This manuscript is involved in the study of stability of the solutions of functional differential equations (FDEs) with random coefficients and/or stochastic terms. We focus on the study of different types of stability of random/stochastic functional systems, specifically, stochastic delay differential equations (SDDEs). Introducing appropriate Lyapunov functionals enables us to investigate the necessary conditions for stochastic stability, asymptotic stochastic stability, asymptotic mean square stability, mean square exponential stability, global exponential mean square stability, and practical uniform exponential stability. Some examples with numerical simulations are presented to strengthen the theoretical results. Using our theoretical study, important aspects of epidemiological and ecological mathematical models can be revealed. In ecology, the dynamics of Nicholson’s blowflies equation is studied. Conditions of stochastic stability and stochastic global exponential stability of the equilibrium point at which the blowflies become extinct are investigated. In finance, the dynamics of the Black–Scholes market model driven by a Brownian motion with random variable coefficients and time delay is also studied.

Cloud computing is one of the evolving fields of technology, which allows storage, access of data, programs, and their execution over the internet with offering a variety of information related services. With cloud information services, it is essential for information to be saved securely and to be distributed safely across numerous users. Cloud information storage has suffered from issues related to information integrity, data security, and information access by unauthenticated users. The distribution and storage of data among several users are highly scalable and cost-efficient but results in data redundancy and security issues. In this article, a biometric authentication scheme is proposed for the requested users to give access permission in a cloud-distributed environment and, at the same time, alleviate data redundancy. To achieve this, a cryptographic technique is used by service providers to generate the bio-key for authentication, which will be accessible only to authenticated users. A Gabor filter with distributed security and encryption using XOR operations is used to generate the proposed bio-key (biometric generated key) and avoid data deduplication in the cloud, ensuring avoidance of data redundancy and security. The proposed method is compared with existing algorithms, such as convergent encryption (CE), leakage resilient (LR), randomized convergent encryption (RCE), secure de-duplication scheme (SDS), to evaluate the de-duplication performance. Our comparative analysis shows that our proposed scheme results in smaller computation and communication costs than existing schemes.

A large range of applications have been identified based upon the communication of underground sensors deeply buried in the soil. The classical electromagnetic wave (EM) approach, which works well for terrestrial communication in air medium, when applied for this underground communication, suffers from significant challenges attributing to signal absorption by rocks, soil, or water contents, highly varying channel condition caused by soil characteristics, and requirement of big antennas. As a strong alternative of EM, various magnetic induction (MI) techniques have been introduced. These techniques basically depend upon the magnetic induction between two coupled coils associated with transceiver sensor nodes. This paper elaborates on three basic MI communication mechanisms i.e. direct MI transmission, MI waveguide transmission, and 3D coil MI communication with detailed discussion of their working mechanism, advantages and limitations. The comparative analysis of these MI techniques with each other as well as with EM wave method will facilitate the users in choosing the best method to offer enhanced transmission range (upto 250 m), reduced path loss (<100 dB), channel reliability, working bandwidth (1–2 kHz), & omni-directional coverage to realize the promising MI-based wireless underground sensor network (WUSN) applications.

There are several challenges that hospitals are facing according to the emergency department (ED). The main two issues are department capacity and lead time. However, the lack of consensus on performance criteria to evaluate ED increases the complication of this process. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the efficiency of the emergency department in 20 Egyptian hospitals (12 private and 8 general hospitals) based on 13 performance metrics. This research suggests an integrated evaluation model assess ED under a framework of plithogenic theory. The proposed framework addressed uncertainty and ambiguity in information with an efficient manner via presenting the evaluation expression by plithogenic numbers. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique is used in order to measure the efficiency of the emergency department of 20 hospitals according to the number of treated patients and effect on patient's life quality based on 11 factors. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the weight of efficiency factors will be measured based on neutrosophic linguistic scale pairwise comparison. Plithogenic operations provide more accurate aggregation result according to contradiction degree between criteria values. The results show that ten of the hospitals are providing efficient service in their emergency department, while the other ten are less efficient. The analysis of the results shows that 58% of private hospitals emergency department is operating efficiently, while the efficient general hospitals represent 38%.

In logistics, several algorithms can be implemented in order to solve the problems of the vehicle routing with variants in order to find near-optimal solutions. Waste Collection can be considered as an essential logistic activity within any area or city. This kind of paper is aimed to implement Iterated greedy (IG) and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) to solve waste collection vehicle routing problem with time windows on a real-case study. The idea is to generate an efficient way to collect waste problems in an area located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Moreover, generating a route plays a significant role in terms of serving all customers’ demands who have own different time windows of receiving goods. Also, the performance of the proposed algorithms according to all instances is examined and minimizing the total costs and meeting all constraints that related to capacity, time windows, and others. To evaluate the execution of the presented algorithms, the computational results showed essential improvements, and also ALNS algorithm generates reasonable solutions in terms of total costs and a reasonable amount of time, when compared to other algorithms.