The emission of pollutants from vehicles is presented as a prime factor deteriorating air quality. Thus, seeking public policies encouraging the use and the development of more sustainable vehicles is paramount to preserve populations’ health. To better understand the health risks caused by air pollution and exclusively by mobile sources urges the question of which input variables should be considered. Therefore, this research aims to estimate the impacts on populations’ health related to road transport variables for São Paulo, Brazil, the largest metropolis in South America. We used three Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) (Multilayer Perceptron—MLP, Extreme Learning Machines—ELM, and Echo State Neural Networks—ESN) to estimate the impacts of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter on outcomes for respiratory diseases (morbidity—hospital admissions and mortality). We also used unusual inputs, such as road vehicles fleet, distributed and sold fuels amount, and vehicle average mileage. We also used deseasonalization and the Variable Selection Methods (VSM) (Mutual Information Filter and Wrapper). The results showed that the VSM excluded some variables, but the best performances were reached considering all of them. The ELM achieved the best overall results to morbidity, and the ESN to mortality, both using deseasonalization. Our study makes an important contribution to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: 3—good health and well-being, 7—affordable and clean energy, and 11—sustainable cities and communities. These research findings will guide government about future legislations, public policies aiming to warranty and improve the health system.

Lithium-ion batteries are the current most promising device for electric vehicle applications. They have been widely used because of their advantageous features, such as high energy density, many cycles, and low self-discharge. One of the critical factors for the correct operation of an electric vehicle is the estimation of the battery charge state. In this sense, this work presents a comparison of the state of charge estimation (SoC), tested in four different conduction profiles in different temperatures, which was performed using the Multiple Linear Regression without (MLR) and with spline interpolation (SPL-MLR) and the Generalized Linear Model (GLM). The models were calibrated by three different bio-inspired optimization techniques: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Differential Evolution (DE), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The computational results showed that the MLR-PSO is the most suitable for SoC prediction, overcoming all other models and important proposals from the literature.

In automotive industries, pricing anomalies may occur for components of different products, despite their similar physical characteristics, which raises the total production cost of the company. However, detecting such discrepancies is often neglected since it is necessary to find the problems considering the observation of thousands of pieces, which often present inconsistencies when specified by the product engineering team. In this investigation, we propose a solution for a real case study. We use as strategy a set of clustering algorithms to group components by similarity: K-Means, K-Medoids, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Hierarchical, Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Differential Evolution (DE). We observed that the methods could automatically perform the grouping of parts considering physical characteristics present in the material master data, allowing anomaly detection and identification, which can consequently lead to cost reduction. The computational results indicate that the Hierarchical approach presented the best performance on 1 of 6 evaluation metrics and was the second place on four others indexes, considering the Borda count method. The K-Medoids win for most metrics, but it was the second best positioned due to its bad performance regarding SI-index. By the end, this proposal allowed identify mistakes in the specification and pricing of some items in the company.

The forecasting of monthly seasonal streamflow time series is an important issue for countries where hydroelectric plants contribute significantly to electric power generation. The main step in the planning of the electric sector’s operation is to predict such series to anticipate behaviors and issues. In general, several proposals of the literature focus just on the determination of the best forecasting models. However, the correct selection of input variables is an essential step for the forecasting accuracy, which in a univariate model is given by the lags of the time series to forecast. This task can be solved by variable selection methods since the performance of the predictors is directly related to this stage. In the present study, we investigate the performances of linear and non-linear filters, wrappers, and bio-inspired metaheuristics, totaling ten approaches. The addressed predictors are the extreme learning machine neural networks, representing the non-linear approaches, and the autoregressive linear models, from the Box and Jenkins methodology. The computational results regarding five series from hydroelectric plants indicate that the wrapper methodology is adequate for the non-linear method, and the linear approaches are better adjusted using filters.

Particulate matter (PM) is one of the most harmful air pollutants to human health studied worldwide. In this scenario, it is of paramount importance to monitor and predict PM concentration. Artificial neural networks (ANN) are commonly used to forecast air pollution levels due to their accuracy. The use of partition on prediction problems is well known because decomposition of time series allows the latent components of the original series to be revealed. It is a matter of extracting the “deterministic” component, which is easy to predict the random components. However, there is no evidence of its use in air pollution forecasting. In this work, we introduce a different approach consisting of the decomposition of the time series in contiguous monthly partitions, aiming to develop specialized predictors to solve the problem because air pollutant concentration has seasonal behavior. The goal is to reach prediction accuracy higher than those obtained by using the entire series. Experiments were performed for seven time series of daily particulate matter concentrations (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀–particles with diameter less than 2.5 and 10 micrometers, respectively) in Finland and Brazil, using four ANNs: multilayer perceptron, radial basis function, extreme learning machines, and echo state networks. The experimental results using three evaluation measures showed that the proposed methodology increased all models’ prediction capability, leading to higher accuracy compared to the traditional approach, even for extremely high air pollution events. Our study has an important contribution to air quality prediction studies. It can help governments take measures aiming air pollution reduction and preparing hospitals during extreme air pollution events, which is related to the following United Nations sustainable developments goals: SDG 3—good health and well-being and SDG 11—sustainable cities and communities.