Search

The proliferation of Internet of Drones (IoDs)-based use cases has greatly transformed the cyberspace into pervasive and ubiquitous world. The IoD applications could range beyond military, civilian and industrial domains. However, these drones work in hostile environment, and face many challenges related to communication security. Owing to energy, storage and computational resource-constraints, the complex and heavy cryptographic solutions could not be directly deployed in IoD environment. Several authentication protocols for IoD system can be witnessed however with limitations. In this work, we have demonstrated a two-stage PUF-enabled lightweight authentication protocol (TS-PAID) for IoD setting. In comparison with related protocols, the TS-PAID bring more computational and communicational efficiencies along with resilience against known security threats including physical capture of drone. The security properties of TS-PAID are proven under formal analysis based on Real-or-Random (RoR) random oracle model. The performance findings exhibit practicality and effectiveness for the proposed scheme against the comparative studies.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased e-commerce growth, adding more than 218 billion US dollars to the United States e-commerce sales. With this significant growth, various operational challenges have appeared, including logistic difficulties and customer satisfaction. Businesses that strive to take advantage of increased e-commerce growth must understand data and rely on e-commerce analytics. The large scale of e-commerce data requires sophisticated information technology techniques and cyber-infrastructure to leverage and analyze. This study presents a big e-commerce data platform to address several challenges in e-commerce. The presented platform’s design is based on a distributed system architecture that supports e-commerce analytics applications using historical and real-time data and features a continuous feedback loop to observe the decision-making and evaluation processes to achieve the desired objectives. The platform was validated using two analytical applications. The first application was to identify the periods in which customers prefer to place orders, while the second was used to verify the big e-commerce data platform. The resulting insights and findings promote informed e-commerce decisions. Furthermore, viewing and acting on insight results and findings promote informed decisions that potentially benefit the e-commerce industry. The proposed platform can perform numerous e-commerce applications that potentially benefit the e-commerce industry.

In this research, we have suggested a combined strategy to calculate and determine the solutions for problems originating in combustion theory and heat transfer, that are known as Bratu differential equations. We aim to suggest and test a soft computing technique using an efficient meta-heuristic the Symbiotic Organism Search (SOS) algorithm and Artificial neural network (ANN) architecture to obtain better solutions for Bratu differential equations by utilizing fewer computational resources and minimal time. We have simulated our computing approach for different cases, and we compare the outcome of our experiments with solutions obtained by the existing state-of-the-art methods. For novelty, we have found an accurate critical value of λc by using SOS algorithm. Values of TIC, MAD, and NSE confirm that our method is a convenient and potential candidate for handling real-application problems. We found that this ANN-SOS algorithm takes less time and is accurate in getting results of the expected standard.

Huge amounts of educational data are being produced, and a common challenge that many educational organizations confront, is finding an effective method to harness and analyze this data for continuously delivering enhanced education. Nowadays, the educational data is evolving and has become large in volume, wide in variety and high in velocity. This produced data needs to be handled in an efficient manner to extract value and make informed decisions. For that, this paper confronts such data as a big data challenge and presents a comprehensive platform tailored to perform educational big data analytical applications. Further, present an effective environment for non-data scientists and people in the educational sector to apply their demanding educational big data applications. The implementation stages of the educational big data platform on a cloud computing platform and the organization of educational data in a data lake architecture are highlighted. Furthermore, two analytical applications are performed to test the feasibility of the presented platform in discovering knowledge that potentially promotes the educational institutions.

The world’s technological and economic advancements have led to a sharp increase in the demand for electrical energy. Saudi Arabia is experiencing rapid economic and demographic growth, which is resulting in higher energy needs. The limits of fossil fuel reserves and their disruption to the environment have motivated the pursuit of alternative energy options such as wind energy. In order to regulate the power system to maintain safe and dependable operation, projections of current and daily power generation are crucial. Thus, this work focuses on wind power prediction and the statistical analysis of wind characteristics using wind data from a meteorological station in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. The data were collected over four years from January 2015 to July 2018. More than twelve thousand data points were collected and analyzed. Layout and wake effect studies were carried out. Furthermore, the near wake length downstream from the rotor disc between 1 and 5 rotor diameters (1D to 5D) was taken into account. Five robust machine learning algorithms were implemented to estimate the potential wind power production from a wind farm in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. The relationship between the wind speed and power produced for each season was carefully studied. Due to the variability in the wind speeds, the power production fluctuated much more in the winter. The higher the wind speed, the more significant the difference in energy production between the five farm layouts, and vice versa, whereas at a low wind speed, there was no significant difference in the power production in all of the near wake lengths of the 1D to 5D rotor diameters downstream from the rotor disc. Among the utilized prediction models, the decision tree regression was found to have the best accuracy values in all four utilized evaluation metrics, with 0.994 in R-squared, 0.025 in MAE, 0.273 in MSE, and 0.522 in RMSE. The obtained results were satisfactory and provide support for the construction of several wind farms, producing hundreds of megawatts, in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Makkah Region.

Real application problems in physics, engineering, economics, and other disciplines are often modeled as differential equations. Classical numerical techniques are computationally expensive when we require solutions to our mathematical problems with no prior information. Hence, researchers are more interested in developing numerical methods that can obtain better solutions with fewer efforts and computational time. Heuristic algorithms are considered suitable candidates for such type of problems. In this research, we have developed a new neuroevolutionary algorithm that combines the power of feed- forward artificial neural networks (ANNs) and a modern metaheuristic, the Symbiotic Organism Search (SOS) algorithm. With our new approach, we have analyzed the simultaneous surface convection and radiation during heat transfer in different models of fins/heat exchangers. Longitudinal fins are considered with concave parabolic, rectangular and trapezoidal shapes. We have analyzed our problem in two scenarios and six sub-cases. Our solutions are of high quality, with minimum residual errors in all cases. We have established the quality of our results by calculating values of different performance indicators like Root-mean-square error (RMSE), Absolute error (AE), Generational distance (GD), Mean absolute deviation (MAD), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), Error in Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (ENSE). Statistical and graphical analysis of our results suggests that our approach is suitable for handling real application problems. We have compared our results with state-of-the- art results, and the outcome of our analysis points to the superiority of our approach.

This paper aims at the analysis of the VdP heartbeat mathematical model. We have analysed the conditionality of a mathematical model which represents the oscillatory behaviour of the heart. A novel neuroevolutionary approach is chosen to analyse the mathematical model. The characteristics of the cardiac pulse of the heart are examined by considering two major scenarios with sixteen different cases. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are constructed to obtain the best solutions for the heartbeat model. Unknown weights are finely tuned by a combination of a global search technique the Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) and a local search technique the Interior Point Algorithm (IPA). Stable behaviour of solutions obtained by considering different cases demonstrates that the model under consideration is well-conditioned. The accuracy of our novel procedure is established by getting the lowest residual errors in our solution for all cases. Graphical and statistical analysis are added to further elaborate the accuracy of our approach.

In this research, a soft computing approach based on a Nature-inspired technique, the Fractional-Order Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (FO-DPSO) algorithm, is hybridized with feed-forward artificial neural network (FF-ANN) to suggest and calculate better solutions for non-linear second-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) representing the corneal shape model (CSM). The unknown weights involved in approximate solutions obtained through ANN are tuned with the help of FO-DPSO. To test the robustness of our approach and conditionality of CSM, we have considered several cases of CSM with different aspects of the problem. Solutions obtained by Adam's method are used as a reference point for the sake of comparison. We establish it that FO-DPSO is a suitable technique for tuning the unknown weights involved in the solution designed with ANNs. Our results suggest that the proposed approach is a suitable candidate for solving real-world problems involving differential equations.

The distributor management system has long been a challenge for many organizations and companies. Overall, successful distribution involves several moving entities and methods, requiring a resilient distribution management strategy powered by data analysis. For nonprofit organizations, the distribution system requires efficient distribution and management. This includes minimizing time, distance, and cost. As a consequence, service quality and financial efficiency can be achieved. This paper proposes a methodology to tackle the vehicle routing problems (VRP) faced by nonprofit organizations. The methodology consists of four subsequent approaches—greedy, intraroute, interroute, and tabu search—to improve the functionality and performance of nonprofit organizations. The methodology was validated by applying it to a real nonprofit organization. Furthermore, the proposed system was compared to another state-of-the-art system; the achieved results were satisfactory and suggest that this methodology is capable of handling the VRP accordingly, improving the functionality and performance of nonprofit organizations.

In stenography, embedding data within an image has a trade-off between image quality and embedding capacity. Specifically, the more data are concealed within a carrier image, the further distortion the image suffers, causing a decline in the resultant stego image quality. Embedding high capacity of data into an image while preserving the quality of the carrier image can be seen as an optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial steganography scheme using genetic algorithms (GAs). Our scheme utilizes new operations to increase least significant bits (LSB) matching between the carrier and the stego image which results in increased embedding capacity and reduced distortion. These operations are optimized pixel scanning in vertical and horizontal directions, circular shifting, flipping secret bits and secret data transposing. We formulate a general GA-based steganography model to search for the optimum solutions. Finally, we use LSB substitution for data embedding. We conduct extensive experimental testing of the proposed scheme and compare it to the state-of-art steganography schemes. The proposed scheme outperforms the relevant GA-based steganography methodologies.

A central authority, in a conventional centralized energy trading market, superintends energy and financial transactions. The central authority manages and controls transparent energy trading between producer and consumer, imposes a penalty in case of contract violation, and disburses numerous rewards. However, the management and control through the third party pose a significant threat to the security and privacy of consumers’/producers’ (participants) profiles. The energy transactions between participants involving central authority utilize users’ time, money, and impose a computational burden over the central controlling authority. The Blockchain-based decentralized energy transaction concept, bypassing the central authority, is proposed in Smart Grid (SG) by researchers. Blockchain technology braces the concept of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy transactions. This work encompasses the SolarCoin-based digital currency blockchain model for SG incorporating RE. Energy transactions from Prosumer (P) to Prosumer, Energy District to Energy District, and Energy District to SG are thoroughly investigated and analyzed in this work. A robust demand-side optimized model is proposed using Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to maximize Prosumer Energy Surplus (PES), Grid revenue (GR), percentage energy transactions accomplished, and decreased Prosumer Energy Cost (PEC). Real-time averaged energy data of Australia are employed, and a piece-wise energy price mechanism is implemented in this work. The graphical analysis and tabular statistics manifest the efficacy of the proposed model.