Accurate residential load forecasting is a key to achieve grid stability and efficient energy management. However, it becomes challenging due to the non-linear and seasonally fluctuating energy usage of domestic users. Existing statistical and machine learning-based forecasting models struggle to produce accurate forecasts due to dynamic and stochastic user behaviors for energy usage. On the other hand, pairwise ensemble methods can achieve higher forecasting accuracy in short-term load forecasting, but are not scalable and face generalization issues that often lead to overfitting and complexity in managing multivariate data. To address these limitations, we propose to integrate LightGBM, XGBoost and CatBoost models to systematically address the limitations of existing ensemble-based forecasting models. This integration aims to leverage the strengths of each ensemble method, where LightGBM handles generalization across multiple sites, XGBoost avoids overfitting the model, and CatBoost effectively manages categorical features. We implement our proposed model using a real-world, publicly available dataset for 13 residential locations in North America and Europe. The proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms with the lowest root mean squared logarithmic error (RMSLE) values of 0.1898, while the coefficient of determination (R²) calculated from the data is 0.9745. Other evaluation measures such as root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of variation of the root mean square error (CVRMSE) and mean bias error (MBE) also support the proposed approach regarding the efficiency of the model.Finally, we also perform an ablution study to show predictive efficacy of incremental model integration.

Advances in connectivity, communication, computation, and algorithms are driving a revolution that will bring economic and social benefits through smart technologies of the Industry 4.0 era. At the same time, attackers are targeting this expanded cyberspace to exploit it. Therefore, many cyberattacks are reported each year at an increasing rate. Traditional security devices such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDSs), intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), anti-viruses, and the like, often cannot detect sophisticated cyberattacks. The security information and event management (SIEM) system has proven to be a very effective security tool for detecting and mitigating such cyberattacks. A SIEM system provides a holistic view of the security status of a corporate network by analyzing log data from various network devices. The correlation engine is the most important module of the SIEM system. In this study, we propose the optimized correlator (OC), a novel correlation engine that replaces the traditional regex matching sub-module with a novel high-performance multiple regex matching library called “Hyperscan” for parallel log data scanning to improve the performance of the SIEM system. Log files of 102 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, and 1024 MB, generated from log data received from various devices in the network, are input into the OC and simple event correlator (SEC) for applying correlation rules. The results indicate that OC is 21 times faster than SEC in real-time response and 2.5 times more efficient in execution time. Furthermore, OC can detect multi-layered attacks successfully.

Effective and optimal decision-making can enhance system performance, potentially leading to a positive reputation and financial gains. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is an important research topic widely applied to practical decision-making problems. Using the basic idea of symmetry to balance the arrangement where elements or features have an equality or similarity in distribution, MCDM provides robust decisions in such multi-dimensional complex issues. This study proposes MultiFuzzTOPS, a decision-making model to deal with complexity of multi-criteria decision-making. The proposed MultiFuzzTOPS leverages the fuzzy logic and soft sets such as type-2 soft sets (T2SS) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for decision-making. We validate the proposed model by implementing it to solve the pesticide selection problem in food science by considering various criteria for the selection of pesticides. Our proposed MultiFuzzTOPS recommends the best pesticide compared with its counterparts because it covers the maximum information for the selection of the best alternative. Results are ranked on the basis of the Hamming distance and similarity coefficient. We also validate the effectiveness by performing the sensitivity analysis, and the validation shows the reliability and effectiveness of our proposed model.

Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) play an important role in the automation of material handling and transportation tasks in modern industrial and logistics systems. However, suboptimal path planning and longer waiting times at charging stations significantly affect the operational efficiency of these vehicles. To address these challenges, we leverage the capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to find the optimal paths for AGVs. In this paper, we propose GRouteNet, a GNN-based model that effectively finds the shortest path for AGVs. The proposed model utilizes the message-passing mechanism of GNN to determine the neighbor nodes and then aggregates this information to find the shortest path. We compare the results of GRouteNet with a couple of existing state-of-the-art pathfinding models and show that the path length computed by GRouteNet is up to 45% shorter compared to the existing models. Furthermore, we propose a Shortest Charging Time First (SCTF) scheduling algorithm to reduce the long waiting times in the queues at the charging stations. The proposed SCTF algorithm prioritizes the charging of AGVs based on their charging time and charges the AGVs with the shortest charging time first. We compare the results of SCTF with the first-come-first-serve scheduling algorithm and show that SCTF reduces the waiting times at the charging stations by up to 42%.