Internet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for Distributed UAV Traffic Management

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the integration of new connected devices such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the ubiquitous network. UAVs promise a pragmatic solution to the limitations of existing terrestrial IoT infrastructure as well as bring new means of delivering IoT services through a wide range of applications. Owning to their potential, UAVs are expected to soon dominate the low-altitude airspace over populated cities. This introduces new research challenges such as the safe management of UAVs operation under high traffic demands. This paper proposes a novel way of structuring the uncontrolled, low-altitude airspace, with the aim of addressing the complex problem of UAV traffic management at an abstract level. The work, hence, introduces a model of the airspace as a weighted multilayer network of nodes and airways and presents a set of experimental simulation results using three UAV traffic management heuristics

Constraint Model for the Satellite Image Mosaic Selection Problem

peer reviewedSatellite imagery solutions are widely used to study and monitor different regions of the Earth. However, a single satellite image can cover only a limited area. In cases where a larger area of interest is studied, several images must be stitched together to create a single larger image, called a mosaic, that can cover the area. Today, with the increasing number of satellite images available for commercial use, selecting the images to build the mosaic is challenging, especially when the user wants to optimize one or more parameters, such as the total cost and the cloud coverage percentage in the mosaic. More precisely, for this problem the input is an area of interest, several satellite images intersecting the area, a list of requirements relative to the image and the mosaic, such as cloud coverage percentage, image resolution, and a list of objectives to optimize. We contribute to the constraint and mixed integer lineal programming formulation of this new problem, which we call the satellite image mosaic selection problem, which is a multi-objective extension of the polygon cover problem. We propose a dataset of realistic and challenging instances, where the images were captured by the satellite constellations SPOT, Pléiades and Pléiades Neo. We evaluate and compare the two proposed models and show their efficiency for large instances, up to 200 images

Comparison of the Novel Probabilistic Self-Optimizing Vectorized Earth Observation Retrieval Classifier with Common Machine Learning Algorithms

The Vectorized Earth Observation Retrieval (VEOR) algorithm is a novel algorithm suited to the efficient supervised classification of large Earth Observation (EO) datasets. VEOR addresses shortcomings in well-established machine learning methods with an emphasis on numerical performance. Its characteristics include (1) derivation of classification probability; (2) objective selection of classification features that maximize Cohen’s kappa coefficient (κ) derived from iterative “leave-one-out” cross-validation; (3) reduced sensitivity of the classification results to imbalanced classes; (4) smoothing of the classification probability field to reduce noise/mislabeling; (5) numerically efficient retrieval based on a pre-computed look-up vector (LUV); and (6) separate parametrization of the algorithm for each discrete feature class (e.g., land cover). Within this study, the performance of the VEOR classifier was compared to other commonly used machine learning algorithms: K-nearest neighbors, support vector machines, Gaussian process, decision trees, random forest, artificial neural networks, AdaBoost, Naive Bayes and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis. Firstly, the comparison was performed using synthetic 2D (two-dimensional) datasets featuring different sample sizes, levels of noise (i.e., mislabeling) and class imbalance. Secondly, the same experiments were repeated for 7D datasets consisting of informative, redundant and insignificant features. Ultimately, the benchmarking of the classifiers involved cloud discrimination using MODIS satellite spectral measurements and a reference cloud mask derived from combined CALIOP lidar and CPR radar data. The results revealed that the proposed VEOR algorithm accurately discriminated cloud cover using MODIS data and accurately classified large synthetic datasets with low or moderate levels of noise and class imbalance. On the contrary, VEOR did not feature good classification skills for significantly distorted or for small datasets. Nevertheless, the comparisons performed proved that VEOR was within the 3–4 most accurate classifiers and that it can be applied to large Earth Observation datasets

Trustworthy Online Shopping with Price Impact

Internet shopping is one of the main pillars of electronic commerce.According to the literature, the Internet Shopping Optimization Problem (ISOP)has been defined in order to optimize the global cost of online purchase, taking into account both the cost of products and shipping. In this study, it was decided to propose and analyze a very interesting, and really substantial, extension of the ISOP.Namely, trust factors were subjected to careful analysis from the customer point of view. The analysis is based on a specially prepared questionnaire, supplemented by the information from the literature and our own observations. Thus, it was possible to propose a definition of a new mathematical model of the problem, and to prove its affiliation to the class of strongly NP-hard problems. In addition, the heuristic algorithm is proposed, which can be used to solve the problem

Two Meta–Heuristic Algorithms for Scheduling on Unrelated Machines with the Late Work Criterion

A scheduling problem in considered on unrelated machines with the goal of total late work minimization, in which the late work of a job means the late units executed after its due date. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, we propose two meta-heuristic algorithms to solve it, namely, a tabu search (TS) and a genetic algorithm (GA), both of which are equipped with the techniques of initialization, iteration, as well as termination. The performances of the designed algorithms are verified through computational experiments, where we show that the GA can produce better solutions but with a higher time consumption. Moreover, we also analyze the influence of problem parameters on the performances of these meta-heuristics

Internet shopping with price sensitive discounts

A customer would like to buy a given set of products in a given set of Internet shops. For each Internet shop, standard prices for the products are known as well as a concave increasing discounting function of total standard and delivery price. The problem is to buy all the required products at the minimum total discounted price. Computational complexity of various special cases is established. Properties of optimal solutions are proved and polynomial time and exponential time solution algorithms based on these properties are designed. Two heuristic algorithms are suggested and computationally tested

Dual Discounting Functions for Internet Shopping Optimization Problem

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