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Abstract In late 2023, the United Nations conference on climate change (COP28), which was held in Dubai, encouraged a quick move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Solar energy is one of the most promising forms of energy that is both sustainable and renewable. Generally, photovoltaic systems transform solar irradiance into electricity. Unfortunately, instability and intermittency in solar radiation can lead to interruptions in electricity production. The accurate forecasting of solar irradiance guarantees sustainable power production even when solar irradiance is not present. Batteries can store solar energy to be used during periods of solar absence. Additionally, deterministic models take into account the specification of technical PV systems and may be not accurate for low solar irradiance. This paper presents a comparative study for the most common Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms employed for short-term solar irradiance forecasting. The dataset was gathered in Islamabad during a five-year period, from 2015 to 2019, at hourly intervals with accurate meteorological sensors. Furthermore, the Grid Search Cross Validation (GSCV) with five folds is introduced to ML and DL models for optimizing the hyperparameters of these models. Several performance metrics are used to assess the algorithms, such as the Adjusted R 2 score, Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE), Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Square Error (MSE). The statistical analysis shows that CNN-LSTM outperforms its counterparts of nine well-known DL models with Adjusted R 2 score value of 0.984. For ML algorithms, gradient boosting regression is an effective forecasting method with Adjusted R 2 score value of 0.962, beating its rivals of six ML models. Furthermore, SHAP and LIME are examples of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) utilized for understanding the reasons behind the obtained results.

Abstract Risks in the supply chain can damage many companies and organizations due to sustainability risk factors. This study evaluates the supply chain risk assessment and management and then selects the best supplier in a gas company in Egypt. A comprehensive methodology can use the experts' opinions who use the linguistic variables in the spherical fuzzy numbers (SFNs) to evaluate the criteria and suppliers in this study based on their views. Selecting the best supplier is a complex task due to various criteria related to supply chain risk assessment, such as supply risks, environmental risks, financial risks, regularity risks, political risk, ethical risks, and technology risks and their sub-criteria. This study suggested a new combined model with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) under a spherical fuzzy set (SFS) environment to overcome uncertainty and incomplete data in the assessment process. The MCDM methodology has two methods: the Entropy and COmbinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS) methods. The SFS-Entropy is used to compute supply chain risk assessment and management criteria weights. The SFS-CODAS method is used to rank the supplier. The main results show that supply risks have the highest importance, followed by financial and environmental risks, and ethical risks have the lowest risk importance. The criteria weights were changed under sensitivity analysis to show the stability and validation of the results obtained from the suggested methodology. The comparative analysis is implemented with other MCDM methods named TOPSIS, VIKOR, MARCOS, COPRAS, WASPAS, and MULTIMOORA methods under the SFS environment. This study can help managers and organizations select the best supplier with the lowest sustainability risks.

Agriculture is essential for many countries that depend on crops for food production and security. So, evaluating irrigation systems and selecting the best one is critical and gives various benefits such as water use efficiency, productivity, and agricultural development. This paper proposed a framework for conserving water and increasing effectiveness by using a suitable irrigation system. We used the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology to deal with conflict criteria in the evaluation process. We used two MCDM methods such as Criteria Importance Through Inter-Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method to compute the weights of the irrigation system criteria, and the spherical fuzzy double normalization-based multiple aggregations (DNMA) method to rank the irrigation systems (alternatives). The main advantage of CRITIC method computes the conflict and variability of the criteria by calculate weights of them. The main advantage of DNMA is used the two normalization method to rank the alternatives. These methods are integrated with spherical fuzzy set (SFS) fuzzy information in the assessment process. It has three values: membership, non-membership, and hesitant degrees to overcome uncertainty in the assessment steps. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study to show its performance. This study used 20 criteria of irrigation systems and 10 irrigation systems (alternatives) to select the best alternative. The results are discussed from the perspective of five experts. The sensitivity analysis is conducted to show the stability of the results. The comparative analysis is performed to show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The results show the proposed methodology is more robust compared to other methods.

This study is presented to examine the performance of a newly proposed metaheuristic algorithm within discrete and continuous search spaces. Therefore, the multithresholding image segmentation problem and parameter estimation problem of both the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and photovoltaic (PV) models, which have different search spaces, are used to test and verify this algorithm. The traditional techniques could not find approximate solutions for those problems in a reasonable amount of time, so researchers have used metaheuristic algorithms to overcome those shortcomings. However, the majority of metaheuristic algorithms still suffer from slow convergence speed and stagnation into local minima problems, which makes them unsuitable for tackling these optimization problems. Therefore, this study proposes an improved nutcracker optimization algorithm (INOA) for better solving those problems in an acceptable amount of time. INOA is based on improving the performance of the standard algorithm using a newly proposed convergence improvement strategy that aims to improve the convergence speed and prevent stagnation in local minima. This algorithm is first applied to estimating the unknown parameters of the single-diode, double-diode, and triple-diode models for a PV module and a solar cell. Second, four PEMFC modules are used to further observe INOA's performance for the continuous optimization challenge. Finally, the performance of INOA is investigated for solving the multi-thresholding image segmentation problem to test its effectiveness in a discrete search space. Several test images with different threshold levels were used to validate its effectiveness, stability, and scalability. Comparison to several rival optimizers using various performance indicators, such as convergence curve, standard deviation, average fitness value, and Wilcoxon rank-sum test, demonstrates that INOA is an effective alternative for solving both discrete and continuous optimization problems. Quantitively, INOA could solve those problems better than the other rival optimizers, with improvement rates for final results ranging between 0.8355 % and 3.34 % for discrete problems and 4.97 % and 99.9 % for continuous problems.

With the prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, smart cities comprise complex networks, including sensors, actuators, appliances, and cyber services. The complexity and heterogeneity of smart cities have become vulnerable to sophisticated cyber-attacks, especially privacy-related attacks such as inference and data poisoning ones. Federated Learning (FL) has been regarded as a hopeful method to enable distributed learning with privacy-preserved intelligence in IoT applications. Even though the significance of developing privacy-preserving FL has drawn as a great research interest, the current research only concentrates on FL with independent identically distributed (i.i.d) data and few studies have addressed the non-i. i.d setting. FL is known to be vulnerable to Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) attacks, where an adversary can presume to act as a contributor participating in the training process to acquire the private data of other contributors. This paper proposes an innovative Privacy Protection-based Federated Deep Learning (PP-FDL) framework, which accomplishes data protection against privacy-related GAN attacks, along with high classification rates from non-i. i.d data. PP-FDL is designed to enable fog nodes to cooperate to train the FDL model in a way that ensures contributors have no access to the data of each other, where class probabilities are protected utilizing a private identifier generated for each class. The PP-FDL framework is evaluated for image classification using simple convolutional networks which are trained using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The empirical results have revealed that PF-DFL can achieve data protection and the framework outperforms the other three state-of-the-art models with 3%–8% as accuracy improvements.

Abstract Binary optimization problems belong to the NP-hard class because their solutions are hard to find in a known time. The traditional techniques could not be applied to tackle those problems because the computational cost required by them increases exponentially with increasing the dimensions of the optimization problems. Therefore, over the last few years, researchers have paid attention to the metaheuristic algorithms for tackling those problems in an acceptable time. But unfortunately, those algorithms still suffer from not being able to avert local minima, a lack of population diversity, and low convergence speed. As a result, this paper presents a new binary optimization technique based on integrating the equilibrium optimizer (EO) with a new local search operator, which effectively integrates the single crossover, uniform crossover, mutation operator, flipping operator, and swapping operator to improve its exploration and exploitation operators. In a more general sense, this local search operator is based on two folds: the first fold borrows the single-point crossover and uniform crossover to accelerate the convergence speed, in addition to avoiding falling into local minima using the mutation strategy; the second fold is based on applying two different mutation operators on the best-so-far solution in the hope of finding a better solution: the first operator is the flip mutation operator to flip a bit selected randomly from the given solution, and the second operator is the swap mutation operator to swap two unique positions selected randomly from the given solution. This variant is called a binary hybrid equilibrium optimizer (BHEO) and is applied to three common binary optimization problems: 0–1 knapsack, feature selection, and the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem (MHKC) to investigate its effectiveness. The experimental findings of BHEO are compared with those of the classical algorithm and six other well-established evolutionary and swarm-based optimization algorithms. From those findings, it is concluded that BHEO is a strong alternative to tackle binary optimization problems. Quantatively, BHEO could reach an average fitness of 0.090737884 for the feature section problem and an average difference from the optimal profits for some used Knapsack problems of 2.482.

Integrating the metaverse technology with the transportation system has several security and privacy issues. This study assesses the 12 security solutions to select the best one to overcome security and privacy issues (such as data theft, unauthorized access, and theft of personal data) when integrating the transportation system with metaverse technology. A suggested methodology is conducted by experts and decision-makers using linguistic terms and spherical fuzzy numbers to express their opinions on evaluating the criteria and alternatives. Selecting the best security solution (alternative) is critical because it includes several conflict security criteria, such as data theft, authentication, security attacks, and others. This paper introduces a methodology for multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) in a spherical fuzzy (SF) environment. The MCDM method dealt with various conflicting criteria, and SF dealt with uncertainty and vague information while evaluating the criteria and alternatives. The suggested methodology consists of two main phases. The first phase introduces the analytic hierarchy process (SF-AHP) method to compute the criteria weights. The second phase introduces the Weighted Aggregates Sum Product Assessment (SF-WASPAS) method to rank and select the best alternative. The results show the end-to-end authentication protocol is the best alternative (security solution). This study conducted a sensitivity analysis of the stability of the rank by changing the criteria’s weights. The sensitivity analysis results show that the end-to-end authentication protocol is the best alternative (security solution) in different cases. We compare the suggested methodology with six other MCDM methods: SF-TOPSIS, SF-VIKOR, SF-MABAC, SF-CODAS, SF-MARCOS, and SF-COPRAS to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the presented methodology is robust compared to other MCDM methods.

This paper examines the performance of three binary metaheuristic algorithms when applied to two distinct knapsack problems (0–1 knapsack problems (KP01) and multidimensional knapsack problems (MKP)). These binary algorithms are based on the classical mantis search algorithm (MSA), the classical quadratic interpolation optimization (QIO) method, and the well-known differential evolution (DE). Because these algorithms were designed for continuous optimization problems, they could not be used directly to solve binary knapsack problems. As a result, the V-shaped and S-shaped transfer functions are used to propose binary variants of these algorithms, such as binary differential evolution (BDE), binary quadratic interpolation optimization (BQIO), and binary mantis search algorithm (BMSA). These binary variants are evaluated using various high-dimensional KP01 examples and compared to several classical metaheuristic techniques to determine their efficacy. To enhance the performance of those binary algorithms, they are combined with repair operator 2 (RO2) to offer better hybrid variants, namely HMSA, HQIO, and HDE. Those hybrid algorithms are evaluated using several medium- and large-scale KP01 and MKP instances, as well as compared to other hybrid algorithms, to demonstrate their effectiveness. This comparison is conducted using three performance metrics: average fitness value, Friedman mean rank, and computational cost. The experimental findings demonstrate that HQIO is a strong alternative for solving KP01 and MKP. In addition, the proposed algorithms are applied to the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack Cryptosystem and the resource allocation problem in adaptive multimedia systems (AMS) to illustrate their effectiveness when applied to optimize those real applications. The experimental findings illustrate that the proposed HQIO is a strong alternative for handling various knapsack-based applications.

Due to climate change, fossil fuel reduction, growing energy usage, and ecological impacts, the need for renewable energy sources is rising quickly. A large amount of energy comes from the ocean through the tide; renewable energy must be exploited. One important energy source is wave energy converters (WECs), which enhance efficiency and grow energy. This study presented a case study from three layers of the Red Sea in Egypt for selecting optimal wave energy location (WEL), wave energy technology (WET), and WEC. The spherical fuzzy set (SFS) framework deals with uncertainty and vague information in this selection process. The SFS is integrated with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) to deal with various criteria in each layer. This study uses two MCDM methods under the SFS environment: The Stepwise Weighted Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method and the Weighted Euclidean Distance Based Approach (WEDBA) method. The SF-SWARA method is used to compute the criteria weights in each layer. Then, the SF-WEDBA method ranks the alternatives in each layer. The main results in each layer show that the accessibility criterion, Economic factors, and energy production criterion have the highest weight in the three layers. Sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis are conducted in each layer.

Abstract The parameter identification problem of photovoltaic (PV) models is classified as a complex nonlinear optimization problem that cannot be accurately solved by traditional techniques. Therefore, metaheuristic algorithms have been recently used to solve this problem due to their potential to approximate the optimal solution for several complicated optimization problems. Despite that, the existing metaheuristic algorithms still suffer from sluggish convergence rates and stagnation in local optima when applied to tackle this problem. Therefore, this study presents a new parameter estimation technique, namely HKOA, based on integrating the recently published Kepler optimization algorithm (KOA) with the ranking-based update and exploitation improvement mechanisms to accurately estimate the unknown parameters of the third-, single-, and double-diode models. The former mechanism aims at promoting the KOA’s exploration operator to diminish getting stuck in local optima, while the latter mechanism is used to strengthen its exploitation operator to faster converge to the approximate solution. Both KOA and HKOA are validated using the RTC France solar cell and five PV modules, including Photowatt-PWP201, Ultra 85-P, Ultra 85-P, STP6-120/36, and STM6-40/36, to show their efficiency and stability. In addition, they are extensively compared to several optimization techniques to show their effectiveness. According to the experimental findings, HKOA is a strong alternative method for estimating the unknown parameters of PV models because it can yield substantially different and superior findings for the third-, single-, and double-diode models.

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are not able to execute resource-intensive tasks due to their limited storage and computing power. Therefore, Mobile edge computing (MEC) technology has recently been utilized to provide computing and storage capabilities to those devices, enabling them to execute these tasks with less energy consumption and low latency. However, the edge servers in the MEC network are located at fixed positions, which makes them unable to be adjusted according to the requirements of end users. As a result, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently been used to carry the load of these edge servers, making them mobile and capable of meeting the desired requirements for IoT devices. However, the trajectories of the UAVs need to be accurately planned in order to minimize energy consumption for both the IoT devices during data transmission and the UAVs during hovering time and mobility between halting points (HPs). The trajectory planning problem is a complicated optimization problem because it involves several factors that need to be taken into consideration. This problem is considered a multiobjective optimization problem since it requires simultaneous optimization of both the energy consumption of UAVs and that of IoT devices. However, existing algorithms in the literature for this problem have been based on converting it into a single objective, which may give preference to some objectives over others. Therefore, in this study, several multiobjective trajectory planning algorithms (MTPAs) based on various metaheuristic algorithms with variable population size and the Pareto optimality theory are presented. These algorithms aim to optimize both objectives simultaneously. Additionally, a novel mechanism called the cyclic selection mechanism (CSM) is proposed to manage the population size accurately, optimizing the number of HPs and the maximum function evaluations. Furthermore, the HPs estimated by each MTPA are associated with multiple UAVs using the k-means clustering algorithm. Then, a low-complexity greedy mechanism is used to generate the order of HPs assigned to each UAV, determining its trajectory. Several experiments are conducted to assess the effectiveness of the MTPAs with variable population size and cyclic selection mechanisms. The experimental findings demonstrate that the MTPAs with the cyclic selection mechanism outperform all competing algorithms, achieving better outcomes.

Abstract Chest diseases, especially COVID-19, have quickly spread throughout the world and caused many deaths. Finding a rapid and accurate diagnostic tool was indispensable to combating these diseases. Therefore, scientists have thought of combining chest X-ray (CXR) images with deep learning techniques to rapidly detect people infected with COVID-19 or any other chest disease. Image segmentation as a preprocessing step has an essential role in improving the performance of these deep learning techniques, as it could separate the most relevant features to better train these techniques. Therefore, several approaches were proposed to tackle the image segmentation problem accurately. Among these methods, the multilevel thresholding-based image segmentation methods won significant interest due to their simplicity, accuracy, and relatively low storage requirements. However, with increasing threshold levels, the traditional methods have failed to achieve accurate segmented features in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, researchers have recently used metaheuristic algorithms to tackle this problem, but the existing algorithms still suffer from slow convergence speed and stagnation into local minima as the number of threshold levels increases. Therefore, this study presents an alternative image segmentation technique based on an enhanced version of the Kepler optimization algorithm (KOA), namely IKOA, to better segment the CXR images at small, medium, and high threshold levels. Ten CXR images are used to assess the performance of IKOA at ten threshold levels (T-5, T-7, T-8, T-10, T-12, T-15, T-18, T-20, T-25, and T-30). To observe its effectiveness, it is compared to several metaheuristic algorithms in terms of several performance indicators. The experimental outcomes disclose the superiority of IKOA over all the compared algorithms. Furthermore, the IKOA-based segmented CXR images at eight different threshold levels are used to train a newly proposed CNN model called CNN-IKOA to find out the effectiveness of the segmentation step. Five performance indicators, namely overall accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and specificity, are used to disclose the CNN-IKOA’s effectiveness. CNN-IKOA, according to the experimental outcomes, could achieve outstanding outcomes for the images segmented at T-12, where it could reach 94.88% for overall accuracy, 96.57% for specificity, 95.40% for precision, and 95.40% for recall.

As is well-known, multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches can aid decision-makers in identifying the optimal alternative based on predetermined criteria. However, it is a big challenge to apply this approach in complex applications such as 5th generation (5G) industry assessment because criteria are challenging and trade-offs between them are hard. Also, assessment of the 5G industry involve strong uncertainty. So, this study is the first to evaluate the 5G industry using a new neutrosophic simple multi-attribute rating technique (N-SMART). Since neutrosophic set considers truth-degree, indeterminacy-degree, and falsity-degree, it is a more accurate instrument for evaluating uncertainty. The 5G assessment issue exemplifies the validity and great performance of our proposed method as: (1) its ability to deal with uncertainty phenomena; (2) its simplicity; and (3) its enhanced capacity to discern alternatives. Also, by considering the 5G service provided in the Egyptian New Administrative capital as a case study, the results showed that Ericsson 5G is the best choice and Nokia 5G is the worst choice.

The 0–1 Knapsack problem is a non-deterministic polynomial-time-hard combinatorial optimization problem that cannot be solved in reasonable time using traditional methods. Therefore, researchers have turned to metaheuristic algorithms for their ability to solve several combinatorial problems in a reasonable amount of time. This paper adapts the Kepler optimization algorithm using eight V-shaped and S-shaped transfer functions to create a binary variant called BKOA for solving the 0–1 Knapsack problem. Several experiments were conducted to compare the efficacy of the binary Kepler optimization algorithm to several competing optimizers when solving 20 well-known knapsack instances with dimensions ranging from 4 to 75. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this algorithm over other metaheuristic algorithms, except for the genetic algorithm, which is marginally superior. To further improve the binary Kepler optimization algorithm, it is combined with an enhanced improvement strategy to create a new hybrid variant. This hybrid variant, termed HBKOA, has superior exploration and exploitation capabilities that make it better than genetic algorithm and other optimizers for all performance metrics considered. The enhanced improvement strategy is also integrated with several competing optimizers, and the experimental results show that HBKOA, hybrid binary manta ray foraging optimization, and hybrid binary equilibrium optimizer are competitive for small and medium-dimensional instances and superior for the higher dimensions.

Optimization problems are prevalent in a variety of real-world applications, including medical, engineering, chemical, and others, and must be precisely solved to enhance the performance of these applications. Unfortunately, finding near-optimal solutions to these problems is regarded as a hard challenge due to their various characteristics. In a new attempt to solve these problems, this paper presents a new variant of the artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO) called ranking-based GTO (RGTO). This variant uses two strategies known as the ranking-based update strategy and the convergence acceleration strategy to improve both the classical GTO's exploitation and exploration capabilities. The first strategy is proposed to enhance each gorilla's local and global search abilities, whereas the latter is intended to enhance GTO's global search abilities to reach better solutions as quickly as possible. First, a recent and challenging benchmark, namely CEC-2017, is utilized to assess the RGTO's explorative and exploitative capabilities. After that, RGTO is used to solve three engineering optimization problems, including parameter estimation problems for both photovoltaic (PV) models and proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), as well as some engineering design problems, to demonstrate how well it performs for real-world optimization problems. Compared to several rival optimizers, the proposed algorithm provides outstanding outcomes for the three engineering optimization benchmark problems considered.

Abstract Breast cancer is a hazardous disease that should be seriously tackled to reduce its danger in all aspects of the world. Therefore, several imaging ways to detect this disease were considered, but the produced images need to be accurately processed to effectively detect it. Image segmentation is an indispensable step in image processing to segment the homogenous regions that have similar features such as brightness, color, texture, contrast, form, and size. Several techniques like region-based, threshold-based, edge-based, and feature-based clustering have been developed for image segmentation; however, thresholding, which is divided into two classes: bilevel and multilevel, won the highest attention by the researchers due to its simplicity, ease of use and accuracy. The multilevel thresholding-based image segmentation is difficult to be tackled using traditional techniques, especially with increasing the threshold level; therefore, the researchers pay attention to the metaheuristic algorithms which could overcome several hard problems in a reasonable time. In this paper, a new hybrid metaheuristic algorithm based on integrating the jellyfish search algorithm with an effective improvement method is proposed for segmenting the color images of breast cancer, namely the hybrid jellyfish search algorithm HJSO. Experiments are extensively performed to appear the superiority of the proposed algorithm, including validating its performance using various breast cancer images and conducting an extensive comparison with several rival algorithms to explore its effectiveness. The experimental findings, including various performance metrics like fitness values, CPU time, Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), standard deviation, Features similarity index (FSIM), and Structural similarity index (SSIM), totally show the efficiency of HJSO.

This paper presents a binary variant of a novel physics-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, namely Light spectrum optimizer (LSO), for tackling both the 0–1 knapsack (KP01) and multidimensional knapsack problems (MKP). Because of the continuous nature of the standard LSO that contradicts the knapsack problem's discrete nature, two various transfer functions: S-shaped and X-shaped, are used to convert the continuous values produced by LSO into discrete ones. Some binary solutions produced by the binary LSO (BLSO) may be infeasible, so an improvement-repair strategy is used to convert those solutions into feasible ones by making some improvements on them. Moreover, the classical LSO was modified in this study to propose a new binary variant, namely BMLSO, with better exploration and exploitation operators for overcoming the knapsack problems. Additionally, a novel method, which simulates the swarm intelligence behaviors and the simulated binary crossover (SBX) to accelerate the convergence speed with avoiding stuck into local minima, has been proposed for producing a new binary variant of MLSO known as BHLSO. To verify the performance of the proposed binary variants of LSO, 45 benchmark instances of KP01 and 30 benchmark instances of MKP used commonly in the literature have been used in our experiments. The experimental findings show the superiority of BHLSO for both KP01 and MKP compared with several well-known algorithms in terms of CPU time, convergence speed, and accuracy.

In this paper, several recently published metaheuristic algorithms are adapted to optimize the NP-hard problem of jointly mining decision and resource allocation in mobile edge computing (MEC) enabled blockchain networks under two different encoding schemes. The first scheme represents individuals in a way that incorporates the mining decisions, transmission power, and computing resources of all miners for each individual, with mining decisions determined by a binary vector whose values indicate whether miners partake in mining or not. While, the second scheme makes each individual accountable for the transmission power and computing resources of each participant miner, treating all individuals as a singular solution to the problem. Then the Nutcracker optimization algorithm and gradient-based optimizer are modified to propose two robust variants, MNOA and MGBO, respectively. We then combine MNOA and MGBO to create HNOA, which further optimizes the mining decision and resource allocation in this problem. HNOA and other variants are validated using nine instances with a range of 150 to 600 miners. HNOA is also compared to several competing optimizers to demonstrate its efficacy in terms of several performance metrics. The experimental findings show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Choosing a suitable location for solar photovoltaic (PV) plants depends on several conflicted selection criteria such as technical, economical, and social restrictions. For handling such a problem, this paper proposes two Computational Intelligence (CI) based frameworks called Genetic Algorithm with Repairing operator (GAR) and Map-Reduce-based Genetic Algorithm with a Repair operator (MRGAR). The governorate of the Red Sea in Egypt is selected as a case study which is a privileged area for harvesting solar energy. Firstly, all gathered maps and geographic information resources are manipulated. Secondly, the regarded problem is formulated as a binary-constrained multiobjective optimization problem. Finally, this problem is solved with two proposed frameworks and the results are simulated. The experimental results conclude that both frameworks are efficient for solving the regarded site selection problem. However, GAR and MRGAR have diversified performances. In particular, the percentage of gathered solar energy of GAR is better than MRGAR whereas MRGAR is significantly faster than GAR. Therefore, MRGAR is recommended to deal with large-scale problems.

The success of an organization nowadays is heavily dependent on the usability of its website. Offering educational content and services online is becoming more commonplace in the higher education sector. University websites serve a wide range of users, like students, faculty, parents, staff, etc. Hence, the website must address the different needs of these users while maintaining good usability. Good usability makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for, understand how to use the website, and navigate through the content. This helps improve user satisfaction and engagement with the website, which can lead to increased productivity and better outcomes. Therefore, usability testing and analysis is the unspoken metric for success. Understanding the many factors contributing to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) topic. In this paper, we propose a framework for evaluating the usability of academic websites using the Entropy and Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) MCDM methods under type-2 neutrosophic sets. The entropy method is used to compute the objective weights of four main criteria contributing to the usability of academic websites, namely (Content, Organization, Presentation and Interaction, and Trustworthiness), with 31 sub-criteria. The WASPAS method is then used to rank five Egyptian university websites and select the best one in terms of usability. This framework will help designers understand the important criteria to consider while designing for university websites in addition to providing them with a usability evaluation method tailored to university websites.

As a new attempt to design a precise mathematical model for the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), in this paper, three recently-proposed well-established optimizers: horse herding optimization algorithm (HOA), seagull optimization algorithm (SOA) and gradient-based optimizer (GBO) integrated with two newly-proposed effective strategies, namely self-adaptive strategy, and ranking-based updating strategy, have been extensively investigated to accurately estimate the unknown parameters of this model for accomplishing a better output voltage of the simulated PEMFC stacks. Those hybridized algorithms were briefly named HHOA, HSOA, and HGBO. To assess the performance of those proposed algorithms, six common PEMFC stacks were used and their outcomes were extensively compared with the standard algorithms and some of the state-of-the-arts under various performance metrics and the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. The experimental findings show the effectiveness of both HGBO and HSOA in terms of convergence speed and final accuracy; However, HSOA could be more stable. The source code of this study is publicly available at https://drive.matlab.com/sharing/d9263036-9f80-4a40-bad9-ad476ed19c69.

The parameter assessment of solar cells and photovoltaic (PV) modules is a challenging task due to the non-linearity behavior of the current–voltage (I–V) characteristic curve. This paper presents two hybrid nature-inspired algorithms for estimating the unknown parameters of the Single-Diode Model (SDM), and Double-Diode Model (DDM). These algorithms are based on borrowed exploration and exploitation schemes from three well-known optimization algorithms: Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA), and Generalized Normal Distribution Optimization (GNDO) algorithm. The first proposed algorithm is called Marine-Whale-Generalized (MWG) algorithm. In addition, MWG is effectively integrated with novel exploration and exploitation schemes to further its exploration and exploitation operators in a new variant known as (MWGG). A solar cell from RTC France and five commercial PV module models, including Photowatt-PWP201 (PWP), Ultra 85-P (Ultra), and STM6-40/36 (STM), are being used to test the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. The experimental findings proved that MWGG is more accurate and faster at convergent results compared to other comparators.

Developing an appropriate model for accurate prediction of energy consumption is very essential for developing an effective energy management system for residential buildings. In view of this, the Short-term Load Forecasting (STLF) of household appliances has been performing an important role in supervising and managing energy in the residential community. In the domain of big data analytics, data-driven load forecasting approaches have realized an amazing performance in the recognition of patterns of residential electric loads and forecasting energy consumption. Nevertheless, current research emphasizes the use of powerful feature-engineering methods, which are ineffective and result in low generalization performance. Further, considering the differences in the consumption behavior of various home appliances, it is unfeasible to discover energy consumption characteristics physically in the power system. Thus, this study addresses the problems of STLF using a novel two-stream deep learning (DL) model called STLF-Net. The first stream is designed with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to learn and capture the long-term temporal representations of the energy utilization data. Simultaneously, in the second stream, the short-term information and positional representations are modeled using a stack of temporal convolutional (TC) modules. The TC module is designated using dilated causal convolutions and residual connection to enable efficient feature extraction while alleviating the gradient vanishing issues. The learned representations from the two streams are fused and subsequently passed to several dense layers to generate the final hour-ahead load forecasts. Experimental assessments on two public energy consumption predictions datasets (IHEPC and AEP) demonstrated the superior performance of the STLF-Net over the recent cutting-edge data-driven approaches.

Abstract There are several multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches presented in the literature with their characteristics. Although traditional MCDM approaches are considered a proper implementation to select the best alternative from available types, they failed to consider uncertainty which is quite high and desires to be thoughtfully measured in the selection process. This research focuses on extending MCDM in the neutrosophic environment using axiomatic design (AD) as a novel contribution to selecting appropriate Computed Tomography (CT) devices. We present a new linguistic scale for evaluating criteria and alternatives based on single-valued triangular neutrosophic numbers (SVTrN). The proposed approach is superior to other existing approaches due to its simplicity and ability to simulate natural human thinking via considering truth, indeterminacy, and falsity degrees. Then, applying it will increase the value of imaging for medical decision-making and decrease needless costs. So, this study can be valuable to researchers by helping them consider the appropriate medical imaging system selection problem theoretically under uncertainty, and for governments and organizations to design better satisfying medical imaging evaluation systems.

Globalization and the rapid growth of technologies are the main challenges facing the manufacturer and its sustainability and survival. Sustainability for any manufacturing plays an important role in competitive advantage which make the manufacturing firm a sustainable competitor. Sustainability in manufacturing is integrated with Industry 4.0 (I4.0) to achieve benefits of economic, environmental, and social. But it has many criteria and factors and contains incomplete and uncertain information. So, we used the neutrosophic sets to overcome this incomplete information and treat with uncertainty environment. The Single-Valued Neutrosophic Set (SVNS) is used to evaluate these criteria, which include three values (Truth, indeterminacy, and falsity). The SVNS is integrated with Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods. The MCDM concept is used in this paper to deal with many conflicting criteria. A Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is utilized for determining the relation between five main criteria and fourteen sub-criteria in this study. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to compute the weights of the main and sub-criteria. Our framework is applied to a real case study in Egypt to show the validity of our framework.

In the domains of data mining and machine learning, feature selection (FS) is an essential preprocessing step that has a significant effect on the machine learning model’s performance. The primary purpose of FS is to eliminate unnecessary features, resulting in time-space reduction as well as improved the corresponding learning model performance. Horse herd optimization algorithm (HOA) is a new metaheuristic algorithm that mimics the herding behavior of horses. Within a wrapper-based approach, a binary version of HOA is proposed in this study to select the optimal subset of features for classification purposes. The transfer function is the most important aspect of the binary version. Eight transfer functions, S-shaped and V-shaped, are tested to map the continuous search space into binary search space. Two main enhancements are integrated into the standard HOA to strengthen its performance. A Levy flight operator is added to improve the HOA’s exploring behavior and alleviate local minimal stagnation. Secondly, a local search algorithm is integrated to enhance the best solution obtained after each iteration of HOA. The purpose of the second enhancement is to increase the exploitation capability by looking for the most promising places discovered by HOA. Large-scaled, middle-scaled, and low-scaled datasets from reputable data repositories are used to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm (BinHOA). Comparative tests with state-of-the-art algorithms reveal that the Levy flight with the local search algorithm have a significant favorable impact on the performance of HOA. An enhancement of the population diversity is observed with avoidance of being trapped in local optima.

In this paper, a binary variant of a novel nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called the nutcracker optimization algorithm (NOA) is presented for binary optimization problems. Because of the continuous nature of the classical NOA and the discrete nature of the binary problems, two different families of transfer functions, namely S-shaped and V-shaped, are extensively investigated for converting the classical NOA into a binary variant, namely BNOA, applicable for various binary problems. Additionally, BNOA is improved using a local search strategy based on effectively integrating some genetic operators into the BNOA’s exploitation and exploration; this additional variant is called BINOA. Both BNOA and BINOA are evaluated using three common binary optimization problems, including feature selection, 0-1 knapsack, and the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem (MHKC), and are compared to several robust binary metaheuristic optimizers in terms of statistical information, statistical tests, and convergence speed. The experiential findings show that BINOA is better than the classical BNOA and the other rival optimizers for both the 0-1 knapsack problem and attacking MHKC and is on par with some algorithms, like the genetic algorithm for feature selection.

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.

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.

To avoid any conflict toward a previous work, we clarify certain parts that need explanation and suggest some modifications that will enhance the performance of the suggested algorithm. We enhance the algorithm by making it work in any environment and under various conditions without the occurrence of any warnings. Moreover, we suggest various future directions that will help researchers in the application of neutrosophic analytic hierarchy process. Given that scientific research is always renewed and developed, we always strive to reach the best methods and solutions. Thus, we present this study as a good guide for researchers in their future works.

Recently, a new strong optimization algorithm called marine predators algorithm (MPA) has been proposed for tackling the single-objective optimization problems and could dramatically fulfill good outcomes in comparison to the other compared algorithms. Those dramatic outcomes, in addition to our recently-proposed strategies for helping meta-heuristic algorithms in fulfilling better outcomes for the multi-objective optimization problems, motivate us to make a comprehensive study to see the performance of MPA alone and with those strategies for those optimization problems. Specifically, This paper proposes four variants of the marine predators’ algorithm (MPA) for solving multi-objective optimization problems. The first version, called the multi-objective marine predators’ algorithm (MMPA) is based on the behavior of marine predators in finding their prey. In the second version, a novel strategy called dominance strategy-based exploration-exploitation (DSEE) recently-proposed is effectively incorporated with MMPA to relate the exploration and exploitation phase of MPA to the dominance of the solutions—this version is called M-MMPA. DSEE counts the number of dominated solutions for each solution—the solutions with high dominance undergo an exploitation phase; the others with small dominance undergo the exploration phase. The third version integrates M-MMPA with a novel strategy called Gaussian-based mutation, which uses the Gaussian distribution-based exploration and exploitation strategy to search for the optimal solution. The fourth version uses the Nelder-Mead simplex method with M-MMPA (M-MMPA-NMM) at the start of the optimization process to construct a front of the non-dominated solutions that will help M-MMPA to find more good solutions. The effectiveness of the four versions is validated on a large set of theoretical and practical problems. For all the cases, the proposed algorithm and its variants are shown to be superior to a number of well-known multi-objective optimization algorithms.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is an essential measure to determine the level of profitability of a customer to a firm. Customer relationship management treats CLV as the most significant factor for measuring the level of purchases and, consequently, the profitability of a given customer. This motivates researchers to compete in developing models to maximize the value of CLV. Dynamic programming models in general—and the Q-learning model specifically—play a significant role in this area of research as a model-free algorithm. This maximizes the long-term future rewards of a certain agent, given their current state, set of possible actions, and the next state of that agent, assuming the customer represents the agent and CLV is their future reward. However, due to the stochastic nature of this problem, it is inaccurate to obtain a single crisp value for Q. In this paper, fuzzy logic and neutrosophic logic shall be utilized to search for the membership values of Q to capture the stochasticity and uncertainty of the problem. Both fuzzy Q-learning and neutrosophic Qlearning were implemented using two membership functions (i.e., trapezoidal, and triangular) to search for the optimal Q value that maximizes the customer's future rewards. The proposed algorithms were applied to two benchmark datasets: The Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) cup 1998 direct mailing campaign dataset and the other from Kaggle, related to direct mailing campaigns. The proposed algorithms proved their effectiveness and superiority when comparing them to each other or the traditional deep Q-learning models.

The next generation 6G communication network is typically characterized by the full connectivity and coverage of Users Equipment (UEs). This leads to the need for moving beyond the traditional two-dimensional (2D) coverage service to the three-dimensional (3D) full-service one. The 6G 3D architecture leverages different types of non-terrestrial or aerial nodes that can act as mobile Base Stations (BSs) such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Low Altitude Platforms (LAPs), High-Altitude Platform Stations (HAPSs), or even Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Moreover, aided technologies have been added to the 6G architecture to dynamically increase its coverage efficiency such as the Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS). In this paper, an enhanced Computational Intelligence (CI) algorithm is introduced for optimizing the coverage of UAV-BSs with respect to their location from RIS in the 3D space of 6G architecture. The regarded problem is formulated as a constrained 3D coverage optimization problem. In order to increase the convergence of the proposed algorithm, it is hybridized with a crossover operator. For the validation of the proposed method, it is tested on different scenarios with large-scale coordinates and compared with many recent and hybrid CI algorithms, as Slime Mould Algorithm (SMA), Lévy Flight Distribution (LFD), hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Gravitational Search Algorithm (PSOGSA), the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), and hybrid Grey Wolf Optimizer and Cuckoo Search (GWOCS). The experiment and the statistical analysis show the significant efficiency of the proposed algorithm in achieving complete coverage with a lower number of UAV-BSs and without constraints violation.

Autonomous/self-driving vehicles have gained significant attention these days, as one of the intelligent transportation systems. However, those vehicles have risks related to their physical implementation and security against cyber threats. Therefore, this study proposes a new security-by-design model for estimating the uncertainty of autonomous vehicles and measuring cyber risks; thus it assists decision-makers in addressing the risks of the physical design and their attack surfaces. The proposed model is developed using neutrosophic sets that efficiently tackle multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems with extensive conflicting criteria and alternatives. The proposed model integrates MCDM, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison (MABAC), and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations II (PROMETHEE II), along with single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs). An illustrative case considering ten risks in self-driving vehicles is used to validate the feasibility of the proposed model. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model is considered consistent and reliable to deal with and represent uncertainty and incomplete risk information using neutrosophic sets.

Despite the remarkable work conducted to improve fog computing applications’ efficiency, the task scheduling problem in such an environment is still a big challenge. Optimizing the task scheduling in these applications, i.e. critical healthcare applications, smart cities, and transportation is urgent to save energy, improve the quality of service, reduce the carbon emission rate, and improve the flow time. As proposed in much recent work, dealing with this problem as a single objective problem did not get the desired results. As a result, this paper presents a new multi-objective approach based on integrating the marine predator’s algorithm with the polynomial mutation mechanism (MHMPA) for task scheduling in fog computing environments. In the proposed algorithm, a trade-off between the makespan and the carbon emission ratio based on the Pareto optimality is produced. An external archive is utilized to store the non-dominated solutions generated from the optimization process. Also, another improved version based on the marine predator’s algorithm (MIMPA) by using the Cauchy distribution instead of the Gaussian distribution with the levy Flight to increase the algorithm’s convergence with avoiding stuck into local minima as possible is investigated in this manuscript. The experimental outcomes proved the superiority of the MIMPA over the standard one under various performance metrics. However, the MIMPA couldn’t overcome the MHMPA even after integrating the polynomial mutation strategy with the improved version. Furthermore, several well-known robust multi-objective optimization algorithms are used to test the efficacy of the proposed method. The experiment outcomes show that MHMPA could achieve better outcomes for the various employed performance metrics: Flow time, carbon emission rate, energy, and makespan with an improvement percentage of 414, 27257.46, 64151, and 2 for those metrics, respectively, compared to the second-best compared algorithm.

This paper proposes improvements to the binary grey-wolf optimizer (BGWO) to solve the feature selection (FS) problem associated with high data dimensionality, irrelevant, noisy, and redundant data that will then allow machine learning algorithms to attain better classification/clustering accuracy in less training time. We propose three variants of BGWO in addition to the standard variant, applying different transfer functions to tackle the FS problem. Because BGWO generates continuous values and FS needs discrete values, a number of V-shaped, S-shaped, and U-shaped transfer functions were investigated for incorporation with BGWO to convert their continuous values to binary. After investigation, we note that the performance of BGWO is affected by the selection of the transfer function. Then, in the first variant, we look to reduce the local minima problem by integrating an exploration capability to update the position of the grey wolf randomly within the search space with a certain probability; this variant was abbreviated as IBGWO. Consequently, a novel mutation strategy is proposed to select a number of the worst grey wolves in the population which are updated toward the best solution and randomly within the search space based on a certain probability to determine if the update is either toward the best or randomly. The number of the worst grey wolf selected by this strategy is linearly increased with the iteration. Finally, this strategy is combined with IBGWO to produce the second variant of BGWO that was abbreviated as LIBGWO. In the last variant, simulated annealing (SA) was integrated with LIBGWO to search around the best-so-far solution at the end of each iteration in order to identify better solutions. The performance of the proposed variants was validated on 32 datasets taken from the UCI repository and compared with six wrapper feature selection methods. The experiments show the superiority of the proposed improved variants in producing better classification accuracy than the other selected wrapper feature selection algorithms.

The Ethereum blockchain generates a significant amount of data due to its intrinsic transparency and decentralized nature. It is also referred to as on-chain data and is openly accessible to the world. Moreover, the on-chain data is timestamped, integrated, and validated into an open ledger. This important blockchain feature enables us to assess the network’s health and usage. It serves as a massive data warehouse for complex prediction algorithms that can effectively detect systemic trends and forecast future behavior. We adopt a quantitative approach using a subset of these metrics to determine the network’s true monetary value by developing a Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) with the metrics most closely associated with the price as inputs. Since several hyperparameters regulate the learning process in an RNN, they are highly sensitive to their values. It is thus critical, to select optimal hyperparameters so that the training is quick and effective. Determining the optimal parameters of an RNN model is a tedious and complex process. Hence, previous studies have developed several self-adaptive approaches to determine the optimal values for various parameters effectively. However, none of the prior studies explore self-adaptive algorithms in deep learning models in conjunction with on-chain data to predict cryptocurrency prices. In this paper, we propose three self-adaptive techniques, each of which converges on a set of optimal parameters to predict the price of Ethereum accurately. We compare our results to a traditional LSTM model. Our approach exhibits 86.94% accuracy while maintaining a minimum error rate.

The scarcity of water resources, economic development, and environmental protection are the most important challenges facing governments in dry areas. Proper and legalized new city afforestation projects can achieve maximum economic, environmental, and societal benefit. Therefore, afforestation projects are one of the most important elements of land uses in new cities for their effective role in addressing and reducing the number of negatives associated with urban growth. The problem of water shortage in the process of afforestation of new cities can be faced with several solutions, the most important of which is relying on planting drought-tolerant trees and plants. However, how to plan and select trees and plants to achieve desired goals is an important policy-making problem. This study evaluates four categories, and each category consists of a group of trees and plants that can be planted through a case study in the New Administrative Capital, Egypt. A hybrid fuzzy approach was introduced in which participants could use verbal expressions to express their opinions in decision-making to determine criteria that influence the selection of plants and trees. Many criteria must be taken into consideration in the evaluation process, including economic importance, societal importance, environmental importance, soil strategies, disease and pest resistance, and water-saving. Hence, this study uses a fuzzy hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach that considers many incompatible criteria. At first, the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method was applied to estimate the relative importance of the six selected criteria. Then, the Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) method was applied to arrange the trees and plants of the four selected categories. Sensitivity analysis was carried out to validate the validity and stability of the hybrid fuzzy approach through the change in the weights of the criteria. The results of this paper provide a practical reference for optimizing afforestation and selecting suitable trees and plants to achieve a profitable pattern through economic, societal, and environmental aspects in new cities and dry areas.

Some clarifications of a previous paper with the same title are presented here to avoid any reading conflict [1]. Also, corrections of some typo errors are underlined. Each modification is explained with details for making the reader able to understand the main concept of the paper. Also, some suggested modifications advanced by Singh et al. [3] (Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 2019, DOI:10.3233/JIFS-181541) are discussed. It is observed that Singh et al. [3] have constructed their modifications on several mathematically incorrect assumptions. Consequently, the reader must consider only the modifications which are presented in this research.

This paper proposed a novel first-order single-valued neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy time series (SVNHFTS) forecasting model. Our aim is to improve the previously proposed neutrosophic time series (NTS) model by incorporating the degree of the hesitancy using single-valued neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy set (SVNHFS) model instead of single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS). Our paper's novelty is that we incorporate an algorithm that automatically converts the crisp dataset into the neutrosophic set that eliminates the need for experts' input or opinions in determining the membership in each of the partitioned neutrosophic set. We also incorporate Markov Chain algorithm in the de-neutrosophication process to include the weightage of the repeating neutrosophic logical relationships (NLRs). Our paper's significant contribution is to add to the existing body of knowledge related to fuzzy time series (FTS) by developing a new FTS model based on SVNHFS, one of the improved version of fuzzy sets, since this area of research is still relatively underdeveloped. To determine our proposed model's capability, we apply our proposed SVNHFTS model to three real datasets while also comparing the result to the other FTS models based on improved versions of fuzzy sets. Our datasets include benchmark enrollment data of University of Alabama, IDX Composite (Indonesian composite stock index), and MERVAL index (Argentinian composite stock index). The result shows that our proposed SVNHFTS model outperforms most of the other FTS models in terms of AFE and RMSE, especially the previously proposed NTS model.

This article proposes a new method to overcome the sparse data problem of the collaborative filtering models (CF models) by considering the homologous relationship between users or items calculated on contextual attributes when we build the CF models. In the traditional CF models, the results are built only based on data from the user's ratings for items. The results of the proposed models are calculated on two factors: (1) the similar factors based on rating values; (2) the similar factors based on contextual attributes. The findings from the experimentation on two datasets DePaulMovie and InCarMusic, show that the proposed models have higher accuracy than the traditional CF models.

Many countries are challenged by the medical resources required for COVID-19 detection which necessitates the development of a low-cost, rapid tool to detect and diagnose the virus effectively for a large numbers of tests. Although a chest X-Ray scan is a useful candidate tool the images generated by the scans must be analyzed accurately and quickly if large numbers of tests are to be processed. COVID-19 causes bilateral pulmonary parenchymal ground-glass and consolidative pulmonary opacities, sometimes with a rounded morphology and a peripheral lung distribution. In this work, we aim to extract rapidly from chest X-Ray images the similar small regions that may contain the identifying features of COVID-19. This paper therefore proposes a hybrid COVID-19 detection model based on an improved marine predators algorithm (IMPA) for X-Ray image segmentation. The ranking-based diversity reduction (RDR) strategy is used to enhance the performance of the IMPA to reach better solutions in fewer iterations. RDR works on finding the particles that couldn't find better solutions within a consecutive number of iterations, and then moving those particles towards the best solutions so far. The performance of IMPA has been validated on nine chest X-Ray images with threshold levels between 10 and 100 and compared with five state-of-art algorithms: equilibrium optimizer (EO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), Harris-hawks algorithm (HHA), and salp swarm algorithms (SSA). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model outperforms all other algorithms for a range of metrics. In addition, the performance of our proposed model was convergent on all numbers of thresholds level in the Structured Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) and Universal Quality Index (UQI) metrics.

The study of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is crucial in many fields, including medicine, biology, zoology, agriculture, and forensics. Since reading a DNA sequence is onerous because of its massive length, it is common in many DNA analysis applications to divide DNA strands into small segments or fragments which, after analysis, must be reassembled. Since this reassembly takes a non-specific polynomial time to solve, the DNA fragment assembly problem (DFAP) is NP-hard. This paper proposes a new assembler for tackling the DFAP based on the overlap-layout-consensus (OLC) approach. The proposed assembler adapts a discrete whale optimization algorithm (DWOA) using standard operators adopted from evolutionary algorithms to simulate the strategy adopted by humpback whales when searching for prey. For the first time, we formulate the behaviors of whales to be applied directly to any discrete optimization problem based on three primary operations: a swap-based best-position operator, an ordered crossover operator, and selection of a random whale operation to perform the exploitation and exploration phases of the algorithm. These operations were carefully designed to preserve the methodology of the original whale algorithm. DFAP is a multi-objective problem that seeks to reach the optimal order of segments that maximizes the overlap score and minimizes the number of contigs (set of overlapping DNA segments) to compose a one-contig DNA strand. Existing local search methods, such as problem aware local search (PALS) many non-conflicting movements (PALS2-many), suffer from being trapped in local optima. Hence, the integration of DWOA with PALS2-many improves the search capability for finding the optimal order of fragments. In addition, we propose a new variation of PALS2-many that achieves simultaneously the two objectives of DFAP. Our proposed DWOA was compared with a number of the most recent robust assemblers: a hybrid crow search algorithm for solving the DFAP (CSA-P2M*Fit), P2M*Fit, and a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA-P2M*Fit). The experimental results and statistical analyses of the proposed DWOA on thirty benchmark instances show that DWOA significantly outperforms those algorithms in reaching fewer contigs, in addition to being competitive with CSA-P2M*Fit and superior to P2M*Fit and GA-P2M*Fit for the overlap score.

The rapid spread of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has led to a dramatically increased mortality rate worldwide. Despite many efforts, the rapid development of an effective vaccine for this novel virus will take considerable time and relies on the identification of drug-target (DT) interactions utilizing commercially available medication to identify potential inhibitors. Motivated by this, we propose a new framework, called DeepH-DTA, for predicting DT binding affinities for heterogeneous drugs. We propose a heterogeneous graph attention (HGAT) model to learn topological information of compound molecules and bidirectional ConvLSTM layers for modeling spatio-sequential information in simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) sequences of drug data. For protein sequences, we propose a squeezed-excited dense convolutional network for learning hidden representations within amino acid sequences; while utilizing advanced embedding techniques for encoding both kinds of input sequences. The performance of DeepH-DTA is evaluated through extensive experiments against cutting-edge approaches utilising two public datasets (Davis, and KIBA) which comprise eclectic samples of the kinase protein family and the pertinent inhibitors. DeepH-DTA attains the highest Concordance Index (CI) of 0.924 and 0.927 and also achieved a mean square error (MSE) of 0.195 and 0.111 on the Davis and KIBA datasets respectively. Moreover, a study using FDA-approved drugs from the Drug Bank database is performed using DeepH-DTA to predict the affinity scores of drugs against SARS-CoV-2 amino acid sequences, and the results show that that the model can predict some of the SARS-Cov-2 inhibitors that have been recently approved in many clinical studies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making method called the neutrosophic data analytic hierarchy process (NDAHP) for the single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS). This method is an extension of the neutrosophic analytic hierarchy process (NAHP) designed to handle actual datasets which consist of crisp values. The proposed NDAHP method uses an objective weighting mechanism whereas all other existing versions of the AHP, fuzzy AHP, and other fuzzy based AHP method in literature such as the NAHP and picture fuzzy AHP uses a subjective weighting mechanism to arrive at the decision. This makes the proposed NDAHP method effective as the weightage of the criteria which forms the input of the evaluation matrix are determined in an objective manner using actual data collected for the problem, and hence will not change according to the opinions of different decision makers which are subjective. The proposed NDAHP method is applied to a multi-criteria decision making problem related to the ranking of the financial performance of five public listed petrochemical companies trading in the main board of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE). Actual dataset of 15 financial indices for the five petrochemical companies for 2017 obtained from Yahoo! Finance was used in this paper. Following this, a brief comparative study is conducted to evaluate the performance of our NDAHP algorithm against the results of other existing SVNS-based decision making methods in the literature. The results are compared against actual results obtained from KLSE. To further verify the rankings obtained through each method, the Spearman and Pearson ranking tests are carried out on each of the decision making methods that are studied. It is proved that NDAHP produces the most accurate results, and this was further verified from the results of the Spearman and Pearson ranking tests.

Assessment of code smell for predicting software change proneness is essential to ensure its significance in the area of software quality. While multiple studies have been conducted in this regard, the number of systems studied and the methods used in this paper are quite different, thus, causing confusion for understanding the best methodology. The objective of this paper is to approve the effect of code smell on the change inclination of a specific class in a product framework. This is the novelty and surplus of this work against the others. Furthermore, this paper aims to validate code smell for predicting class change proneness to find an error in the prediction of change proneness using code smell. Six typical machine learning algorithms (Naive Bayes Classifier, Multilayer Perceptron, LogitBoost, Bagging, Random Forest, and Decision Tree) have been used to predict change proneness using code smell from a set of 8200 Java classes spanning 14 software systems. The experimental results suggest that code smell is indeed a powerful predictor of class change proneness with multilayer perceptron being the most effective technique. The sensitivity and specificity values for all the models are well over 70% with a few exceptions.