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We propose an improved version of the recently developed Enhanced Fireworks Algorithm (EFWA) based on an adaptive dynamic local search mechanism. In EFWA, the explosion amplitude (i.e., search area around the current location) of each firework is computed based on the quality of the firework's current location. This explosion amplitude is limited by a lower bound which decreases with the number of iterations in order to avoid the explosion amplitude to be [close to] zero, and in order to enhance global search abilities at the beginning and local search abilities towards the later phase of the algorithm. As the explosion amplitude in EFWA depends solely on the fireworks' fitness and the current number of iterations, this procedure does not allow for an adaptive optimization process. To deal with these limitations, we propose the Dynamic Search Fireworks Algorithm (dynFWA) which uses a dynamic explosion amplitude for the firework at the currently best position according to the success of the current local search around this location. If the fitness of the best firework could be improved, the explosion amplitude will increase in order to speed up convergence. On the contrary, if the current position of the best firework could not be improved, the explosion amplitude will decrease in order to narrow the search area. In addition, we show that one of the EFWA operators can be removed in dynFWA without a loss in accuracy -this makes dynFWA computationally more efficient than EFWA. Experiments on 28 benchmark functions indicate that dynFWA is able to significantly outperform EFWA, and achieves better performance than the latest SPSO version SPSO2011.

Mobile cellular networks can serve as ubiquitous sensors for physical mobility. We propose a method to infer vehicle travel times on highways and to detect road congestion in realtime, based solely on anonymized signaling data collected from a mobile cellular network. Most previous studies have considered data generated from mobile devices active in calls, namely Call Detail Records (CDR), an approach that limits the number of observable devices to a small fraction of the whole population. Our approach overcomes this drawback by exploiting the whole set of signaling events generated by both idle and active devices. While idle devices contribute with a large volume of spatially coarse-grained mobility data, active devices provide finer-grained spatial accuracy for a limited subset of devices. The combined use of data from idle and active devices improves congestion detection performance in terms of coverage, accuracy, and timeliness. We apply our method to real mobile signaling data obtained from an operational network during a one-month period on a sample highway segment in the proximity of a European city, and present an extensive validation study based on ground-truth obtained from a rich set of reference datasources-road sensor data, toll data, taxi floating car data, and radio broadcast messages.

This paper presents a cooperative framework for fireworks algorithm (CoFFWA). A detailed analysis of existing fireworks algorithm (FWA) and its recently developed variants has revealed that ( i) the current selection strategy has the drawback that the contribution of the firework with the best fitness (denoted as core firework) overwhelms the contributions of all other fireworks (non-core fireworks) in the explosion operator, ( ii) the Gaussian mutation operator is not as effective as it is designed to be. To overcome these limitations, the CoFFWA is proposed, which significantly improves the exploitation capability by using an independent selection method and also increases the exploration capability by incorporating a crowdness-avoiding cooperative strategy among the fireworks. Experimental results on the CEC2013 benchmark functions indicate that CoFFWA outperforms the state-of-the-art FWA variants, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, and the standard particle swarm optimization SPSO2007/SPSO2011 in terms of convergence performance.