Minimizing the ongoing impact of train delays has benefits to both the users of the railway system and the railway stakeholders. However, the efficient rescheduling of trains after a perturbation is a complex real-world problem. The complexity is compounded by the fact that the problem may be both dynamic and multi-objective. The aim of this research is to investigate the ability of ant colony optimization algorithms to solve a simulated dynamic multi-objective railway rescheduling problem and, in the process, to attempt to identify the features of the algorithms that enable them to cope with a multi-objective problem that is also dynamic. Results showed that, when the changes in the problem are large and frequent, retaining the archive of non-dominated solution between changes and updating the pheromones to reflect the new environment play an important role in enabling the algorithms to perform well on this dynamic multi-objective railway rescheduling problem.

A data stream is a continuously arriving sequence of data and clustering data streams requires additional considerations to traditional clustering. A stream is potentially unbounded, data points arrive online and each data point can be examined only once. This imposes limitations on available memory and processing time. Furthermore, streams can be noisy and the number of clusters in the data and their statistical properties can change over time. This paper presents an online, bio-inspired approach to clustering dynamic data streams. The proposed ant colony stream clustering (ACSC) algorithm is a density-based clustering algorithm, whereby clusters are identified as high-density areas of the feature space separated by low-density areas. ACSC identifies clusters as groups of micro-clusters. The tumbling window model is used to read a stream and rough clusters are incrementally formed during a single pass of a window. A stochastic method is employed to find these rough clusters, this is shown to significantly speeding up the algorithm with only a minor cost to performance, as compared to a deterministic approach. The rough clusters are then refined using a method inspired by the observed sorting behavior of ants. Ants pick-up and drop items based on the similarity with the surrounding items. Artificial ants sort clusters by probabilistically picking and dropping micro-clusters based on local density and local similarity. Clusters are summarized using their constituent micro-clusters and these summary statistics are stored offline. Experimental results show that the clustering quality of ACSC is scalable, robust to noise and favorable to leading ant clustering and stream-clustering algorithms. It also requires fewer parameters and less computational time.

This paper presents an evaluation of different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures using false-colour images obtained by multispectral sensors on drones for the detection of Black Sigatoka in banana crops. The objective is to use drones to improve the accuracy and efficiency of Black Sigatoka detection to reduce its impact on banana production and improve the sustainable management of banana crops, one of the most produced, traded, and important fruits for food security consumed worldwide. This study aims to improve the precision and accuracy in analysing the images and detecting the presence of the disease using deep learning algorithms. Moreover, we are using drones, multispectral images, and different CNNs, supported by transfer learning, to enhance and scale up the current approach using RGB images obtained by conventional cameras and even smartphone cameras, available in open datasets. The innovation of this study, compared to existing technologies for disease detection in crops, lies in the advantages offered by using drones for image acquisition of crops, in this case, constructing and testing our own datasets, which allows us to save time and resources in the identification of crop diseases in a highly scalable manner. The CNNs used are a type of artificial neural network widely utilised for machine training; they contain several specialised layers interconnected with each other in which the initial layers can detect lines and curves, and gradually become specialised until reaching deeper layers that recognise complex shapes. We use multispectral sensors to create false-colour images around the red colour spectra to distinguish infected leaves. Relevant results of this study include the construction of a dataset with 505 original drone images. By subdividing and converting them into false-colour images using the UAV’s multispectral sensors, we obtained 2706 objects of diseased leaves, 3102 objects of healthy leaves, and an additional 1192 objects of non-leaves to train classification algorithms. Additionally, 3640 labels of Black Sigatoka were generated by phytopathology experts, ideal for training algorithms to detect this disease in banana crops. In classification, we achieved a performance of 86.5% using false-colour images with red, red edge, and near-infrared composition through MobileNetV2 for three classes (healthy leaves, diseased leaves, and non-leaf extras). We obtained better results in identifying Black Sigatoka disease in banana crops using the classification approach with MobileNetV2 as well as our own datasets.