Water filtration by using apple and banana peels as activated carbon

Water filter is an important devices for reducing the contaminants in raw water. Activated from charcoal is used to absorb the contaminants. Fruit peels are some of the suitable alternative carbon to substitute the charcoal. Determining the role of fruit peels which were apple and banana peels powder as activated carbon in water filter is the main goal. Drying and blending the peels till they become powder is the way to allow them to absorb the contaminants. Comparing the results for raw water before and after filtering is the observation. After filtering the raw water, the reading for pH was 6.8 which is in normal pH and turbidity reading recorded was 658 NTU. As for the colour, the water becomes more clear compared to the raw water. This study has found that fruit peels such as banana and apple are an effective substitute to charcoal as natural absorbent

A framework for traffic flow survivability in wireless networks prone to multiple failures and attacks

Transmitting packets over a wireless network has always been challenging due to failures that have always occurred as a result of many types of wireless connectivity issues. These failures have caused significant outages, and the delayed discovery and diagnostic testing of these failures have exacerbated their impact on servicing, economic damage, and social elements such as technological trust. There has been research on wireless network failures, but little on multiple failures such as node-node, node-link, and link–link failures. The problem of capacity efficiency and fast recovery from multiple failures has also not received attention. This research develops a capacity efficient evolutionary swarm survivability framework, which encompasses enhanced genetic algorithm (EGA) and ant colony system (ACS) survivability models to swiftly resolve node-node, node-link, and link-link failures for improved service quality. The capacity efficient models were tested on such failures at different locations on both small and large wireless networks. The proposed models were able to generate optimal alternative paths, the bandwidth required for fast rerouting, minimized transmission delay, and ensured the rerouting path fitness and good transmission time for rerouting voice, video and multimedia messages. Increasing multiple link failures reveal that as failure increases, the bandwidth used for rerouting and transmission time also increases. This implies that, failure increases bandwidth usage which leads to transmission delay, which in turn slows down message rerouting. The suggested framework performs better than the popular Dijkstra algorithm, proactive, adaptive and reactive models, in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio (PDR), speed of transmission, transmission delay and running time. According to the simulation results, the capacity efficient ACS has a PDR of 0.89, the Dijkstra model has a PDR of 0.86, the reactive model has a PDR of 0.83, the proactive model has a PDR of 0.83, and the adaptive model has a PDR of 0.81. Another performance evaluation was performed to compare the proposed model's running time to that of other evaluated routing models. The capacity efficient ACS model has a running time of 169.89ms on average, while the adaptive model has a running time of 1837ms and Dijkstra has a running time of 280.62ms. With these results, capacity efficient ACS outperforms other evaluated routing algorithms in terms of PDR and running time. According to the mean throughput determined to evaluate the performance of the following routing algorithms: capacity efficient EGA has a mean throughput of 621.6, Dijkstra has a mean throughput of 619.3, proactive (DSDV) has a mean throughput of 555.9, and reactive (AODV) has a mean throughput of 501.0. Since Dijkstra is more similar to proposed models in terms of performance, capacity efficient EGA was compared to Dijkstra as follows: Dijkstra has a running time of 3.8908ms and EGA has a running time of 3.6968ms. In terms of running time and mean throughput, the capacity efficient EGA also outperforms the other evaluated routing algorithms. The generated alternative paths from these investigations demonstrate that the proposed framework works well in preventing the problem of data loss in transit and ameliorating congestion issue resulting from multiple failures and server overload which manifests when the process hangs. The optimal solution paths will in turn improve business activities through quality data communications for wireless service providers.School of ComputingPh. D. (Computer Science

Performance analysis of biological resource allocation algorithms for next generation networks.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Abstract available in PDF.Publications listed on page iii

Gene expression programming for Efficient Time-series Financial Forecasting

Stock market prediction is of immense interest to trading companies and buyers due to high profit margins. The majority of successful buying or selling activities occur close to stock price turning trends. This makes the prediction of stock indices and analysis a crucial factor in the determination that whether the stocks will increase or decrease the next day. Additionally, precise prediction of the measure of increase or decrease of stock prices also plays an important role in buying/selling activities. This research presents two core aspects of stock-market prediction. Firstly, it presents a Networkbased Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) methodology to integrate the capabilities of neural networks with that of fuzzy logic. A specialised extension to this technique is known as the genetic programming (GP) and gene expression programming (GEP) to explore and investigate the outcome of the GEP criteria on the stock market price prediction. The research presented in this thesis aims at the modelling and prediction of short-tomedium term stock value fluctuations in the market via genetically tuned stock market parameters. The technique uses hierarchically defined GP and gene-expressionprogramming (GEP) techniques to tune algebraic functions representing the fittest equation for stock market activities. The technology achieves novelty by proposing a fractional adaptive mutation rate Elitism (GEP-FAMR) technique to initiate a balance between varied mutation rates between varied-fitness chromosomes thereby improving prediction accuracy and fitness improvement rate. The methodology is evaluated against five stock market companies with each having its own trading circumstances during the past 20+ years. The proposed GEP/GP methodologies were evaluated based on variable window/population sizes, selection methods, and Elitism, Rank and Roulette selection methods. The Elitism-based approach showed promising results with a low error-rate in the resultant pattern matching with an overall accuracy of 95.96% for short-term 5-day and 95.35% for medium-term 56-day trading periods. The contribution of this research to theory is that it presented a novel evolutionary methodology with modified selection operators for the prediction of stock exchange data via Gene expression programming. The methodology dynamically adapts the mutation rate of different fitness groups in each generation to ensure a diversification II balance between high and low fitness solutions. The GEP-FAMR approach was preferred to Neural and Fuzzy approaches because it can address well-reported problems of over-fitting, algorithmic black-boxing, and data-snooping issues via GP and GEP algorithmsSaudi Cultural Burea