In this work, we present a new multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) characterized by the use of a strategy to limit the velocity of the particles. The proposed approach, called Speed-constrained Multi-objective PSO (SMPSO) allows to produce new effective particle positions in those cases in which the velocity becomes too high. Other features of SMPSO include the use of polynomial mutation as a turbulence factor and an external archive to store the nondominated solutions found during the search. Our proposed approach is compared with respect to five multi-objective metaheuristics representative of the state-of-the-art in the area. For the comparison, two different criteria are adopted: the quality of the resulting approximation sets and the convergence speed to the Pareto front. The experiments carried out indicate that SMPSO obtains remarkable results in terms of both, accuracy and speed.

Internet of Things (IoT)-based automation of agricultural events can change the agriculture sector from being static and manual to dynamic and smart, leading to enhanced production with reduced human efforts. Precision Agriculture (PA) along with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the main drivers of automation in the agriculture domain. PA uses specific sensors and software to ensure that the crops receive exactly what they need to optimize productivity and sustainability. PA includes retrieving real data about the conditions of soil, crops and weather from the sensors deployed in the fields. High-resolution images of crops are obtained from satellite or air-borne platforms (manned or unmanned), which are further processed to extract information used to provide future decisions. In this paper, a review of near and remote sensor networks in the agriculture domain is presented along with several considerations and challenges. This survey includes wireless communication technologies, sensors, and wireless nodes used to assess the environmental behaviour, the platforms used to obtain spectral images of crops, the common vegetation indices used to analyse spectral images and applications of WSN in agriculture. As a proof of concept, we present a case study showing how WSN-based PA system can be implemented. We propose an IoT-based smart solution for crop health monitoring, which is comprised of two modules. The first module is a wireless sensor network-based system to monitor real-time crop health status. The second module uses a low altitude remote sensing platform to obtain multi-spectral imagery, which is further processed to classify healthy and unhealthy crops. We also highlight the results obtained using a case study and list the challenges and future directions based on our work.

Abstract-In this work we compare the use of a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) (both augmented with Support Vector Machines SVM) for the classification of high dimensional Microarray Data. Both algorithms are used for finding small samples of informative genes amongst thousands of them. A SVM classifier with 10-fold cross-validation is applied in order to validate and evaluate the provided solutions. A first contribution is to prove that P SOSV M is able to find interesting genes and to provide classification competitive performance. Specifically, a new version of PSO, called Geometric PSO, is empirically evaluated for the first time in this work using a binary representation in Hamming space. In this sense, a comparison of this approach with a new GASV M and also with other existing methods of literature is provided. A second important contribution consists in the actual discovery of new and challenging results on six public datasets identifying significant in the development of a variety of cancers (leukemia, breast, colon, ovarian, prostate, and lung).

Water makes up about 70% of the earth’s surface and is one of the most important sources vital to sustaining life. Rapid urbanization and industrialization have led to a deterioration of water quality at an alarming rate, resulting in harrowing diseases. Water quality has been conventionally estimated through expensive and time-consuming lab and statistical analyses, which render the contemporary notion of real-time monitoring moot. The alarming consequences of poor water quality necessitate an alternative method, which is quicker and inexpensive. With this motivation, this research explores a series of supervised machine learning algorithms to estimate the water quality index (WQI), which is a singular index to describe the general quality of water, and the water quality class (WQC), which is a distinctive class defined on the basis of the WQI. The proposed methodology employs four input parameters, namely, temperature, turbidity, pH and total dissolved solids. Of all the employed algorithms, gradient boosting, with a learning rate of 0.1 and polynomial regression, with a degree of 2, predict the WQI most efficiently, having a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.9642 and 2.7273, respectively. Whereas multi-layer perceptron (MLP), with a configuration of (3, 7), classifies the WQC most efficiently, with an accuracy of 0.8507. The proposed methodology achieves reasonable accuracy using a minimal number of parameters to validate the possibility of its use in real time water quality detection systems.

Abstract-Recent advances in wireless technologies have given rise to the emergence of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In such networks, the limited coverage of WiFi and the high mobility of the nodes generate frequent topology changes and network fragmentations. For these reasons, and taking into account that there is no central manager entity, routing packets through the network is a challenging task. Therefore, offering an efficient routing strategy is crucial to the deployment of VANETs. This paper deals with the optimal parameter setting of the optimized link state routing (OLSR), which is a well-known mobile ad hoc network routing protocol, by defining an optimization problem. This way, a series of representative metaheuristic algorithms (particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, genetic algorithm, and simulated annealing) are studied in this paper to find automatically optimal configurations of this routing protocol. In addition, a set of realistic VANET scenarios (based in the city of Málaga) have been defined to accurately evaluate the performance of the network under our automatic OLSR. In the experiments, our tuned OLSR configurations result in better quality of service (QoS) than the standard request for comments (RFC 3626), as well as several human experts, making it amenable for utilization in VANET configurations.Index Terms-Metaheuristics, optimization algorithms, optimized link state routing (OLSR), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET).