The heterogeneous digital arena emerged as the open depiction for malicious activities, and cyber criminals and terrorists are targeting the cyber depiction for controlling its operation. In the dark web (DW), diverse illegal hacking communities are using the sensing-chip webnet to transfer their bots for tracking the user activity so that criminal activities could be accomplished like money laundering, pornography, child trafficking, drug trafficking, arms and ammunition trafficking, where professionals could also be hired and contracted for generating flood infringement and ransomware infringement.

No abstract

In the last few decades, the development and advancement of meta-heuristic algorithms have become the focus of the research community as these algorithms face various challenges like, balance between exploration and exploitation, tuning of parameters, getting trapped in local optima, and very slow convergence rate. Sine cosine algorithm (SCA) also faces similar kinds of challenges and sometimes fails to perform effectively in finding the global optimal solution. Sine and cosine are trigonometric operators with a 90$$^\circ $$ phase shift from each other. The range of sine and cosine functions lies in the range $$[-1,1]$$. Sine and cosine functions in the position update equation of SCA help solutions to perform search procedure. However, in some situations, SCA promotes similar solutions in the search space, which results in the loss of diversity in the population, and the search process is susceptible to trapping in the region of local optimum [1]. Motivated by these challenges, SCA has been modified to improve its capability and efficiency in several ways. Several strategies have been employed to alter the basic version of SCA [2], aiming to enhance its effectiveness and optimization capabilities. In this chapter, we will discuss about these modifications and strategies, which have been incorporated into the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in past few years. Apart from this, we will briefly describe the applications of the modified versions of SCA.

The increasing complexity of real-world optimization problems demands fast, robust, and efficient meta-heuristic algorithms. The popularity of these intelligent techniques is gaining popularity day by day among researchers from various disciplines of science and engineering. The sine cosine algorithm is a simple population-based stochastic approach for handling different optimization problems. In this work, we have discussed the basic sine cosine algorithm for continuous optimization problems, the multi-objective sine cosine algorithm for handling multi-objective optimization problems, and the discrete (or binary) versions of sine cosine algorithm for discrete optimization problems. Sine cosine algorithm (SCA) has reportedly shown competitive results when compared to other meta-heuristic algorithms. The easy implementation and less number of parameters make the SCA algorithm, a recommended choice for performing various optimization tasks. In this present chapter, we have studied different modifications and strategies for the advancement of the sine cosine algorithm. The incorporation of concepts like opposition-based learning, quantum simulation, and hybridization with other meta-heuristic algorithms have increased the efficiency and robustness of the SCA algorithm, and meanwhile, these techniques have also increased the application spectrum of the sine cosine algorithm.

Decision-making is a difficult task, and it requires careful analysis of the underlying problem at hand. The presence of various alternative solutions makes the decision-making problem even more difficult as all the available solutions are not optimal. Since resources, time, and money are limited, or even sometimes scarce, the quest for optimal choices is of paramount importance for the welfare of the mankind. Optimization is a mathematical tool and an indispensable part of the decision-making process which assists in finding optimal (or near optimal) solutions from the set of available solutions.