Multi-UAV Optimal Mission Assignment and Path Planning for Disaster Rescue Using Adaptive Genetic Algorithm and Improved Artificial Bee Colony Method

An optimal mission assignment and path planning method of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for disaster rescue is proposed. In this application, the UAVs include the drug delivery UAV, image collection UAV, and communication relay UAV. When implementing the modeling and simulation, first, three threat sources are built: the weather threat source, transmission tower threat source, and upland threat source. Second, a cost-revenue function is constructed. The flight distance, oil consumption, function descriptions of UAV, and threat source factors above are considered. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is utilized to estimate the weights of cost-revenue function. Third, an adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA) is designed to solve the mission allocation task. A fitness function which considers the current and maximum iteration numbers is proposed to improve the AGA convergence performance. Finally, an optimal path plan between the neighboring mission points is computed by an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) method. A balanced searching strategy is developed to modify the IABC computational effect. Extensive simulation experiments have shown the effectiveness of our method.

A Geometric Complementarity-Based Tool for Protein–Protein Docking

The computationally hard protein–protein complex structure prediction problem is continuously fascinating to the scientific community due to its biological impact. The field has witnessed the application of geometric algorithms, randomized algorithms, and evolutionary algorithms to name a few. These techniques improve either the searching or scoring phase. An effective searching strategy does not generate a large conformation space that perhaps demands computational power. Another determining factor is the parameter chosen for score calculation. The proposed method is an attempt to curtail the conformations by limiting the search procedure to probable regions. In this method, partial derivatives are calculated on the coarse-grained representation of the surface residues to identify the optimal points on the protein surface. Contrary to the existing geometric-based algorithms that align the convex and concave regions of both proteins, this method aligns the concave regions of the receptor with convex regions of the ligand only and thus reduces the size of conformation space. The method’s performance is evaluated using the 55 newly added targets in Protein–Protein Docking Benchmark v 5 and is found to be successful for around 47% of the targets.

Impact of Pesticide Exposure on Environment and Biodiversity: A Review

The use of pesticide in modern agriculture and public health sector has been increased tremendously. Only 0.1% of pesticide applied to crops truly reaches the target, the rest of it enters into the environment. Several pesticides can persist in an ecosystem for longer periods accumulate in the body tissues of organisms and cause more health problems. Pesticide exposure generally occurs through ingestion, inhalation and skin contact or absorptions by intentionaly or unintentionaly which leads to acute and chronic health problems in non target organisms such as animals, birds, aquatic animals and human. A total of more than 100 articles related to impact of pesticide exposure were reviewed. To review the literature, we reviewed a number of studies, report and abstract between 1950 to 2020 using key words effect of pesticide on animals, birds, human, environment we used this term to search in in PubMed, ResearchGate and google scholar. Searching strategy also include cross-referencing of research and review article Improving epidemiological studies, metabolic studies, residue monitoring and experimental research on pesticide exposure can reduces human health risks of pesticide exposure. This article clearly explains how the pesticide enter into the atmosphere, soil and water and its adverse effect on birds, animals and human, major incidence regarding pesticide exposure and effort should be taken prevent the pesticide poisoning.

Enhanced Tunicate Swarm Algorithm for Solving Large-Scale Nonlinear Optimization Problems

Nowadays optimization problems become difficult and complex, traditional methods become inefficient to reach global optimal solutions. Meanwhile, a huge number of meta-heuristic algorithms have been suggested to overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods. Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (TSA) is a new biologically inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm which mimics jet propulsion and swarm intelligence during the searching for a food source. In this paper, we suggested an enhancement to TSA, named Enhanced Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (ETSA), based on a novel searching strategy to improve the exploration and exploitation abilities. The proposed ETSA is applied to 20 unimodal, multimodal and fixed dimensional benchmark test functions and compared with other algorithms. The statistical measures, error analysis and the Wilcoxon test have affirmed the robustness and effectiveness of the ETSA. Furthermore, the scalability of the ETSA is confirmed using high dimensions and results exhibited that the ETSA is least affected by increasing the dimensions. Additionally, the CPU time of the proposed algorithms are obtained, the ETSA provides less CPU time than the others for most functions. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied at one of the important electrical applications, Economic Dispatch Problem, and the results affirmed its applicability to deal with practical optimization tasks.

Through-Floor Vital Sign Searching for Trapped Person Using Wireless-Netted UWB Radars

In personnel rescue applications, considerable attention has been paid to the positioning method of living persons. Especially, the effective vital sign searching is urgently required. This work presents an effective multiple-observation-points-based vital sign searching method for trapped persons using wireless-netted ultra-wideband (UWB) radars. Controlled by a wireless network, four UWB radars are connected to form a group. Based on that, we design an optimized searching path strategy and the corresponding vital sign searching procedure. The simulated result illustrates the proposed vital sign searching strategy on the spatial locations of the trapped person. Finally, the proof-of-principle through-floor experiment was also carried out, verifying the performance of this proposed vital sign searching algorithm.

Probing superheavy dark matter with gravitational waves

We study the superheavy dark matter (DM) scenario in an extended B−L model, where one generation of right-handed neutrino νR is the DM candidate. If there is a new lighter sterile neutrino that co-annihilate with the DM candidate, then the annihilation rate is exponentially enhanced, allowing a DM mass much heavier than the Griest-Kamionkowski bound (∼105 GeV). We demonstrate that a DM mass MνR ≳ 1013 GeV can be achieved. Although beyond the scale of any traditional DM searching strategy, this scenario is testable via gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by the cosmic strings from the U(1)B−L breaking. Quantitative calculations show that the DM mass $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (109−1013 GeV) can be probed by future GW detectors.

LUNG CANCER ASSOCIATED WITH CARBON BLACK EXPOSURE ON BRICK WORKERS

ABSTRACTCarbon black aerosol has potential risks to human health. It has been acknowledged to cause cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in humans. International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) 2010 stated that carbon black classification is 2b, which is carcinogenic. This research explains a case of lung cancer due to carbon black exposure and reviews the literature of occupational cases to get the answers about the effects of carbon black exposure and the increasing risk of lung cancer for workers exposed to carbon black. The literature review was performed to answer the clinical question via electronic databases: PubMed and Google Scholar. The keywords used were ‘carbon black’ and ‘lung cancer’ and 'workers'. The inclusion criteria of this searching strategy were the workers which exposed to carbon black, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, systematic reviews, cohort. The exclusion criteria of this article were inaccessible articles, RCTs that have been used in the recent systematic reviews. The selected articles were then critically appraised using relevant criteria by the Oxford Center for Evidence-based Medicine. This study reviews the literature by Rota Matteo; The epidemiological evidence on the polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) high exposed, perspective cohort study by Delli LD, and the control case study by Marie EPt. All the researches above showed that carbon black carcinogenic potential is the same as the IARC monograph statement that the epidemiological studies of carbon black provide possible carcinogenicity (Group of 2B). Keywords: carbon black, lung cancer, workers

A Study of Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese Discourse: From the Perspective of Psycholinguistics

Anaphora is the main linguistic means to establish discourse coherence, and anaphora resolution is the psychological process to maintain this coherence. Chinese discourse is characterized with providing multiplicity of linguistic clues to readers by employing various referential apparatuses such as pronoun anaphora, zero anaphora, and so on. As a way of avoiding repeated reference to an object that is mentioned beforehand, zero anaphora is frequently employed in discourse. The production and resolution of zero anaphora largely concerns some constraints underlying psychological mechanisms. We particularly focus on zero anaphora resolution in the present study to try to discover some specific aspects of the underlying mechanism, hoping to find out some factors unique to the resolution process. We designed the first two experiments to probe into the psychological reality when participants were presented with sentences containing either pronoun anaphora or zero anaphora or both under discourse condition with topic continuity in Experiment 1a and topic discontinuity in Experiment 1b. We did not find any significant difference in the reaction time between zero anaphora resolution and pronoun anaphora resolution, indicating that zero anaphora possibly works within the processing mechanism on which pronoun anaphora resolution depends. However, we found significantly longer time in reading the first sentence in any of the discourse, showing that the first-mention effect exists in anaphora resolution. We further explored the time course of zero anaphora resolution by measuring the reaction time during the period when participants read sentences that varied according to the location where zero anaphora occurred under two conditions: topic continuity (Experiment 2a) vs. topic discontinuity (Experiment 2b). The strategies of searching for the referential information were found divergent: the exhaustive searching strategy was adopted when the topics within a discourse were kept continuous and the heuristic searching strategy was employed when the topics were discontinuous. The design of Experiment 5 took the factor of voice type and situation consistency into consideration, investigating in what way do those factors influence the resolution of zero anaphora. The voice type, according to the results, plays a significant role for its exclusively close relationship with the first-mention effect.

A Systematic Review on Adaptation Practices in Aquaculture towards Climate Change Impacts

The impact of climate change is one of the many challenges faced by aquaculture communities nowadays. Only a limited number of articles have attempted to systematically review available literature in this field, which has led to the current study, aiming to develop a systematic review related to the practice of adapting to climate change among aquaculture communities. This systematic review was guided by the PRISMA Statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) in its systematic searching strategy on Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, resulting in the selection of 20 related studies. All selected articles were assessed using the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool (MMAT). Employing thematic analysis, five main themes resulted, namely Governmental (five subthemes), Community (three subthemes), Facilities (five subthemes), Temperature (two subthemes) and Financial (three subthemes), along with 18 subthemes. Based on the pattern of previous studies, the review presented several recommendations for scholars, agencies, and communities to consider in future.