Autonomous Flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Evolutionary Algorithms

in High Performance Computing (2020)

This article explores the application of evolutionary algorithms and agent-oriented programming to solve the problem of searching and monitoring objectives through a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles. The ... [more ▼]

This article explores the application of evolutionary algorithms and agent-oriented programming to solve the problem of searching and monitoring objectives through a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles. The subproblem of static off-line planning is studied to find initial flight plans for each vehicle in the fleet, using evolutionary algorithms to achieve compromise values between the size of the explored area, the proximity of the vehicles, and the monitoring of points of interest defined in the area. The results obtained in the experimental analysis on representative instances of the surveillance problem indicate that the proposed techniques are capable of computing effective flight plans. [less ▲]

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

in Sensors (2019), 19(21), 22

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 ... [more ▼]

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. [less ▲]

Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy

in Samir Labib, Nader; Brust, Matthias R.; Danoy, Grégoire (Eds.) et al Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy (2019, October)

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised ... [more ▼]

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised management, improved energy efficiency and a better quality living through a wide array of value-added services. However, as sensing, actuation, communication and control become increasingly more sophisticated, such promising data-driven systems generate, process, and exchange larger amounts of security-critical and privacy-sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks. In turn this affirms the importance of trustworthiness in IoT and emphasises the need of a solid technical and regulatory foundation. The goal of this paper is to first introduce the concept of trustworthiness in IoT, its main pillars namely, security, privacy and data protection, and then analyse the state-of-the-art in research and standardisation for each of these subareas. Throughout the paper, we develop and refer to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a promising value-added service example of mobile IoT devices. The paper then presents a thorough gap analysis and concludes with recommendations for future work. [less ▲]

A GP Hyper-Heuristic Approach for Generating TSP Heuristics

in 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2019) (2019, May 20)

GP hyper-heuristic for the travelling salesman problem

Scientific Conference (2019, January 29)

A Memory-Based Label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection

in Complex Networks and Their Applications VII (2019)

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dissimilarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of ... [more ▼]

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dissimilarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of them are not suitable for large-scale networks because they have high complexity and use global knowledge. The Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) assigns a unique label to every node and propagates the labels locally, while applying the majority rule to reach a consensus. Nodes which share the same label are then grouped into communities. Although LPA excels with near linear execution time, it gets easily stuck in local optima and often returns a single giant community. To overcome these problems we propose MemLPA, a novel LPA where each node implements memory and the decision rule takes past states of the network into account. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi benchmark and a set of real-world networks that MemLPA outperforms most of state-of-the-art community detection algorithms. [less ▲]

A Memory-Based Label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection

in Aiello, Luca Maria; Cherifi, Chantal; Cherifi, Hocine (Eds.) et al Complex Networks and Their Applications VII (2018, December 02)

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dis- similarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of ... [more ▼]

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dis- similarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of them are not suitable for large-scale networks because they have high complexity and use global knowledge. The Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) assigns a unique label to every node and propagates the labels locally, while applying the majority rule to reach a consensus. Nodes which share the same label are then grouped into communities. Although LPA excels with near linear execution time, it gets easily stuck in local optima and often returns a single giant community. To overcome these problems we propose MemLPA, a novel LPA where each node imple- ments memory and the decision rule takes past states of the network into account. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi benchmark and a set of real-world net- works that MemLPA outperforms most of state-of-the-art community detection algorithms. [less ▲]

A Competitive Approach for Bi-Level Co-Evolution

in 2018 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW) (2018, May 25)

A Standardized Broker Model in Smart Cities

Poster (2018, May)

As urban residents are expected to represent more than 60 per cent of the world’s population by 2050, the current developments and interests in the “Smart City” concept are essential to enable the ... [more ▼]

As urban residents are expected to represent more than 60 per cent of the world’s population by 2050, the current developments and interests in the “Smart City” concept are essential to enable the successful transition to this new era. This paradigm relies on the integration of emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Big Data to manage assets and resources efficiently while facilitating the planning, construction, management and smart services within cities. While smart cities aim to enhance the quality, performance and interactivity of urban services at reduced cost, their realization is faced by many regulatory and technical challenges. Among these challenges, is the integration of renewable energy resources to the utility system of smart cities motivated by the increasingclimate change concerns. Adding further to its complexity, is the challenge of incorporating multiple renewable energy retailers in the same region each with their own pricing strategies due to the lack of a standardized metering indicator and billing system. These challenges create a need for an intelligent and standardized cloud-based energy broker to satisfying the end-user requests, and minimize expenses by efficiently selecting the most suitable energy retailer. In our work, a particular focus is raised towards the optimization of such energy brokering service which is motivated by the orchestration of a brokering role aiming to improve user experience and interaction with smart city services. Hence our main contribution is proposing a standardized intelligent broker model with smart trading strategies to cope with the dynamics and complexity of the energy retail market, while allocating energy resources based on endusers’ demands. This is achieved through the following steps: 1) studying a complete model of the broker service and involved parties within the exposed framework. 2) proposing a multiobjective heuristic to provide a dynamic optimization of the grid operations and resources, with full cyber-security, within the boundaries of the city. 3) analyzing the gaps among industry practices, market requirements and current technical standardization efforts at ISO/IEC JTC 1/ SC 38 (Cloud Computing and distributed platform) in order to pave the way to establishing standards in metering indicators and billing principles for cloud services this while keeping in mind privacy and data protection risks and regulations enforced by ISO JT1/SC 27 and EU General Data Protection Regulation effective May 2018. This research was conducted in collaboration with ILNAS - the Institut Luxem- bourgeois de la Normalisation, de l’Accréditation, de la Sécurité et qualité des produits et services (ILNAS) under the authority of the Minister of Economy, Luxembourg. [less ▲]

Bayesian optimization to enhance coverage performance of a swarm of UAV with chaotic dynamics

Scientific Conference (2018, February 26)

We introduce the optimization of CACOC through Bayesian Optimization. CACOC is based on a chaotic system, i.e. Rossler system whose behavior can be modified by tuning the α parameter. In order to evaluate ... [more ▼]

We introduce the optimization of CACOC through Bayesian Optimization. CACOC is based on a chaotic system, i.e. Rossler system whose behavior can be modified by tuning the α parameter. In order to evaluate the performance of CACOC for different value of α, the coverage metric has to be evaluated after simulation. The latter is time-consuming. Therefore, a surrogate-based optimization, i.e. Bayesian Optimization has been privilegied to tackle this issue. An analysis of the chaotic system with the obtained α value has been performed to compare the periodic orbits and their associated patterns. Numerical results show that the best α value avoid a waste of time in periodic region of the bifurcation diagram. Future works will focus on more complex chaotic system as well as new application domain of the optimized CACOC approach. [less ▲]