Abstract This paper proposes SHIODEG, a hybrid metaheuristic that integrates the success-history intelligent optimizer (SHIO) with differential evolution (DE) and a Gaussian transformation (GT) to tackle two persistent challenges in optimization for engineering design: (i) the absence of a universally best optimizer across problem classes (as implied by the No-Free-Lunch perspective) and (ii) the limited ability of purely gradient-based methods to produce substantial improvements in complex, constrained, and often non-smooth real-world problems, motivating hybrid strategies that balance exploration and exploitation. SHIODEG follows a staged search process in which DE generates diverse trial solutions, GT injects normally distributed perturbations to reduce premature convergence and diversity collapse, and SHIO refines promising regions using success-history guidance from the best three leaders. SHIODEG is evaluated on the IEEE CEC2022 benchmark suite (12 functions) using 30 independent runs, a population size of 100, and a budget of 1000D function evaluations. The results show that SHIODEG consistently delivers top-tier performance across the benchmark suite, showing strong competitiveness, low variability, and statistically significant improvements over a wide range of alternative optimizers. It also demonstrates robust effectiveness on multiple constrained engineering design problems, achieving high-quality solutions across diverse real-world constraints.

Multimodal journey planners are used worldwide to support travelers in planning and executing their journeys. Generated travel plans usually involve local mobility service providers, consider some travelers’ preferences, and provide travelers information about the routes’ current status and expected delays. However, those planners cannot fully consider the special situations of individual cities when providing travel planning services. Specifically, authorities of different cities might define customizable regulations or constraints of movements in the cities (e.g., due to construction works or pandemics). Moreover, with the transformation of traditional cities into smart cities, travel planners could leverage advanced monitoring features. Finally, most planners do not consider relevant information impacting travel plans, for instance, information that might be provided by travelers (e.g., a crowded square) or by mobility service providers (e.g., changing the timetable of a bus). To address the aforementioned shortcomings, in this paper, we propose ROUTE, a framework for customizable smart mobility planners that better serve the needs of travelers, local authorities, and mobility service providers in the dynamic ecosystem of smart cities. ROUTE is composed of an architecture, a process, and a prototype developed to validate the feasibility of the framework. Experiments’ results show that the framework scales well in both centralized and distributed deployment settings.

Engineering Internet of Things (IoT) systems is a challenging task partly due to the dynamicity and uncertainty of the environment including the involvement of the human in the loop. Users should be able to achieve their goals seamlessly in different environments, and IoT systems should be able to cope with dynamic changes. Several approaches have been proposed to enable the automated formation, enactment, and self-adaptation of goal-driven IoT systems. However, they do not address deployment issues. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven approach for deploying self-adaptive IoT systems in the Edge-Cloud continuum. Our approach supports the systems to cope with the dynamicity and uncertainty of the environment including changes in their deployment topologies, i.e., the deployment nodes and their interconnections. We describe the architecture and processes of the approach and the simulations that we conducted to validate its feasibility. The results of the simulations show that the approach scales well when generating and adapting the deployment topologies of goal-driven IoT systems in smart homes and smart buildings.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a great potential to change our lives. Billions of heterogeneous, distributed, intelligent, and sometimes mobile devices, will be connected and offer new types of applications and ways to interact. The dynamic environment of the IoT, the involvement of the human in the loop, and the runtime interactions among devices and applications, put additional requirements on the systems' architecture. In this paper, we use the Emergent Configurations (ECs) concept as a way to engineer IoT systems and propose an architecture for ECs. More specifically, we discuss (i) how connected devices and applications form ECs to achieve users' goals and (ii) how applications are run and adapted in response to runtime context changes including, e.g., the sudden unavailability of devices, by exploiting the Smart Meeting Room case.