Informatica

Due to the increasing importance of evaluating the quality of health care services using the patient-centred approach, this study aimed to propose a novel framework by combining the SERVQUAL model and multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods using interval-valued triangular fuzzy numbers (IVTFN). In this study, after an initial overview of related work and expert opinions, a list of the most important dimensions and indicators for measuring the quality of health care services was extracted and localized. Then, to determine the importance of each of the identified factors, one of MADM’s acceptable methods called step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) was used. Then, in order to use the developed framework for comparing different health centres and ranking them, after collecting evaluation data in the form of linguistic variables, another practical method in the field of MADM has been used, namely, Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method. The dimensions and sub-dimensions identified are, on the one hand, appropriate to the conditions of the case study and, on the other hand, the findings from the implementation show that among the dimensions of health service quality, responsiveness and then reliability has the highest rank in this case. Also, the use of IVTFN, on the one hand, eliminates the problems related to the use of Likert scale in other quality assessment methods and, on the other hand, reduces the possibility of facing imperfect knowledge of data which is a common problem in the field of qualitative evaluations. Utilizing the results of this study can significantly help decision makers in their choice of strategies to improve service quality. Furthermore, improving the quality of services can play an important role in promoting the competitiveness and performance of health care providers by increasing patient satisfaction with the services received. Also, as a side effect, the developed framework can be used to compare the performance of different hospitals and health centres, as well as their ranking.

Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is one of the most reliable and applicable decision-making tools to address real-life complex and multi-dimensional problems in accordance with the concepts of sustainable development and circular economy. Although there have been several literature reviews on several MCDM methods, there is a research gap in conducting a literature review on the Multi-Attributive Border Approximation area Comparison (MABAC) as a useful technique to deal with intelligent decision-making systems. This study attempts to present a comprehensive literature review of 117 articles on recent developments and applications of MABAC. Future outlook is provided considering challenges and current trends.

We study the burst ratio of packet loss processes in networking. This parameter characterizes the inclination of packet losses to form long, consecutive sequences. Such long sequences of losses may have a negative impact on multimedia streams, particularly those of real-time type. In packet networks, the burst ratio is often elevated due to overflows of packet buffers, which are present in all routers and switches. In the article, we investigate the burst ratio in the per-flow manner, i.e. individually for every flow of packets traversing a network node. We first confront all the per-flow burst ratios with each other, as well as with the burst ratio computed for the multiplexed traffic. Next, we study the influence of different features of the system on these burst ratios. In particular, the influence of rates of flows and their proportions, the standard deviation of interarrival times, the capacity of the buffer, the system load and the distribution of the service time, is studied. Special attention is paid to models with non-Poisson flows, which are not analytically tractable.

This contribution presents a brief survey of clipping and intersection algorithms in ${E^{2}}$ and ${E^{3}}$ with a nearly complete list of relevant references. Some algorithms use the projective extension of the Euclidean space and vector-vector operations, which support GPU and SSE use.

The focus of this paper is on the criteria weight approximation in Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). An approximate weighting method produces the weights that are surrogates for the exact values that cannot be elicited directly from the DM. In this field, a very famous model is Rank Order Centroid (ROC). The paper shows that there is a drawback to the ROC method that could be resolved. The paper gives an idea to develop a revised version of the ROC method called Improved ROC (IROC). The behaviour of the IROC method is investigated using a set of simulation experiments. The IROC method could be employed in situations of time pressure, imprecise information, etc. The paper also proposes a methodology including the application of the IROC method in a group decision making mode, to estimate the weights of the criteria in a tree-shaped structure. The proposed methodology is useful for academics/managers/decision makers who want to deal with MCDM problem. A study case is examined to show applicability of the proposed methodology in a real-world situation. This case is engine/vehicle selection problem, that is one of the fundamental challenges of road transport sector of any country.

The coordinated integration of heterogeneous TinyML-enabled elements in highly distributed Internet of Things (IoT) environments paves the way for the development of truly intelligent and context-aware applications. In this work, we propose a hierarchical ensemble TinyML scheme that permits system-wide decisions by considering the individual decisions made by the IoT elements deployed in a certain scenario. A two-layered TinyML-based edge computing solution has been implemented and evaluated in a real smart-agriculture use case, permitting to save wireless transmissions, reduce energy consumption and response times, at the same time strengthening data privacy and security.

In this study, Intuitionistic Fuzzy Consistency Method (IF-FUCOM) and Grey Relation Analysis (GRA) were combined to assess the effects of Bacillus subtilis bacteria on concrete properties, as well as to determine the optimal bacteria concentration and curing day. Three different concentrations of bacteria were added to the mortar mixes, like 103, 105, and 107 cells/ml of water. Mortar samples were left to cure for 7 days, 14 days, and 28 days to evaluate compressive strength, water absorption, crack healing. According to the proposed algorithm, 105 bacteria are the optimal concentration, while 28 days is the ideal curing time.

Due to the popularity of mobile communication, many computing devices are exposed to remote environments without physical protection so that these devices easily suffer from leakage attacks (e.g., side-channel attacks). Under such leakage attacks, when a computing device performs some cryptographic algorithm, an adversary may acquire partial bits of secret keys participated in this cryptographic algorithm. To resist leakage attacks, researchers offer leakage-resilient cryptography as a solution. A signcryption scheme combines signing and encrypting processes to simultaneously provide both authentication and confidentiality, which is an important cryptographic primitive. Indeed, many leakage-resilient signcryption schemes under various public key system (PKS) settings were proposed. Unfortunately, these schemes still have two shortcomings, namely, bounded leakage resilience and conditionally continuous leakage resilience. In this paper, a “fully” continuous leakage-resilient certificate-based signcryption (FCLR-CBSC) scheme is proposed. Security analysis is formally proved to show that our scheme possesses both authentication and confidentiality against two types of adversaries in the certificate-based PKS setting. Performance analysis and simulation experience show that our scheme is suited to run on both a PC and a mobile device.

Commonly modern symmetric encryption schemes (e.g. AES) use rather simple actions repeated many times by defining several rounds to calculate the ciphertext. An idea we previously offered was to trade these multiple repeats for one non-linear operation. Recently we proposed a perfectly secure symmetric encryption scheme based on the matrix power function (MPF). However, the platform group we used was commuting. In this paper, we use a non-commuting group whose cardinality is a power of 2 as a platform for MPF. Due to the convenient cardinality value, our scheme is more suitable for practical implementation. Moreover, due to the non-commuting nature of the platform group, some “natural” constraints on the power matrices arise. We think that this fact complicates the cryptanalysis of our proposal. We demonstrate that the newly defined symmetric cipher possesses are perfectly secure as they were previously done for the commuting platform group. Furthermore, we show that the same secret key can be used multiple times to encrypt several plaintexts without loss of security. Relying on the proven properties we construct the cipher block chaining mode of the initial cipher and show that it can withstand an adaptive chosen plaintext attack.