This paper introduces a novel physical-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called “Light Spectrum Optimizer (LSO)” for continuous optimization problems. The inspiration for the proposed algorithm is the light dispersions with different angles while passing through rain droplets, causing the meteorological phenomenon of the colorful rainbow spectrum. In order to validate the proposed algorithm, three different experiments are conducted. First, LSO is tested on solving CEC 2005, and the obtained results are compared with a wide range of well-regarded metaheuristics. In the second experiment, LSO is used for solving four CEC competitions in single objective optimization benchmarks (CEC2014, CEC2017, CEC2020, and CEC2022), and its results are compared with eleven well-established and recently-published optimizers, named grey wolf optimizer (GWO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA), evolutionary algorithms like differential evolution (DE), and recently-published optimizers including gradient-based optimizer (GBO), artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO), Runge–Kutta method (RUN) beyond the metaphor, African vultures optimization algorithm (AVOA), equilibrium optimizer (EO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Reptile Search Algorithm (RSA), and slime mold algorithm (SMA). In addition, several engineering design problems are solved, and the results are compared with many algorithms from the literature. The experimental results with the statistical analysis demonstrate the merits and highly superior performance of the proposed LSO algorithm.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a transformative era in supply chain management, revolutionizing the way organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize their operations. This comprehensive survey paper explores the multifaceted landscape of IoT applications in supply chain management, shedding light on the challenges, opportunities, and best practices that define this technological paradigm shift. The paper delves into the fundamental principles of IoT, elucidating how sensor-laden devices, real-time data streams, and advanced analytics empower organizations with unprecedented visibility and control across their supply chains. It systematically examines IoT applications in key supply chain domains, including inventory management, asset tracking, cold chain monitoring, predictive maintenance, route optimization, and waste reduction. Each application is scrutinized for its role in enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, ensuring product quality, and advancing sustainability. Furthermore, this paper addresses the challenges inherent in implementing IoT within supply chains, such as data security, interoperability, scalability, and regulatory compliance. It underscores the importance of change management and workforce development in harnessing the full potential of IoT and presents a roadmap for best practices to overcome these obstacles. The paper culminates in a forward-looking exploration of future trends and innovations in the IoT-driven supply chain landscape. By offering a comprehensive overview of IoT's role in supply chain management, this paper equips practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers with a holistic understanding of the transformative power of IoT, empowering them to navigate the complexities, seize opportunities, and implement best practices that will define the future of supply chain management.

With the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the field of transportation, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) turned to be a vital method for designing Smart Transportation Systems (STS). STS consist of various interconnected vehicles and transportation infrastructure exposed to cyber intrusion due to the broad usage of software and the initiation of wireless interfaces. This study proposes a federated deep learning-based intrusion detection framework (FED-IDS) to efficiently detect attacks by offloading the learning process from servers to distributed vehicular edge nodes. FED-IDS introduces a context-aware transformer network to learn spatial-temporal representations of vehicular traffic flows necessary for classifying different categories of attacks. Blockchain-managed federated training is presented to enable multiple edge nodes to offer secure, distributed, and reliable training without the need for centralized authority. In the blockchain, miners confirm the distributed local updates from participating vehicles to stop unreliable updates from being deposited on the blockchain. The experiments on two public datasets (i.e., Car-Hacking, TON_IoT) demonstrated the efficiency of FED-IDS against state-of-the-art approaches. It reveals the credibility of securing networks of intelligent transportation systems against cyber-attacks.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 empower interrelation among manufacturing processes, industrial machines, and utility services. The time-critical data collected from heterogeneous sensing devices are usually communicated to processing points for analysis and aggregation as the basis of IIoT. The IIoTs’ service quality typically depends on data integrity and accuracy, which could be exploited by injecting malicious events, such as false data injection and data poisoning attacks. Thus, effective anomaly recognition and explanation are critical for ensuring quality services and empowering security administrators to interpret the causal reasoning of prediction decisions and underlying data evidence. This study proposes an autoencoder-based detection framework using convolutional and recurrent networks to discover cyber threats in IIoT networks and explain the model. A two-step sliding window (SW) is applied to learn the latent representations of data features better. Malicious points from the raw time series are transformed into fixed-length series through the first-step SW. Every series is converted into continuous-time-reliant subseries via another smaller SW to learn latent representations of malicious events. Fully connected networks use the extracted temporal and spatial features for the classification and explanation of attack events. The empirical results revealed that this framework effectively extracts features that include contexts of malicious patterns. This demonstrated that the proposed framework is robust in detecting malicious events using multiple evaluation metrics and outperforming the contemporary state-of-the-art methods, indicating its suitability as an operative application method in real-world IIoT-based networks.

Feature Selection (FS) is an important preprocessing step that is involved in machine learning and data mining tasks for preparing data (especially high-dimensional data) by eliminating irrelevant and redundant features, thus reducing the potential curse of dimensionality of a given large dataset. Consequently, FS is arguably a combinatorial NP-hard problem in which the computational time increases exponentially with an increase in problem complexity. To tackle such a problem type, meta-heuristic techniques have been opted by an increasing number of scholars. Herein, a novel meta-heuristic algorithm, called Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA), is presented. The SSA still performs poorly on exploratory behavior and exploration-exploitation trade-off because it does not duly stimulate the search within feasible regions, and the exploitation process suffers noticeable stagnation. Therefore, we improve SSA by adopting: i) a strategy for Random Re-positioning of Roaming Agents (3RA); and ii) a novel Local Search Algorithm (LSA), which are algorithmically incorporated into the original SSA structure. To the FS problem, SSA is improved and cloned as a binary variant, namely, the improved Binary SSA (iBSSA), which would strive to select the optimal or near-optimal features from a given dataset while keeping the classification accuracy maximized. For binary conversion, the iBSSA was primarily validated against nine common S-shaped and V-shaped Transfer Functions (TFs), thus producing nine iBSSA variants. To verify the robustness of these variants, three well-known classification techniques, includingk-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) were adopted as fitness evaluators with the proposed iBSSA approach and many other competing algorithms, on 18 multifaceted, multi-scale benchmark datasets from the University of California Irvine (UCI) data repository. Then, the overall best-performing iBSSA variant for each of the three classifiers was compared with binary variants of 12 different well-known meta-heuristic algorithms, including the original SSA (BSSA), Artificial Bee Colony (BABC), Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), Bat Algorithm (BBA), Grey Wolf Optimization (BGWO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (BWOA), Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (BGOA) SailFish Optimizer (BSFO), Harris Hawks Optimization (BHHO), Bird Swarm Algorithm (BBSA), Atom Search Optimization (BASO), and Henry Gas Solubility Optimization (BHGSO). Based on a Wilcoxon’s non-parametric statistical test ( $$\alpha =0.05$$α=0.05 ), the superiority of iBSSA with the three classifiers was very evident against counterparts across the vast majority of the selected datasets, achieving a feature size reduction of up to 92% along with up to 100% classification accuracy on some of those datasets.