Informatica

The accelerated progress of aquaponics offers a promising remedy for food production in arid regions, where success heavily hinges on sustaining optimal water quality parameters of aquaponic system. However, managing water parameters in large-scale aquaponic farms, given their complex and interconnected nature, poses significant challenges. Various control approaches have been introduced over the years, but selecting the most suitable one is vital for ensuring stability, efficiency, and high productivity. In this study, a novel fuzzy-based Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodology is proposed, which combines the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Ordinary Priority Approach (OPA-IF) with the Neutrosophic-TOPSIS strategy. This methodology aims to identify the most appropriate control strategy for large-scale aquaponic systems. The OPA-IF analysis reveals that the ‘Capability to Handle MIMO Systems’ is the most critical criterion, leading to the conclusion, through the Neutrosophic-TOPSIS approach, that ‘Model Predictive Control (MPC)’ is the optimal choice for managing large-scale aquaponic systems. Additionally, a comparative analysis using the BWM-Neutrosophic-TOPSIS strategy further supports the findings of the proposed method. The results are further validated through statistical analysis and sensitivity testing, ensuring their robustness and reliability. Overall, this study not only contributes to the scientific understanding of control strategies in aquaponics but also offers practical insights for farmers and aquaponic practitioners. The ultimate goal is to enhance the sustainability and efficiency of aquaponic systems, promoting their adoption and long-term success in sustainable food production.

Sustainable practices are essential for long-term societal development, minimizing environmental impacts while promoting the efficient use of resources. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches can play a vital role in assessing and prioritizing sustainability solutions by considering diverse economic, social, and environmental factors. This study proposes a multi-criteria group decision-making approach based on the Objective Pairwise Adjusted Ratio Analysis (OPARA) method in a fuzzy environment and presents its application for the assessment of sustainable agriculture solutions. In the proposed approach, the evaluation criteria weights are determined by combining subjective weights from experts and objective weights obtained from the MEREC (Method Based on the Removal Effects of Criteria) method. The Relative Preference Relation (RPR) approach is employed for ranking fuzzy numbers and final evaluation. Sensitivity analysis and comparison with other methods are conducted to assess the robustness and validity of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in evaluating solutions. Based on the final evaluation from the case study, the most important criteria are “Availability and quality of water”, “Focus on immediate economic returns”, and “Financial incentives and access to credit”, while the most suitable solutions for advancing sustainable agriculture are “Financial and credit support”, “Education and enhancement of farmers’ knowledge”, and “Enhancement of research and development”.

This paper develops a two-stage decision approach with probabilistic hesitant fuzzy data. Research challenges in earlier models are: (i) the calculation of occurrence probability; (ii) imputation of missing elements; (iii) consideration of attitude and hesitation of experts during weight calculation; (iv) capturing of interdependencies among experts during aggregation; and (v) ranking of alternatives with resemblance to human cognition. Driven by these challenges, a new group decision-making model is proposed with integrate methods for data curation and decision-making. The usefulness and superiority of the model is realized via an illustrative example of a logistic service provider selection.

Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy is an effective cancer treatment. Models based on the Generalized Equivalent Uniform Dose (gEUD) provide radiation plans with excellent planning target volume coverage and low radiation for organs at risk. However, manual adjustment of the parameters involved in gEUD is required to ensure that the plans meet patient-specific physical restrictions. This paper proposes a radiotherapy planning methodology based on bi-level optimization. We evaluated the proposed scheme in a real patient and compared the resulting irradiation plans with those prepared by clinical planners in hospital devices. The results in terms of efficiency and effectiveness are promising.

This paper introduces a novel approach that bridges the floating-point (FP) format, widely utilized in diverse fields for data representation, with the μ-law companding quantizer, proposing a method for designing and linearizing the μ-law companding quantizer to yield a piecewise uniform quantizer tailored to the FP format. A key outcome of the paper is a closed-form approximate expression for closely and efficiently evaluating the FP format’s performance for data with the Laplacian distribution. This expression offers generality across various bit rates and data variances, markedly reducing the computational complexity of FP performance evaluation compared to prior methods reliant on summation of a large number of terms. By facilitating the evaluation of FP format performance, this research substantially aids in the selection of the optimal bit rates, crucial for digital representation quality, dynamic range, computational overhead, and energy efficiency. The numerical calculations spanning a wide range of data variances provided for some commonly used FP versions with an 8-bit exponent have demonstrated that the proposed closed-form expression closely approximates FP format performance.

Derivative-free DIRECT-type global optimization algorithms are increasingly favoured for their simplicity and effectiveness in addressing real-world optimization challenges. This review examines their practical applications through a systematic analysis of scientific journals and computational studies. In particular, significant challenges in reproducibility have been identified with practical problems. To address this, we conducted an experimental study using practical problems from reputable CEC libraries, comparing DIRECT-type techniques against their state-of-the-art counterparts. Therefore, this study sheds light on current gaps, opportunities, and future prospects for advanced research in this domain, laying the foundation for replicating and expanding the research findings presented herein.

Neural networks (NNs) are well established and widely used in time series forecasting due to their frequent dominance over other linear and nonlinear models. Thus, this paper does not question their appropriateness in forecasting cryptocurrency prices; rather, it compares the most commonly used NNs, i.e. feedforward neural networks (FFNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This paper contributes to the existing literature by defining the appropriate NN structure comparable across different NN architectures, which yields the optimal NN model for Bitcoin return forecasting. Moreover, by incorporating turbulent events such as COVID and war, this paper emerges as a stress test for NNs. Finally, inputs are carefully selected, mostly covering macroeconomic and market variables, as well as different attractiveness measures, the importance of which in cryptocurrency forecasting is tested. The main results indicate that all NNs perform the best in an environment of bullish market, where CNNs stand out as the optimal models for continuous dataset, and LSTMs emerge as optimal in direction forecasting. In the downturn periods, CNNs stand out as the best models. Additionally, Tweets, as an attractiveness measure, enabled the models to attain superior performance.

In this study, effect of the environmental factors on the organizational behaviour in higher education sector is analysed and these factors are prioritized. For this aim, first, the environmental criteria affecting the organizational behaviour of higher education sector are selected from the literature. Then, as a solution methodology, (i) some experts are asked to determine pairwise comparison of the criteria, (ii) the linguistic terms are converted to interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy values, and (iii) an interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy DEMATEL approach is developed and applied. According to the results, most of the economic, political, and professional domain criteria are of the cause category.

Most existing traffic trajectory recommendation methods don’t consider the driver-car-road preferences, resulting in the poor ability to meet the driver-car-road requirements. To address this issue, we propose a traffic Trajectory Recommendation scheme based on Edge-cloud computing Driver-car-road Preferences (named as TREDP). TREDP reduces the computational, storage, and energy burden on the edge through edge-cloud collaborative computing. TREDP enhances the recommended accuracy by considering driver-car-road requirements and the relationship among driver-car-road in different traffic trajectories. Meanwhile, TREDP increases the computational efficiency through edge-cloud computing. Thus, it improves the driver experience of intelligent traffic trajectory recommendation systems.