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Personnel selection is a critical obstacle that influences the success of the enterprise. The complexity of personnel selection is to determine efficiently the proper applicantion to fulfill enterprise requirements. The decision makers do their best to match enterprise requirements with the most suitable applicant. Unfortunately, the numerous criterions, alternatives, and goals make the process of choosing among several applicants is very complex and confusing to decision making. The environment of decision making is a multi-criteria decision making surrounded by inconsistency and uncertainty. This paper contributes to support personnel selection process by integrating neutrosophic analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) to illustrate an ideal solution amongst different alternatives. A case study on smart village Cairo Egypt is developed based on decision maker's judgments recommendations. The proposed study applies neutrosophic AHP and TOPSIS to enhance the traditional methods of personnel selection to achieve the ideal solutions. By reaching the ideal solutions, the smart village will enhance the resource management for attaining the goals to be a successful enterprise. The proposed method demonstrates a great impact on the personnel selection process rather than the traditional decision-making methods.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of everyday objects that make us live in the era of the IoT. The spatial characteristics of things around us can be considered the reins of the IoT operability. In other words, the spatial variation of a thing can be the core of the IoT reaction. For example, the spatial variation in crop indicates the requirement and characteristic of agriculture production. Also, the spatial variation of a human movement can alarm the security and monitoring systems. This issue agitates the contemplating of the “Internet of Spatial Things (IoST)” concept. For the first time, this paper draws an inspiration towards the perspective vision of the IoST, which is concerned with revise IoT with the spatial perspective. The IoST concept is argued by the presentation of its definition and architectural components. Besides, the IoST layers are discussed in details. Furthermore, a new proposed reference model of the IoST is proposed. Finally, the new trends and open issues regarding the IoST are aroused.

A large community of research has been developed in recent years to analyze social media and social networks, with the aim of understanding, discovering insights, and exploiting the available information. The focus has shifted from conventional polarity classification to contemporary application-oriented fine-grained aspects such as, emotions, sarcasm, stance, rumor, and hate speech detection in the user-generated content. Detecting a sarcastic tone in natural language hinders the performance of sentiment analysis tasks. The majority of the studies on automatic sarcasm detection emphasize on the use of lexical, syntactic, or pragmatic features that are often unequivocally expressed through figurative literary devices such as words, emoticons, and exclamation marks. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model called sAtt-BLSTM convNet that is based on the hybrid of soft attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (sAtt-BLSTM) and convolution neural network (convNet) applying global vectors for word representation (GLoVe) for building semantic word embeddings. In addition to the feature maps generated by the sAtt-BLSTM, punctuation-based auxiliary features are also merged into the convNet. The robustness of the proposed model is investigated using balanced (tweets from benchmark SemEval 2015 Task 11) and unbalanced (approximately 40000 random tweets using the Sarcasm Detector tool with 15000 sarcastic and 25000 non-sarcastic messages) datasets. An experimental study using the training- and test-set accuracy metrics is performed to compare the proposed deep neural model with convNet, LSTM, and bidirectional LSTM with/without attention and it is observed that the novel sAtt-BLSTM convNet model outperforms others with a superior sarcasm-classification accuracy of 97.87% for the Twitter dataset and 93.71% for the random-tweet dataset.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of devices to afford inventive opportunities between things and people. The rapid development of products related to the IoT is a new challenge to keep security issues, lack of confidence, and understanding of the IoT. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is a classic multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method used to analyze and scale complex problems and to obtain weights for the selected criteria. The vague and inconsistent information in real situations can lead to the decision maker's confusion. The decision makers cannot determine accurate judgments for all situations due to the conditions of uncertainty factors in real life; in addition to the limited knowledge and experience of decision makers. In this research, we present a neutrosophic AHP of the IoT in enterprises to help decision makers to estimate the influential factors. The estimation of influential factors can affect the success of the IoT-related enterprise. This study combines AHP methods with neutrosophic techniques to effectively present the criteria related to influential factors. The recommended alternatives are presented based on neutrosophic techniques satisfying the estimated influential factors for a successful enterprise. A case study is applied in Smart Village, Cairo, Egypt, to show the applicability of the proposed model. The smart village' consistency rate is measured after applying neutrosophic methodologies to reach to nearest optimum results. Additional case studies on the smart city in the U.K. and China have been presented to justify that our proposal can be used and replicated in different environments.

With the wide applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in various fields, such as environment monitoring, battlefield surveillance, healthcare, and intrusion detection, trust establishment among sensor nodes becomes a vital requirement to improve security, reliability, and successful cooperation. The existing trust management approaches for large-scale WSN are failed due to their low dependability (i.e., cooperation), higher communication, and memory overheads (i.e., resource inefficient). In this paper, we propose a novel and comprehensive trust estimation approach (LTS) for large-scale WSN that employs clustering to improve cooperation, trustworthiness, and security by detecting malicious (faulty or selfish) sensor nodes with reduced resource (memory and power) consumption. The proposed scheme (LTS) operates on two levels, namely, intra-cluster and inter-cluster along with distributed approach and centralized approach, respectively, to make accurate trust decision of sensor nodes with minimum overheads. LTS consists of unique features, such as robust trust estimation function, attack resistant, and efficient trust aggregation at the cluster, head to obtain the global feedback trust value. Data trust along with communication trust plays a significant role to cope with malicious nodes. In LTS, punishment and trust severity can be tuned according to the application requirement, which makes it an innovative LTS. Moreover, dishonest recommendations (outliers) are eliminated before aggregation at the base station by observing the statistical dispersion. The theoretical and mathematical validations along with simulation results exhibit the great performance of our proposed approach in terms of trust evaluation cost, prevention, and detection of malicious nodes as well as communication overhead.

Software maintainability predicts changes or failures that may occur in software after it has been deployed. Since it deals with the degree to which an application may be understood, repaired, or enhanced, it also takes into account the overall cost of the project. In the past, several measures have been taken into account for predicting metrics that influence software maintainability. However, deep learning is yet to be explored for the same. In this paper, we perform deep learning for software maintainability metrics' prediction on a large number of datasets. Unlike the previous research works, we have relied on large datasets from 299 software and subsequently applied various metrics and functions to the same; 29 object-oriented metrics have been considered along with their impact on software maintainability of open source software. Several metrics have been analyzed and descriptive statistics of these metrics have been pointed out. The proposed long short term memory has been evaluated using measures, such as mean absolute error, root mean square error and accuracy. Five machine learning algorithms, namely, ridge regression with variable selection, decision tree, quantile regression forest, support vector machine, and principal component analysis have been applied to the original datasets, as well as, to the refined datasets. It was found that this paper provides results in the form of metrics that may be used in the prediction of software maintenance and the proposed deep learning model outperforms all of the other methods that were considered. Furthermore, the results of experiment affirm the efficiency of the proposed deep learning model for software maintainability prediction.

In recent years, the number of cell phones in society has increased drastically and they are getting popular due to their computational ability and adaptability. Resource provisioning is important, but still remains NP-hard problem in mobile computational grid (MCG). Once the jobs are assigned to the MCG, the main challenge is how to identify the correct resource according to the job's requirement and use them to execute the sub-jobs. The heuristic methods such as Min-Min, Max-Min, and HEFT can be used to select appropriate resources from the MCG that is assigned for job execution. Since the computational nodes are static and mobile in nature, the performance of such heuristics is not as expected. Such heuristics suffers from low throughput and low speedup. The process of localization is used in a wireless sensor network with good results. The proposed model uses heuristics and localization process for optimizing the quality of service parameter localization, normalized speedup, and throughput in MCG, with the concept of grid nodes available in MCG. The observation shows significant improvement in the quality of service parameter localization, normalized speedup, and throughput in MCG. The proposed model HGLA and MIN-MIN, MAX-MIN, and HEFT are compared with respect to localization, speedup, and throughput. The results reveal that the proposed model shows better performance over MIN-MIN, MAX-MIN, and HEFT.

This paper proposes an integration of two neutrosophic based multi-criteria decision making methods, namely the neutrosophic data analytical hierarchy process (NDAHP) and the Technique of Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) with maximizing deviation method, both based on the single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS) to evaluate the efficiency of general insurance companies in Malaysia. The level of efficiency of insurance companies is a subjective and vague matter, as the efficiency can be further branched into operational efficiency, investment efficiency, underwriting efficiency, and risk management efficiency. Hence relying on entirely objective decision making methods based on crisp data might not address the problem effectively, and therefore fuzzy based decision making methods are highly appropriate to be used in this situation. Our proposed decision making algorithm uses an integrated weighting mechanism that takes into consideration both the objective and subjective weights of the data attributes. The objective weighting mechanism handles the actual datasets that were used which consists of crisp values, whereas the subjective weighing mechanism handles the opinions of the experts in the general insurance industry who were surveyed in this study. This makes the proposed method a more holistic approach to evaluate the efficiency of general insurance companies in Malaysia as previous researches in this area are generally based on the actual datasets without consideration of the opinions and evaluations of the industry experts, or vice-versa. The proposed decision making algorithm is applied on actual datasets of management expenses, net commission, net earned premium and the net investment income for 19 selected general insurance companies in Malaysia over a two-year period from 2016 to 2017. The results obtained are then discussed and the possible reasons for the results are analyzed. A comprehensive comparative study of the results obtained via our proposed method and two other commonly used methods are then presented, analyzed and discussed.

One of the most efficient tools for modeling uncertainty in decision-making problems is the neutrosophic set (NS) and its extensions, such as complex NS (CNS), interval NS (INS), and interval complex NS (ICNS). Linguistic variables have been long recognized as a useful tool in decision-making problems for solving the problem of crisp neutrosophic membership degree. In this paper, we aim to introduce new concepts: single-valued linguistic complex neutrosophic set (SVLCNS-2) and interval linguistic complex neutrosophic set (ILCNS-2) that are more applicable and adjustable to real-world implementation than those of their previous counterparts. Some set-theoretic operations and the operational rules of SVLCNS-2 and ILCNS-2 are designed. Then, gather classifications of the candidate versus criteria, gather the significance weights, gather the weighted rankings of candidates versus criteria and a score function to arrange the candidates are determined. New TOPSIS decision-making procedures in SVLCNS-2 and ICNS-2 are presented and applied to lecturer selection in the case study of the University of Economics and Business, Vietnam National University. The applications demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of the proposal.

Multicast routing protocols normally depend upon the standard establishment of a multicast tree that needs maintenance of state information by individual nodes. In the case of dynamic networks with burst traffic, between the bursts of data, a long period of silence is expected. The multicast state preservation appends a huge amount of transmission and memory overload. This is no longer suitable for any applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a stateless high power node multicasting method utilizing a group of sink node data, which are implanted in packet headers, to facilitate recipients to fix the finest technique to send data packets in the multicast traffic. In order to eliminate expensive state information of the neighbor table, the HPN multicast protocol utilizes the awareness of the exact positions of sensor nodes. This protocol will be preferably appropriate for multicasting in active networks. The simulation results confirm that HPN multicast affords elevated success rates and little delay exclusive of the trouble of state information.

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) is the network of wireless mobile nodes with self-organizing, dynamic network connectivity without any pre-defined infrastructure for wireless communication. Error-less data broadcasting is the major role in MANET transmission. With the salient feature of dynamic topology and the distributed infrastructure, multipath routing is of great interests in MANETs. Multipath routing methods are dependable on adjacent nodes for finding the shortest path that several data packets are fallen to network traffic. Attention on the adjacent nodes can have the end-to-end delay while broadcasting the data packets into other nodes that finish up being fallen to congestion. It will also reduce network throughput and cause the network optimality problem. In this paper, we propose a new link-disjoint multipath routing method to solve the optimization problem in the real-time network environment. Hence, the proposed method is used to choose the shortest path from multiple paths in MANETs. Simulation results proved that the proposed method performs well in the dynamic network environment.

The world is consuming large amounts of energy in various forms like electric energy and mechanical energy. Since the electrical energy is an important factor for the development of the world, many researchers tried to generate electricity from renewable energy sources collected by sensors in order to overcome the shortage of electrical energy for household appliances and industrial areas. In this paper, we develop Internet-of-Things (IoT) based system to generate electrical energy from multiple sensors for household appliances and industrial areas. Different sensors namely piezoelectric sensor, body heat to electric converter and solar panel are utilized and connected to the power storage circuit for generation of electrical energy. Two different Artificial Intelligence (AI) models such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Adaptive Network based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) are utilized for the total power generated from renewable energy resources. Validation is done through the statistical parameters such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and R2 coefficient of correlation. Result outcome from the models shows that ANN performance is better than ANFIS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we introduce the integer programming in neutrosophic environment, by considering coffecients of problem as a triangulare neutrosophic numbers. The degrees of acceptance, indeterminacy and rejection of objectives are simultaneously considered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most design codes evaluate the non-linear seismic performance of structures using the response reduction/modification factor (R). The value of R is sensitive to a variety of factors in terms of overall ductility and over-strength. In this work, actual R values were assessed for vertical irregularity cases for reinforced concrete bare buildings with moment-resisting frames (MRFs). A significant relationship between R and the vertical irregularity index, calculated from the relative stiffness between adjacent storeys, was derived. Three-dimensional numerical modelling was carried out for soft storey and setback irregularity scenarios using Etabs. Modal pushover analysis was used to obtain the inelastic seismic capacity. It was found that vertically irregular buildings have weak inelastic seismic capacities compared with regular buildings. So, before the design stage, R should be scaled down by 15–40% for single and combined vertical irregularity scenarios. Structures with a combined asymmetric setback with a soft ground storey were found to have the worst R value and R was sensitive to the vertical irregularity index (Vtm) that has R-squared of 80%. So, the vertical irregularity index can be used to specify the allowable vertical irregularity ratio, location and combination of vertical irregularities for each seismic zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]