernel (BPNN-SVM-KELM) based on the variance-covariance (VC) weight determination method. Firstly, the initial weights and thresholds of BPNN are optimized by mind evolutionary computation (MEC) to prevent the BPNN from falling into local optima and speed up its convergence. Secondly, a bat algorithm (BA) is utilized to optimize the key parameters of SVM. Thirdly, the kernel function is introduced into an extreme learning machine (ELM) to improve the regression prediction accuracy of the model. Lastly, after adopting the above three modified models to predict, the variance-covariance weight determination method is applied to combine the forecasting results. Through performance verification of the model by real-world examples, the results show that the forecasting accuracy of the three individual modified models proposed in this paper has been improved, but the stability is poor, whereas the combination forecasting method proposed in this paper is not only accurate, but also stable. As a result, it can provide technical reference for the safety management of power grid.

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The power industry is the main battlefield of CO2 emission reduction, which plays an important role in the implementation and development of the low carbon economy. The forecasting of electricity demand can provide a scientific basis for the country to formulate a power industry development strategy and further promote the sustained, healthy and rapid development of the national economy. Under the goal of low-carbon economy, medium and long term electricity demand forecasting will have very important practical significance. In this paper, a new hybrid electricity demand model framework is characterized as follows: firstly, integration of grey relation degree (GRD) with induced ordered weighted harmonic averaging operator (IOWHA) to propose a new weight determination method of hybrid forecasting model on basis of forecasting accuracy as induced variables is presented; secondly, utilization of the proposed weight determination method to construct the optimal hybrid forecasting model based on extreme learning machine (ELM) forecasting model and multiple regression (MR) model; thirdly, three scenarios in line with the level of realization of various carbon emission targets and dynamic simulation of effect of low-carbon economy on future electricity demand are discussed. The resulting findings show that, the proposed model outperformed and concentrated some monomial forecasting models, especially in boosting the overall instability dramatically. In addition, the development of a low-carbon economy will increase the demand for electricity, and have an impact on the adjustment of the electricity demand structure.

Due to the electricity market deregulation and integration of renewable resources, electrical load forecasting is becoming increasingly important for the Chinese government in recent years. The electric load cannot be exactly predicted only by a single model, because the short-term electric load is disturbed by several external factors, leading to the characteristics of volatility and instability. To end this, this paper proposes a hybrid model based on wavelet transform (WT) and least squares support vector machine (LSSVM), which is optimized by an improved cuckoo search (CS). To improve the accuracy of prediction, the WT is used to eliminate the high frequency components of the previous day’s load data. Additional, the Gauss disturbance is applied to the process of establishing new solutions based on CS to improve the convergence speed and search ability. Finally, the parameters of the LSSVM model are optimized by using the improved cuckoo search. According to the research outcome, the result of the implementation demonstrates that the hybrid model can be used in the short-term forecasting of the power system.

Electric load forecasting is an important issue for a power utility, associated with the management of daily operations such as energy transfer scheduling, unit commitment, and load dispatch. Inspired by strong non-linear learning capability of support vector regression (SVR), this paper presents an SVR model hybridized with the differential empirical mode decomposition (DEMD) method and quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm (QPSO) for electric load forecasting. The DEMD method is employed to decompose the electric load to several detail parts associated with high frequencies (intrinsic mode function—IMF) and an approximate part associated with low frequencies. Hybridized with quantum theory to enhance particle searching performance, the so-called QPSO is used to optimize the parameters of SVR. The electric load data of the New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) market and the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO, New York, USA) are used for comparing the forecasting performances of different forecasting models. The results illustrate the validity of the idea that the proposed model can simultaneously provide forecasting with good accuracy and interpretability.

This paper proposes a new electric load forecasting model by hybridizing the fuzzy time series (FTS) and global harmony search algorithm (GHSA) with least squares support vector machines (LSSVM), namely GHSA-FTS-LSSVM model. Firstly, the fuzzy c-means clustering (FCS) algorithm is used to calculate the clustering center of each cluster. Secondly, the LSSVM is applied to model the resultant series, which is optimized by GHSA. Finally, a real-world example is adopted to test the performance of the proposed model. In this investigation, the proposed model is verified using experimental datasets from the Guangdong Province Industrial Development Database, and results are compared against autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and other algorithms hybridized with LSSVM including genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), harmony search, and so on. The forecasting results indicate that the proposed GHSA-FTS-LSSVM model effectively generates more accurate predictive results.