Vessels sailing in a single platoon could reduce resistance from the perspective of the whole platoon and the individual vessel, and contribute to improving energy benefits. Moreover, transportation energy costs and traffic efficiency are essential indicators for measuring waterborne transportation systems. We attempt to minimize transportation energy costs by coordinating platoon formation using a distributed framework of controllers. A large-scale coordinated vessel platooning program is proposed to minimize transportation energy costs and optimize traffic efficiency while guaranteeing safety. The control framework covers routing, energy consumption-dependent cooperative platooning decision and speed optimization based on graph search algorithm, cluster analysis, optimal control approach and model predictive control. Firstly, a local scheduling strategy combined with the leader vessel selection algorithm is adopted. Furthermore, we used cluster analysis to create a series of mergeable vessel platooning sets. Then, we used the mathematical planning method and a two-step hybrid optimal control approach to calculate the improvement and optimization of each vessel platoon’s path and speed. Finally, the scalability of the scheduling strategy is elucidated. In a simulation of large scale inland waterborne network, savings surpassed 3.5% when six hundreds vessels participated in the system. These simulation results reveal that the scheduling strategy coordinating vessels into vessel platooning, which improves transportation efficiency as well as descends cost, comparing to a fixed origin route in the waterway network.

This paper proposes a novel Soft Multi-Prototype clustering algorithm (SMP) for high-dimensional data clustering with noisy and complex structural patterns. SMP integrates dimensionality reduction, multi-prototype clustering, and multi-prototype merge clustering under a two-layer Semi-Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Semi-NMF) architecture. Specifically, the first Semi-NMF layer performs multi-prototype clustering, which solves the problem that a single prototype cannot represent complex data structures. Meanwhile, the multi-prototype fuzzy clustering constraints ensure that the multi-prototypes better characterize the original data structure. The second Semi-NMF layer performs multi-prototype merge clustering to mitigate the issues of heavy computation burden and poor anti-noise performance of the spectral clustering algorithm. The introduction of the Laplace graph matrix regularization constraint in this layer assists SMP in completing the merging of multi-prototypes with complex data structures. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

The cooperative control of multiple autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) is a critical area of research due to its significant applications in maritime operations, such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring. However, challenges such as communication delays and dynamic topologies often hinder stable cooperative control in practical scenarios. This study addresses these challenges by developing a formation control method based on consensus theory, focusing on both formation control and time delay. First, a simplified ASV characteristic model is established, and a basic consensus control algorithm is designed and analyzed for stability, considering different communication topologies. Then, to handle delays, the formation control method is extended, and the stability of the revised algorithm is rigorously proven using the Lyapunov function. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy effectively maintains formations, even in the presence of communication delays. In the end, comparative simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy effectively maintains formations, even in the presence of communication delays, with a convergence time of approximately 100 s and a formation error stabilizing at around 7 m. This research lays a foundation for more reliable cooperative control systems for ships, with potential applications in a variety of maritime and autonomous systems.

Hyperspectral unmixing is a critical task in remote sensing, enabling the decomposition of hyperspectral data into their constituent endmembers and abundances. The loss of the traditional unmixing algorithm based on deep learning typically depends on reducing the discrepancy between the original and reconstructed hyperspectral image. However, during the training process, the loss feedback method is relatively simple, resulting highly random unmixing results. Moreover, spatial feature extraction can effectively improve the unmixing effect, but existing spatial feature extraction methods in hyperspectral unmixing still have significant room for improvement. To address these challenges, we propose a novel adversarial autoencoder unmixing network considering pixel-level and global similarity measurements based on a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) and a U-shaped transformer-enhanced architecture. The WGAN ensures stable gradient updates through a gradient penalty, maintaining Lipschitz continuity, while the U-shaped network with Swin transformer blocks captures both local and global spatial features. Experiments were conducted on synthetic and real-world hyperspectral datasets. Our method outperformed state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvement in root mean square error and spectral angle distance (SAD). The SAD is a metric that quantifies the angular difference between the true and estimated endmember spectra, our method improves the mean SAD by at least 8.7% compared to competing algorithms, representing an enhancement in unmixing performance. Notably, the method demonstrated superior robustness in low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios, maintaining high unmixing accuracy. These results highlight the potential of our approach to advance unmixing research by addressing both pixel-level and global similarity constraints, providing a new way for hyperspectral unmixing.

Accurate detection of early invisible apple bruises is important for post-harvest quality assessment. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides rich spectral information, its high dimensionality introduces substantial redundancy and weak-signal interference. This study proposes an integrated framework combining waveband optimization and discrete spectral modeling for efficient bruise detection. A Selection-Refined Improved Grey Wolf Optimization (SR-IGWO) algorithm was developed to select 18 bruise-sensitive wavebands from 273 channels (996–2501 nm), achieving a 93.4% reduction in spectral dimensionality. SHAP analysis was further used to interpret the selected bands in relation to biochemical responses associated with bruising. To address the mismatch between conventional CNNs and sparse discrete spectral inputs, a CNN–Transformer hybrid model (DSFormer) was designed using pointwise convolution for band embedding and a Transformer encoder to capture global dependencies. Experimental results across ten independent runs achieved a classification accuracy of 99.11% ± 0.08%, a recall of 96.04% ± 1.08%, and an F1-score of 95.95% ± 0.39% under the tested conditions. Ablation studies suggest that the proposed architecture supports effective detection under sparse spectral conditions. Although validation was limited to a single cultivar and controlled sampling, the proposed framework provides a promising preliminary exploration of reduced hyperspectral data for non-destructive fruit bruise detection.

Artificial intelligence-assisted food detection is increasingly moving from single-task classification toward integrated analytical systems capable of producing multiple quality-related outputs from one sensing workflow. However, most hyperspectral food detection studies still rely on a single spectral range or simple feature concatenation, which limits their ability to exploit complementary physicochemical information from heterogeneous sensors. In this study, an artificial intelligence-enabled visible–near-infrared and short-wave infrared (VNIR-SWIR) hyperspectral fusion framework is proposed for multi-task fruit detection, using origin authentication and bruise localization as representative tasks. The proposed method first constructs an observation-consistent fused representation from high-resolution VNIR images and low-resolution SWIR images. Collaborative spectral unmixing is used to couple cross-modal material distributions, while abundance-consistency and downsampled observation-consistency constraints are introduced to estimate SWIR-informed features on the VNIR spatial grid without assuming measured high-resolution SWIR ground truth. The fused representation is then processed by a shared spectral–spatial deep encoder with two task-specific heads: a fruit-level classification head for origin authentication and a pixel-level segmentation head for bruise detection. Experiments on apple and kiwifruit datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms VNIR-only, SWIR-only, bicubic-fusion, CNMF-style fusion, and TV-regularized fusion baselines under five fruit-level stratified random splits. For origin-category authentication, the proposed method achieved an accuracy of almost 93.85 for apples and almost 94.35 for kiwifruit. For bruise localization, the proposed method achieved higher overall accuracy, average accuracy, and Cohen’s kappa across the evaluated fruit categories.