Rishabh Gupta

In the era of crowd delivery vehicle routing and traffic management in smart cities, a complex challenge appears indistinctly, affecting both developed and developing nations worldwide. This challenging problem involves optimizing multi-depot routes while addressing various hurdles: minimizing travel time, distance, fuel consumption, and carbon emissions, all while navigating dynamic traffic congestion across diverse pathways. Existing approaches often focus on isolated aspects like shortest paths, carbon emissions, or traffic prediction, leaving the comprehensive multi-depot traffic management problem unaddressed. In response, this research work proposes an Intelligent Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing and Management (IM-VRM) model which provides a comprehensive and holistic solution. It employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) learning-based routing with a greedy optimization to establish initial optimal pathways for multi-depot journeys. Subsequently, the IM-VRM model integrates traffic congestion prediction with green parameter computation, engaging the Dijkstra algorithm to select the most admissible routes. This consecutive steps-based travel route guidance process optimizes routing for heterogeneous vehicles, including both heavy-duty and light-duty types. It accounts for load-dependent fuel consumption, velocity, and carbon emissions. By doing so, it simplifies the complexities of multi-depot traffic routing and management. The proposed model has been rigorously evaluated using a real-world multi-depot traffic dataset, demonstrating its practical viability. Notably, IM-VRM model achieves a remarkable improvement in fuel savings, reduced carbon emissions, and shorter travel time outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and precision.

The inefficient sharing of industrial cloud resour-ces among multiple users and vulnerabilities of virtual machines (VM)s and servers prompt unauthorized access to users’ sensitive data along with excess consumption of power and resource wastage. To address these entangled issues, this paper proposes a novel E merging VM T hreat P rediction and Dynamic W orkload E stimation based Resource Allocation ( ETP-WE ) framework that predicts VM threats and resource usage proactively in real-time. The proposed framework contributes by introducing a Risk-Score Matrix that analyses multiple risks for each VM; utilizing knowledge of proposed security and workload analyzers for efficient VM Placement (VMP), and estimating resource utilization by developing an ensemble predictor for prior mitigation of over-/under-load on servers. ETP-WE framework collaborates machine-learning-based security and workload analysis for secure and resource-efficient VMP, thereby reducing the number of security threats, optimizing resource utilization, power-consumption, and adapting to the changes in application demands. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using two benchmark datasets OpenNebula and Google Cluster. The simulation-based comparison with state-of-the-arts validates the efficacy of ETP-WE in terms of reduction of security threats, power consumption, and number of active servers up to 86.9%, 66.67% and 30%-80%, respectively with an improved resource utilization up to 60%-75% over existing approaches Note to Practitioners —Industry clouds serve the precise needs and provide the service features and tools as per the industry’s needs to help organizations meet their workloads processing and storage demands. For instance, healthcare and financial organizations have to comply with extended security to meet specific service requirements. To this context, we have proposed a novel ETP-WE framework for prediction and mitigation of cyberthreats on virtual resources in real-time for secure execution of industrial applications on third-party servers. ETP-WE collaborates machine-learning based security and workload analysis for secure and resource efficient VM allocation, thereby reducing number of security threats, optimizing resource utilization, power-consumption and adaptating to the changes in application demands. During the processing of any sensitive transaction such as medical data, bank transactions, ETP-WE framework will induce improved data protection by mitigating potential data breaches. ETP-WE framework will be deployed at Resource Scheduler to boost security performance by estimating the multiple risks score status of VMs engaged in execution of industrial transactions or workloads. It will help to predict and analyze the probable security threats or breaches proactively and facilitate their mitigation. The performance evaluation and comparison with state-of-the-arts validate potency of ETP-WE in terms of reduction of cybersecurity threats and number of active servers with an improved resource utilization over existing approaches.

Cloud virtualization technology, ingrained with physical resource sharing, prompts cybersecurity threats on users’ virtual machines (VMs) due to the presence of inevitable vulnerabilities on the offsite servers. Contrary to the existing works which concentrated on reducing resource sharing and encryption/decryption of data before transfer for improving cybersecurity which raises computational cost overhead, the proposed model operates diversely for efficiently serving the same purpose. This article proposes a novel multiple risks analysis-based VM threat prediction model (MR-TPM) to secure computational data and minimize adversary breaches by proactively estimating the VMs threats. It considers multiple cybersecurity risk factors associated with the configuration and management of VMs, along with analysis of users’ behavior. All these threat factors are quantified for the generation of respective risk score values and fed as input into a machine learning-based classifier to estimate the probability of threat for each VM. The performance of MR-TPM is evaluated using benchmark Google Cluster and OpenNebula VM threat traces. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model efficiently computes the cybersecurity risks and learns the VM threat patterns from historical and live data samples. The deployment of MR-TPM with existing VM allocation policies reduces cybersecurity threats up to 88.9%.

A large amount of data and applications are migrated by researchers, stakeholders, academia, and business organizations to the cloud environment due to its large variety of services, which involve the least maintenance cost, maximum flexibility, and on-demand service for storage, computation, and data distribution intentions. Despite the various characteristics the cloud environment supports, it also faces many challenges. However, data users may not completely trust a cloud environment that is engaged by a third party. Every cloud user always has a prime concern, i.e., security. Numerous methods have been designed to solve the issue of data security during data storage, calculation, and sharing across stakeholders and users. Nevertheless, there is a lack of existing methods that tackle the issue of the security of data when it is stored in a cloud environment. This article presents a precise security method that has handled the security of data while it is being shared and stored in the cloud. These methods have been utilized to lessen security assaults and prevent unauthorized parties from accessing the actual data. The article is concluded with some limitations and recommendations for the future in terms of secure data retention and distribution.

This letter proposes a novel malicious user prediction model based on quantum machine learning that estimates the vicious entity present in the communication system precedently before allocating the data in the distributed environments. The proposed model scrutinizes the behavior of each user and estimates probable data breaches using a developed malicious user predictor unit. The model computes essential scores associated with each user request for the learning process of the prediction unit by generating training samples. The predictor unit exploits the computational and behavioral properties of Qubits and Quantum gates for the accurate prediction of the malicious user with high precision to grant access to non-malicious data requests only. The experimental evaluation and comparison of the proposed model with state-of-the-art methods reveal that it significantly improves the security of the system up to 33.28%.

A large amount of data and applications need to be shared with various parties and stakeholders in the cloud environment for storage, computation, and data utilization. Since a third party operates the cloud platform, owners cannot fully trust this environment. However, it has become a challenge to ensure privacy preservation when sharing data effectively among different parties. This paper proposes a novel model that partitions data into sensitive and non-sensitive parts, injects the noise into sensitive data, and performs classification tasks using k-anonymization, differential privacy, and machine learning approaches. It allows multiple owners to share their data in the cloud environment for various purposes. The model specifies communication protocol among involved multiple untrusted parties to process owners data. The proposed model preserves actual data by providing a robust mechanism. The experiments are performed over Heart Disease, Arrhythmia, Hepatitis, Indian-liver-patient, and Framingham datasets for Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and Artificial Neural Network classifiers to compute the efficiency in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of the proposed model. The achieved results provide high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score up to 93.75%, 94.11%, 100%, and 87.99% and improvement up to 16%, 29%, 12%, and 11%, respectively, compared to previous works.

The massive upsurge in computational and storage has driven the local data and machine learning applications to the cloud environment. The owners may not fully trust the cloud environment as it is managed by third parties. However, maintaining privacy while sharing data and the classifier with several stakeholders is a critical challenge. This paper proposes a novel model based on differential privacy and machine learning approaches that enable multiple owners to share their data for utilization and the classifier to render classification services for users in the cloud environment. To process owners data and classifier, the model specifies a communication protocol among various untrustworthy parties. The proposed model also provides a robust mechanism to preserve the privacy of data and the classifier. The experiments are conducted for a Naive Bayes classifier over numerous datasets to compute the proposed model efficiency. The achieved results demonstrate that the proposed model has high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score up to 94%, 95%, 94%, and 94%, and improvement up to 16.95%, 20.16%, 16.95%, and 23.33%, respectively, compared with state-of-the-art works.