The authors study the covering rough sets by topological methods. They combine the covering rough sets and topological spaces by means of defining some new types of spaces called covering rough topological (CRT) spaces based on neighbourhoods or complementary neighbourhoods. As the separation axioms play a fundamental role in general topology, they introduce all these axioms into covering rough set theories and thoroughly study the equivalent conditions for every separation axiom in several CRT spaces. They also investigate the relationships between the separation axioms in these special spaces and reveal these relationships through diagrams in different CRT spaces.

To support semantic inter-operability between the biomedical information systems, it is necessary to determine the correspondences between the heterogeneous biomedical concepts, which is commonly known as biomedical ontology matching. Biomedical concepts are usually complex and ambiguous, which makes matching biomedical ontologies a challenge. Since none of the similarity measures can distinguish the heterogeneous biomedical concepts in any context independently, usually several similarity measures are applied together to determine the biomedical concepts mappings. However, the ignorance of the effects brought about by different biomedical concept mapping's preference on the similarity measures significantly reduces the alignment's quality. In this study, a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA)-III-based biomedical ontology matching technique is proposed to effectively match the biomedical ontologies, which first utilises an ontology partitioning technique to transform the large-scale biomedical ontology matching problem into several ontology segment-matching problems, and then uses NSGA-III to determine the optimal alignment without tuning the aggregating weights. The experiment is conducted on the anatomy track and large biomedic ontologies track which are provided by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), and the comparisons with OAEI's participants show the effectiveness of the authors' approach.

This research develops two new models for project portfolio selection, in which the candidate projects are composed of multiple repetitive units. To reflect some real situations, the learning effect is considered in the project portfolio selection problem for the first time. The mathematical representations of the relationship between learning experience and investment cost are provided. One numerical example under different scenarios is demonstrated and the impact of considering learning effect is then discussed.

The teaching–learning-based optimisation (TLBO) algorithm is a population-based metaheuristic inspired on the teaching–learning process observed in a classroom. It has been successfully used in a wide range of applications. In this study, the authors present a variant version of TLBO. In the proposed version, different weights are assigned to students during the student phase, with higher weights being assigned to students with better solutions. Three different approaches to assign weights are investigated. Numerical experiments with benchmark instances of the flow-shop and the job-shop scheduling problems are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed approaches. They compare the proposed approaches with the original TLBO algorithm and with two variants of TLBOs proposed in the literature in terms of solution quality, convergence speed and simulation time. The results obtained by the application of a Friedman statistical test showed that the proposed approaches outperformed the original version of TLBO in terms of convergence, with no significant losses in the average makespan. The additional simulation time required by the proposed approaches is small. The best performance was achieved with the approach of assigning a fixed weight to half the students with the best solutions and assigning zero to other students.

Service-oriented architecture is becoming a major software framework for complex application and it can be dynamically and flexibly composed by integrating existing component web services provided by different providers with standard protocols. The rapid introduction of new web services into a dynamic business environment can adversely affect the service quality and user satisfaction. Therefore, how to leverage, aggregate and make use of individual component's quality of service (QoS) information to derive the optimal QoS of the composite service which meets the needs of users is still an ongoing hot research problem. This study aims at reviewing the advance of the current state-of-the-art in technologies and inspiring the possible new ideas for web service selection and composition, especially with nature-inspired computing approaches. Firstly, the background knowledge of web services is presented. Secondly, various nature-inspired web selection and composition approaches are systematically reviewed and analysed for QoS-aware web services. Finally, challenges, remarks and discussions about QoS-aware web service composition are presented.

This study presented a multi-objective linear fractional inventory (LFI) problem with generalised intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. In modelling, the authors have assumed the ambiances where generalised trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (GTIFNs) used to handle the uncertain information in the data. Then, the given multi-objective generalised intuitionistic fuzzy LFI model was transformed into its equivalent deterministic linear fractional programming problem by employing the possibility and necessity measures. Finally, the applicability of the model is demonstrated with a numerical example and the sensitivity analysis under several parameters is investigated to explore the study.

The concept of missing data is important to apply statistical methods on the dataset. Statisticians and researchers may end up to an inaccurate illation about the data if the missing data are not handled properly. Of late, Python and R provide diverse packages for handling missing data. In this study, an imputation algorithm, cumulative linear regression, is proposed. The proposed algorithm depends on the linear regression technique. It differs from the existing methods, in that it cumulates the imputed variables; those variables will be incorporated in the linear regression equation to filling in the missing values in the next incomplete variable. The author performed a comparative study of the proposed method and those packages. The performance was measured in terms of imputation time, root-mean-square error, mean absolute error, and coefficient of determination . On analysing on five datasets with different missing values generated from different mechanisms, it was observed that the performances vary depending on the size, missing percentage, and the missingness mechanism. The results showed that the performance of the proposed method is slightly better.