Existing smart grid security research investigates different attack techniques and cascading failures from the attackers' viewpoints, while the defenders' or the operators' protection strategies are somehow neglected. Game theoretic methods are applied for the attacker-defender games in the smart grid security area. Yet, most of the existing works only use the one-shot game and do not consider the dynamic process of the electric power grid. In this paper, we propose a new solution for a multistage game (also called a dynamic game) between the attacker and the defender based on reinforcement learning to identify the optimal attack sequences given certain objectives (e.g., transmission line outages or generation loss). Different from a one-shot game, the attacker here learns a sequence of attack actions applying for the transmission lines and the defender protects a set of selected lines. After each time step, the cascading failure will be measured, and the line outage (and/or generation loss) will be used as the feedback for the attacker to generate the next action. The performance is evaluated on W&W 6-bus and IEEE 39-bus systems. A comparison between a multistage attack and a one-shot attack is conducted to show the significance of the multistage attack. Furthermore, different protection strategies are evaluated in simulation, which shows that the proposed reinforcement learning solution can identify optimal attack sequences under several attack objectives. It also indicates that attacker's learned information helps the defender to enhance the security of the system.

At present, the whole world is transitioning to the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, representing the transition to digital, fully automated environments, and cyber-physical systems. Industry 4.0 comprises many different technologies and innovations, which are being implemented in many different sectors. In this review, we focus on the healthcare or medical domain, where healthcare is being revolutionized. The whole ecosystem is moving towards Healthcare 4.0, through the application of Industry 4.0 methodologies. Many technical and innovative approaches have had an impact on moving the sector towards the 4.0 paradigm. We focus on such technologies, including Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, blockchain, Cloud Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, implemented in Healthcare 4.0. In this review, we analyze and identify how their applications function, the currently available state-of-the-art technologies, solutions to current challenges, and innovative start-ups that have impacted healthcare, with regards to the Industry 4.0 paradigm.

Chest radiographs (X-rays) combined with Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) methods have been demonstrated to detect and diagnose the onset of COVID-19, the disease caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, questions remain regarding the accuracy of those methods as they are often challenged by limited datasets, performance legitimacy on imbalanced data, and have their results typically reported without proper confidence intervals. Considering the opportunity to address these issues, in this study, we propose and test six modified deep learning models, including VGG16, InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, ResNet101, and VGG19 to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection from chest X-ray images. Results are evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f- score using a small and balanced dataset (Study One), and a larger and imbalanced dataset (Study Two). With 95% confidence interval, VGG16 and MobileNetV2 show that, on both datasets, the model could identify patients with COVID-19 symptoms with an accuracy of up to 100%. We also present a pilot test of VGG16 models on a multi-class dataset, showing promising results by achieving 91% accuracy in detecting COVID-19, normal, and Pneumonia patients. Furthermore, we demonstrated that poorly performing models in Study One (ResNet50 and ResNet101) had their accuracy rise from 70% to 93% once trained with the comparatively larger dataset of Study Two. Still, models like InceptionResNetV2 and VGG19's demonstrated an accuracy of 97% on both datasets, which posits the effectiveness of our proposed methods, ultimately presenting a reasonable and accessible alternative to identify patients with COVID-19.

Due to the rapidly expanding complexity of the cyber–physical power systems, the probability of a system malfunctioning and failing is increasing. Most of the existing works combining smart grid (SG) security and game theory fail to replicate the adversarial events in the simulated environment close to the real-life events. In this article, a repeated game is formulated to mimic the real-life interactions between the adversaries of the modern electric power system. The optimal action strategies for different environment settings are analyzed. The advantage of the repeated game is that the players can generate actions independent of the previous actions’ history. The solution of the game is designed based on the reinforcement learning algorithm, which ensures the desired outcome in favor of the players. The outcome in favor of a player means achieving higher mixed strategy payoff compared to the other player. Different from the existing game-theoretic approaches, both the attacker and the defender participate actively in the game and learn the sequence of actions applying to the power transmission lines. In this game, we consider several factors (e.g., attack and defense costs, allocated budgets, and the players’ strengths) that could affect the outcome of the game. These considerations make the game close to real-life events. To evaluate the game outcome, both players’ utilities are compared, and they reflect how much power is lost due to the attacks and how much power is saved due to the defenses. The players’ favorable outcome is achieved for different attack and defense strengths (probabilities). The IEEE 39 bus system is used here as the test benchmark. Learned attack and defense strategies are applied in a simulated power system environment (PowerWorld) to illustrate the postattack effects on the system.

A road network is the key foundation of any nation’s critical infrastructure. Pavements represent one of the longest-living structures, having a post-construction life of 20–40 years. Currently, most attempts at maintaining and repairing these structures are performed in a reactive and traditional fashion. Recent advances in technology and research have proposed the implementation of costly measures and time-intensive techniques. This research presents a novel automated approach to develop a cognitive twin of a pavement structure by implementing advanced modelling and machine learning techniques from unmanned aerial vehicle (e.g., drone) acquired data. The research established how the twin is initially developed and subsequently capable of detecting current damage on the pavement structure. The proposed method is also compared to the traditional approach of evaluating pavement condition as well as the more advanced method of employing a specialized diagnosis vehicle. This study demonstrated an efficiency enhancement of maintaining pavement infrastructure.