Special issues

Several special issues are dedicated to the IEEE Workshop PDCO 2020.

1) Special issue of the journal Frontiers: Multi-swarms of unmanned autonomous systems

Swarms of Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS), usually inspired by nature, such as bird flocks or fish schools, have been introduced to achieve complex common objectives through collaborative behaviors. Swarms have already been intensively studied as a way to address the limitations of single autonomous systems by augmenting the range of action, increasing the resilience and flexibility of UAS systems. These properties make them very suitable for numerous applications like surveillance, search and rescue or wide-area monitoring.

Going one step further, the usage of multiple swarms of different types of autonomous vehicles, e.g. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) recently gained attention. Multi-swarm systems can be composed of heterogeneous vehicles moving in an autonomous and coordinated way, for instance in the air, on the ground, or in the sea. While members of a single swarm work collectively to achieve a mission, interactions between swarms can similarly be cooperative but also competitive (e.g., swarms vs. swarms), opening new research challenges.

Multi-swarm systems remain an open research topic because of the intrinsic difficulty in obtaining efficient global behavior while relying on local decisions from distributed and heterogeneous entities evolving in different swarms. Such highly dynamical networked systems not only require efficient mobility behaviors, but also optimized ad hoc communications within and between swarms.

The development of UAS swarming solutions is still mainly limited to manual design and optimization, which becomes increasingly tedious and hardly scalable when considering multi-swarm systems. Therefore, novel artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization approaches are thus required to allow the development of efficient multi-swarm behaviors.

In order to disseminate the current advances in multi-swarm systems of UAS, we seek submissions describing novel work for a Research Topic in this area.

• Multi-swarm mobility models

• Multi-swarm simulations

• Multi-swarm testbeds

• Multi-swarm networking models and optimization (e.g., multi-layer networks)

• Heuristics - meta-heuristics (GP and RL as methodologies) for multi-swarm optimization

• Machine learning for multi-swarm systems

• Models for UTM (UAV Traffic Management)

• Prey-Predator dynamics in multi-swarms

• Multi-swarm collaborative models

• Game theoretical models

• Multi-swarm applications: surveillance, defense, intruder detection and handling

• State-of-the-art analysis (on the topics above)

Keywords: UAS, Swarm intelligence, Artificial intelligence, Optimization, Nature inspired techniques

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

Submission Deadlines:

16 February 2020: Abstract
15 June 2020:     Manuscript

2) Special issue of the journal Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417): Optimization, Processing, and Visualization of Data for Sustainability

At present, data have immense value in the digital world. All computer-based systems gather any kind of data, and companies make use of them to get a huge value out of them, in many different senses. The amount of stored data is continuously growing, and there is a need for efficient techniques to allow getting the most out of it. We focus in this Special Issue on recent advances on data-based optimization, knowledge extraction, and visualization techniques, focused on the enhancement of the sustainability of a system, product, process, etc. Interesting applications of sustainability enhancement can be found in applications belonging to fields such as logistics, mobility, industry, networks, (mobile) computing, or smart cities, among many others.

This Special Issue aims at attracting outstanding research works proposing the application of tools based on novel techniques in fields such as:

- Evolutionary algorithms;

- Heuristics;

- Exact approaches;

- Single-/multiobjective optimization;

- Parallel computing;

- Machine learning;

- Deep learning;

- Big Data techniques;

- Data analytics;

- Visualization and computer graphics.

The topics of interest for the applications are, among others:

- Industry 4.0;

- Logistics;

- Dynamic/static networks;

- Smart cities;

- Intelligent transportation systems;

- Smart Grid;

- Scheduling;

- Computing, from small portable devices to large datacenters.

All high-quality submitted papers related to the listed topics will be considered for publication in this Special Issue, provided they are recommended for publication after the review process. All manuscript submissions and reviews will be handled by the MDPI submission system https://susy.mdpi.com/. All papers should be prepared according to the MDPI Guide for Authors.

 Dr. Patricia Ruiz

Dr. Juan Carlos de la Torre

Dr. Bernabe Dorronsoro

Guest Editors

 Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Submission Deadline:

 31 May 2020: Manuscript

 One can submit a paper to IEEE Workshop PDCO 2020 and an extended version of the paper to the special issue. 

3) Special issue of the journal Algorithms (ISSN 1999-4893):Optimization Algorithms and Applications

Submission Deadline:

15 May 2020: Manuscript

One can submit a paper to IEEE Workshop PDCO 2020 and an extended version of the paper to the special issue.