Abstract:Organic food consumption has increased during the last years as a consequence of its direct impact on consumer health, life style, and social convenience as well as on the environment and sustainable development. Compared to the European level, the consumption of organic food products is quite low in Romania. This paper investigates the perception and attitudes of the organic food consumers from the North-West Development Region of Romania. Consumers' perception towards organic food products was measured using 30 items. The data were collected from 568 respondents and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. A factor-cluster approach was used to identify consumer groups. The findings indicated that health concerns, sensory appeal, sustainable consumption and weight concerns are the main reasons for consuming organic food products. Three main groups of organic food consumers were identified: "gourmand", "environmentally concerned" and "health concerned".

The vehicular ad hoc network, VANET, is one of the most popular and promising technologies in intelligent transportation today. However, VANET is susceptible to several vulnerabilities that result in an intrusion. This intrusion must be solved before VANET technology can be adopted. In this study, we suggest a unique machine learning technique to improve VANET’s effectiveness. The proposed method incorporates two phases. Phase I detects the DDoS attack using a novel machine learning technique called SVM-HHO, which provides information about the vehicle. Phase II mitigates the impact of a DDoS attack and allocates bandwidth using a reliable resources management technique based on the hybrid whale dragonfly optimization algorithm (H-WDFOA). This proposed model could be an effective technique predicting and utilizing reliable information that provides effective results in smart vehicles. The novel machine learning-based technique was implemented through MATLAB and NS2 platforms. Network quality measurements included congestion, transit, collision, and QoS awareness cost. Based on the constraints, a different cost framework was designed. In addition, data preprocessing of the QoS factor and total routing costs were considered. Rider integrated cuckoo search (RI-CS) is a novel optimization algorithm that combines the concepts of the rider optimization algorithm (ROA) and cuckoo search (CS) to determine the optimal route with the lowest routing cost. The enhanced hybrid ant colony optimization routing protocol (EHACORP) is a networking technology that increases efficiency by utilizing the shortest route. The shortest path of the proposed protocol had the lowest communication overhead and the fewest number of hops between sending and receiving vehicles. The EHACORP involved two stages. To find the distance between cars in phase 1, EHACORP employed a method for calculating distance. Using starting point ant colony optimization, the ants were guided in phase 2 to develop the shortest route with the least number of connections to send information. The relatively short approach increases protocol efficiency in every way. The pairing of DCM and SBACO at H-WDFOA-VANET accelerated packet processing, reduced ant search time, eliminated blind broadcasting, and prevented stagnation issues. The delivery ratio and throughput of the H-WDFOA-packet VANET benefitted from its use of the shortest channel without stagnation, its rapid packet processing, and its rapid convergence speed. In conclusion, the proposed hybrid whale dragonfly optimization approach (H-WDFOA-VANET) was compared with industry standard models, such as rider integrated cuckoo search (RI-CS) and enhanced hybrid ant colony optimization routing protocol (EHACORP). With the proposed method, throughput could be increased. The proposed system had energy consumption values of 2.00000mJ, latency values of 15.61668s, and a drop at node 60 of 0.15759. Additionally, a higher throughput was achieved with the new method. With the suggested method, it is possible to meet the energy consumption targets, delay value, and drop value at node 60. The proposed method reduces the drop value at node 80 to 0.15504, delay time to 15.64318s, and energy consumption to 2.00000mJ. These outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Thus, the proposed system is more efficient than existing systems.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are increasingly making an impact in a wide range of domain-specific applications. In IoT-integrated WSNs, nodes generally function with limited battery units and, hence, energy efficiency is considered as the main design challenge. For homogeneous WSNs, several routing techniques based on clusters are available, but only a few of them are focused on energy-efficient heterogeneous WSNs (HWSNs). However, security provisioning in end-to-end communication is the main design challenge in HWSNs. This research work presents an energy optimizing secure routing scheme for IoT application in heterogeneous WSNs. In our proposed scheme, secure routing is established for confidential data of the IoT through sensor nodes with heterogeneous energy using the multipath link routing protocol (MLRP). After establishing the secure routing, the energy and network lifetime is improved using the hybrid-based TEEN (H-TEEN) protocol, which also has load balancing capacity. Furthermore, the data storage capacity is improved using the ubiquitous data storage protocol (U-DSP). This routing protocol has been implemented and compared with two other existing routing protocols, and it shows an improvement in performance parameters such as throughput, energy efficiency, end-to-end delay, network lifetime and data storage capacity.

According to recent studies, it has been concluded that renewable electricity generation is being requested to replace all other fuels more often. In China and the USA, among renewable electricity sources, wind usage has increased significantly compared to 2020. Given these circumstances, the aim of this study was to develop a suitable speed control method for wind power systems in order to achieve maximum power generation while reducing mechanical loads. Several control strategies have been proposed in the literature, all of which offer a compromise between performance and robustness. The present research developed fractional order PID (FOPID) controllers and proved which would be the most suitable controller to address the challenges that wind turbine systems face. The parameters of the FOPID controllers (KP, KI, KD, λ and µ) were tuned with the help of the following optimization algorithms: a genetic algorithm (GA), a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results from these three turning methods were then compared to find the method that offered the best performance and system robustness.

One of the primary challenges that wireless technology in the present generation is facing is always best connected (ABC) service. This is possible only when the wireless overlay networks follow a cooperative and coordinated process. Vertical handoff is one such process. Concerning this process, the main challenge is to develop algorithms that take care of optimal connection management with proper resource utilization for uninterrupted mobility. In this paper, we develop a new hybrid cuckoo search (CS) and genetic algorithm (GA) that maximizes the performance of heterogeneous wireless systems in terms of minimizing latency, handover failure probability, and enhancing the throughput. We focus on an optimized simulation framework to demonstrate the advantage of our hybrid model. It can be discerned from the simulation analysis that the proposed hybrid technique increases throughput by 17% and 8% compared to the cuckoo search and genetic algorithms applied individually. The performance of the proposed scheme is promising for applications wherein the handoff mechanisms have to be optimized to control frequent handoffs to further reduce the power consumption of user equipment.