Evaluating the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms is a crucial step in the development and deployment process of IoT applications. It is still an open issue. In this paper, evaluating the IoT platforms is formulated to be a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problem since it involves multiple considerations and a novel integrated MCDM method is put forward for handling this problem. To this end, an evaluation criteria system is established to characterize these considerations for evaluating IoT platforms and then the concept of probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) is introduced to express the group preference information of IoT platforms with respect to the criteria. Then, a novel probabilistic linguistic best-worst (PLBW) method based on score value is put forward for calculating and analyzing the importance degrees of criteria. Based on the PLBW method, two-tuple distance measure, and two-level possibility degree, a novel integrated probabilistic linguistic MCDM model based on TODIM method is proposed to rank IoT platforms. Finally, a practical case is provided to show the procedure of evaluating IoT platforms and the comparative analysis is performed to verify the advantages of the probabilistic linguistic TODIM method.

Compared to the intuitionistic fuzzy sets, the Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFSs) can provide the decision makers with more freedom to express their evaluation information. There exist some research results on the correlation coefficient between PFSs, but sometimes they fail to deal with the problems of disease diagnosis and cluster analysis. To tackle the drawbacks of the existing correlation coefficients between PFSs, some novel directional correlation coefficients are put forward to compute the relationship between two PFSs by taking four parameters of the PFSs into consideration, which are the membership degree, non-membership degree, strength of commitment, and direction of commitment. Afterwards, two practical examples are given to show the application of the proposed directional correlation coefficient in the disease diagnosis, and the application of the proposed weighted directional correlation coefficient in the cluster analysis. Finally, they are compared with the previous correlation coefficients that have been developed for PFSs.

This work considers unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks for collecting data covertly from ground users. The full-duplex (FD) UAV intends to gather critical information from a scheduled user (SU) through wireless communication and generate artificial noise (AN) with random transmit power in order to ensure a negligible probability of the SU’s transmission being detected by the unscheduled users (USUs). To enhance the system performance, we jointly design the UAV’s trajectory and its maximum AN transmit power together with the user scheduling strategy subject to practical constraints, e.g., a covertness constraint, which is explicitly determined by analyzing each USU’s detection performance, and a binary constraint induced by user scheduling. The formulated design problem is a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem, which is challenging to solve directly, but tackled by our developed penalty successive convex approximation (P-SCA) scheme. An efficient UAV trajectory initialization is also presented based on the successive hover-and-fly (SHAF) trajectory, which also serves as a benchmark scheme. Our examination shows the developed P-SCA scheme significantly outperforms the benchmark scheme in terms of achieving a higher max-min average transmission rate (ATR) from all the SUs to the UAV.

The h-extra node-connectivity of a graph G is the size of a minimal node-set, whose removal will disconnect G, but each remaining component has no fewer h + 1 nodes. Based on h-extra node-connectivity, the h-extra conditional fault-diagnosability of networks has been proposed for a better, more realistic measure of networks' fault-tolerability. It is the maximal x such that G is h-extra conditionally x-fault-diagnosable. This paper will establish a relationship between the h-extra node-connectivity and h-extra conditional fault-diagnosability for a regular graph G, under the classic PMC diagnostic model. We will apply the newly found relationship to a variety of well-known regular networks, to directly obtain their h-extra conditional fault-diagnosability. The significance of the paper's work is that it relates the notions of h-extra node-connectivity and h-extra conditional fault-diagnosability, so that a regular network's h-extra conditional fault-diagnosability may be known once its h-extra node-connectivity is known.

The partitioned Bonferroni mean (PBM) operator can efficiently aggregate inputs, which are divided into parts based on their interrelationships. To date, it has not been used to aggregate linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy numbers (LPFNs). In this paper, we extend the PBM operator and partitioned geometric Bonferroni mean (PGBM) operator to the linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy sets (LPFSs) and use them to develop a novel multiattribute group decision‐making model under the linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy environment. We first define some novel operational laws for LPFNs, which take into consideration the interactions between the membership degree (MD) and nonmembership degree (NMD) from two different LPFNs. Based on these novel operational laws, we put forward the interaction PBM (LPFIPBM) operator, the weighted interaction PBM (LPFWIPBM) operator, the interaction PGBM (LPFIPGBM) operator, and the weighted interaction PGBM (LPFWIPGBM) operator. Then, we study some properties of these proposed operators and discuss their special cases. Based on the proposed LPFWIPBM and LPFWIPGBM operators, a novel multiattribute group decision‐making model is developed to process the linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy information. Finally, some illustrative examples are introduced to compare our proposed methods with the existing ones.