Informatica

This paper presents an optimization based mathematical modelling approach for a single source single destination crude oil facility location transshipment problem. We began by formulating a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model and use a rolling horizon heuristic to find an optimal location for a storage facility within a restricted continuous region. We next design a hybrid two-stage algorithm that combines judicious facility locations resulting from the proposed model into a previously developed column generation approach. The results indicate that improved overall operational costs can be achieved by strategically determining cost-effective locations of the transshipment facility.

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) received great attention because of their important applications in many areas. Consequently, a need for improving their performance and efficiency, especially in energy awareness, is of a great interest. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a lifetime improvement fixed clustering energy awareness routing protocol for WSNs named Load Balancing Cluster Head (LBCH) protocol. LBCH mainly aims at reducing the energy consumption in the network and balancing the workload over all nodes within the network. A novel method for selecting initial cluster heads (CHs) is proposed. In addition, the network nodes are evenly distributed into clusters to build balanced size clusters. Finally, a novel scheme is proposed to circulate the role of CHs depending on the energy and location information of each node in each cluster. Multihop technique is used to minimize the communication distance between CHs and the base station (BS) thus saving nodes energy. In order to evaluate the performance of LBCH, a thorough simulation has been conducted and the results are compared with other related protocols (i.e. ACBEC-WSNs-CD, Adaptive LEACH-F, LEACH-F, and RRCH). The simulations showed that LBCH overcomes other related protocols for both continuous data and event-based data models at different network densities. LBCH achieved an average improvement in the range of 2–172%, 18–145.5%, 10.18–62%, 63–82.5% over the compared protocols in terms of number of alive nodes, first node died (FND), network throughput, and load balancing, respectively.

This paper suggests a new fast colour image cipher to meet the increasing demand for secure online image communication applications. Unlike most other existing approaches using a permutation-substitution network, the proposed algorithm consists of only a single substitution part. The keystream sequence is generated from a 4-D hyperchaotic system, whose initial conditions are determined by both the secret key and the SHA-224 cryptographic hash value of the plain-image. Favoured by the avalanche effect of hash functions, totally different keystream sequences will be generated for different images. Consequently, desired diffusion effect can be achieved after only a single round of substitution operation, whereas at least two encryption rounds are required by the state-of-the-art permutation-substitution type image ciphers. We also demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with the AES encryption algorithm. A thorough security analysis is carried out in detail, demonstrating the satisfactory security of the proposed algorithm.

The main purpose of this article was to compare traditional binary logistic regression analysis with decision tree analysis for the evaluation of the risk of cardiovascular diseases in adult men living in the city. Patients and methods. In our study, we used data from the Multifactorial Ischemic Heart Disease Prevention Study (MIHDPS). In the MIHDPS study, a random sample of male inhabitants of Kaunas city (Lithuania) aged 40–59 years was examined between 1977 and 1980. We analysed a sample of 5626 men. Taking blood pressure lowering medicine, disability, intermittent claudication, regular smoking, a higher value of the body mass index, systolic blood pressure, age, total serum cholesterol, and walking in winter were associated with a higher probability of ischemic heart disease or cardiovascular diseases. Having more siblings and drinking alcohol were associated with a lower probability of these diseases. The binary logistic regression method showed a very slightly lower level of errors than the decision tree did (the difference between the two methods was 2.04% for ischemic heart disease (IHD) and 2.86% for cardiovascular disease (CVD), but for consumers, the decision tree is easier to understand and interpret the results. Both of these methods are appropriate to analyse cardiovascular disease data.

In this paper, we propose a framework for extracting translation memory from a corpus of fiction and non-fiction books. In recent years, there have been several proposals to align bilingual corpus and extract translation memory from legal and technical documents. Yet, when it comes to an alignment of the corpus of translated fiction and non-fiction books, the existing alignment algorithms give low precision results. In order to solve this low precision problem, we propose a new method that incorporates existing alignment algorithms with proactive learning approach. We define several feature functions that are used to build two classifiers for text filtering and alignment. We report results on English-Lithuanian language pair and on bilingual corpus from 200 books. We demonstrate a significant improvement in alignment accuracy over currently available alignment systems.

Neutrosophic linguistic numbers (NLNs) can depict the uncertain and imperfect information by linguistic variables (LVs). As the classical aggregation operator, the Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM) operator has its prominent characteristic that reflects the interactions among multiple attributes. Considering such circumstance: there are interrelationship among the attributes which take the forms of NLNs and the attribute weights are fully unknown in multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems, we propose a novel MAGDM methods with NLNs. Firstly, the MSM is extended to NLNs, that is, aggregating neutrosophic linguistic information by two new operators – the NLN Maclaurin symmetric mean (NLNMSM) operator and the weighted NLN Maclaurin symmetric mean (WNLNMSM) operator. Then, we discuss some characteristics and detail some special examples of the developed operators. Further, we develop an information entropy measure under NLNs to assign the objective weights of the attributes. Based on the entropy weights and the proposed operators, an approach to MAGDM problems with NLNs is introduced. Finally, a manufacturing industry example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

In this work, the discrete time risk model with two seasons is considered. In such model, the claims repeat with time periods of two units, i.e. claim distributions coincide at all even instants and at all odd instants. Our purpose is to derive an algorithm for calculating the values of the particular case of the Gerber–Shiu discounted penalty function $\mathbb{E}({\mathrm{e}^{-\delta T}}{\mathbb{1}_{\{T<\infty \}}})$, where T is the time of ruin, and δ is a constant nonnegative force of interest. Theoretical results are illustrated by some numerical examples.

Eye fundus imaging is a useful, non-invasive tool in disease progress tracking, in early detection of disease and other cases. Often, the disease diagnosis is made by an ophthalmologist and automatic analysis systems are used only for support. There are several commonly used features for disease detection, one of them is the artery and vein ratio measured according to the width of the main vessels. Arteries must be separated from veins automatically in order to calculate the ratio, therefore, vessel classification is a vital step. For most analysis methods high quality images are required for correct classification. This paper presents an adaptive algorithm for vessel measurements without the necessity to tune the algorithm for concrete imaging equipment or a specific situation. The main novelty of the proposed method is the extraction of blood vessel features based on vessel width measurement algorithm and vessel spatial dependency. Vessel classification accuracy rates of 0.855 and 0.859 are obtained on publicly available eye fundus image databases used for comparison with another state of the art algorithms for vessel classification in order to evaluate artery-vein ratio ($AVR$). The method is also evaluated with images that represent artery and vein size changes before and after physical load. Optomed OY digital mobile eye fundus camera Smartscope M5 PRO is used for image gathering.

Green supplier selection has recently become one of the key strategic considerations in green supply chain management, due to regulatory requirements and market trends. It can be regarded as a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem, in which a set of alternatives are evaluated with respect to multiple criteria. MCGDM methods based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) are widely used in solving green supplier selection problems. However, the classic AHP must conduct large amounts of pairwise comparisons to derive a consistent result due to its complex structure. Meanwhile, the classic TOPSIS only considers one single negative idea solution in selecting suppliers, which is insufficiently cautious. In this study, an improved TOPSIS integrated with Best-Worst Method (BWM) is developed to solve MCGDM problems with intuitionistic fuzzy information in the context of green supplier selection. The BWM is investigated to derive criterion weights, and the improved TOPSIS method is proposed to obtain decision makers’ weights in terms of different criteria. Moreover, the developed TOPSIS-based coefficient is used to rank alternatives. Finally, a green supplier selection problem in the agri-food industry is presented to validate the proposed approach followed by sensitivity and comparative analyses.

In this paper, we investigate green supplier evaluation and selection problems within the interval 2-tuple linguistic environment. Based on the operational laws and comparison rule of interval 2-tuple linguistic variables, we develop some new aggregation operators, such as the interval 2-tuple hybrid averaging (ITHA) operator, the interval 2-tuple ordered weighted averaging-weighted averaging (ITOWAWA) operator and the interval 2-tuple hybrid geometric (ITHG) operator. Then, an approach for green supplier evaluation and selection under the context of interval 2-tuple linguistic variables is proposed based on the developed interval 2-tuple linguistic hybrid aggregation operators. Finally, a practical application to the green supplier selection problem of an automobile manufacturer is presented to reveal the potentiality and aptness of the proposed green supplier selection approach. According to the findings, the supplier number ‘five’ got the highest rank, out of the five alternative green suppliers. The approach proposed in this paper may help managers and business professionals to evaluate and select the optimal green supplier by considering the importance degrees of both the given arguments and their ordered positions. Furthermore, it is able to take different scenarios into account and provide a more complete picture to the decision maker by using different hybrid aggregation operators.