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The purpose of this article is to help to bridge the gap between sustainability and its application to project management by developing a methodology based on artificial intelligence to diagnose, classify, and forecast the level of sustainability of a sample of 186 projects aimed at local communities in Latin American and Caribbean countries. First, the compliance evaluation with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the framework of the 2030 Agenda served to diagnose and determine, through fuzzy sets, a global sustainability index for the sample, resulting in a value of 0.638, in accordance with the overall average for the region. Probabilistic predictions were then made on the sustainability of the projects using a series of supervised learning classifiers (SVM, Random Forest, AdaBoost, KNN, etc.), with the SMOTE resampling technique, which provided a significant improvement toward the results of the different metrics of the base models. In this context, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) + SMOTE was the best classification algorithm, with accuracy of 0.92. Lastly, the extrapolation of this methodology is to be expected toward other realities and local circumstances, contributing to the fulfillment of the SDGs and the development of individual and collective capacities through the management and direction of projects.

This article proposes a discussion on the form of coexistence of local Development Agencies in Uruguay, with local governments in the face of the new scenarios marked by the decentralization process, initiated in the country with the Constitutional Reform of 1996 and culminating in February 2009, with the Law of Political Decentralization and Citizen Participation. The discussion applies in particular to the local development agency of the city of Rivera (ADR), located in the northeast of the country. A descriptive, mixed, bibliographic, documentary investigation was carried out with primary data collection to internal and external references to ADR. The results show that the coexistence of both institutions has been difficult, without defining clear roles. Promoting dialogue to define the role of each seems to be the great challenge facing the sustainability of the agency.

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer cost-effective and flexible solutions for a wide range of real-world applications, particularly in hazardous and time-critical environments. Their ability to navigate autonomously, communicate rapidly, and avoid collisions makes UAVs well suited for emergency response scenarios. However, real-time path planning in dynamic and unpredictable environments remains a major challenge, especially in confined tunnel infrastructures where accidents may trigger fires, smoke propagation, debris, and rapid environmental changes. In such conditions, conventional preplanned or model-based navigation approaches often fail due to limited visibility, narrow passages, and the absence of reliable localization signals. To address these challenges, this work proposes an end-to-end emergency response framework for tunnel accidents based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Each UAV operates as an independent learning agent using an Independent Q-Learning paradigm, enabling real-time decision-making under limited computational resources. To mitigate premature convergence and local optima during exploration, Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) is integrated as a policy-guidance mechanism within the reinforcement learning (RL) framework. A customized reward function is designed to prioritize victim discovery, penalize unsafe behavior, and explicitly discourage redundant exploration among agents. The proposed approach is evaluated using a frontier-based exploration simulator under both single-agent and multi-agent settings with multiple goals. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves faster goal discovery, improved map coverage, and reduced rescue time compared to state-of-the-art GWO-based exploration and random search algorithms. These results highlight the effectiveness of lightweight MARL-based coordination for autonomous UAV-assisted tunnel emergency response.

Human activity recognition (HAR) is essential in many applications, such as smart homes, assisted living, healthcare monitoring, rehabilitation, physiotherapy, and geriatric care. Conventional methods of HAR use wearable sensors, e.g., acceleration sensors and gyroscopes. However, they are limited by issues such as sensitivity to position, user inconvenience, and potential health risks with long-term use. Optical camera systems that are vision-based provide an alternative that is not intrusive; however, they are susceptible to variations in lighting, intrusions, and privacy issues. The paper uses an optical method of recognizing human domestic activities based on pose estimation and deep learning ensemble models. The skeletal keypoint features proposed in the current methodology are extracted from video data using PoseNet to generate a privacy-preserving representation that captures key motion dynamics without being sensitive to changes in appearance. A total of 30 subjects (15 male and 15 female) were sampled across 2734 activity samples, including nine daily domestic activities. There were six deep learning architectures, namely, the Transformer (Transformer), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D CNN), and a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network–Long Short-Term Memory (CNN–LSTM) architecture. The results on the hold-out test set show that the CNN–LSTM architecture achieves an accuracy of 98.78% within our experimental setting. Leave-One-Subject-Out cross-validation further confirms robust generalization across unseen individuals, with CNN–LSTM achieving a mean accuracy of 97.21% ± 1.84% across 30 subjects. The results demonstrate that vision-based pose estimation with deep learning is a useful, precise, and non-intrusive approach to HAR in smart healthcare and home automation systems.

Monitoring tool conditions and sub-assemblies before final integration is essential to reducing processing failures and improving production quality for manufacturing setups. This research study proposes a real-time deep learning-based framework for identifying faulty components due to malfunctioning at different manufacturing stages in the aerospace industry. It uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize and classify intermediate abnormal states in a single manufacturing process. The manufacturing process for aircraft factory products comprises different phases; analyzing the components after the integration is labor-intensive and time-consuming, which often puts the company’s stake at high risk. To overcome these challenges, the proposed AI-based system can perform inspection and defect detection and alleviate the probability of components’ needing to be re-manufacturing after being assembled. In addition, it analyses the impact value, i.e., rework delays and costs, of manufacturing processes using a statistical process control tool on real-time data for various manufactured components. Defects are detected and classified using the CNN and teachable machine in the single manufacturing process during the initial stage prior to assembling the components. The results show the significance of the proposed approach in improving operational cost management and reducing rework-induced delays. Ground tests are conducted to calculate the impact value followed by the air tests of the final assembled aircraft. The statistical results indicate a 52.88% and 34.32% reduction in time delays and total cost, respectively.

The demand for cloud computing has drastically increased recently, but this paradigm has several issues due to its inherent complications, such as non-reliability, latency, lesser mobility support, and location-aware services. Fog computing can resolve these issues to some extent, yet it is still in its infancy. Despite several existing works, these works lack fault-tolerant fog computing, which necessitates further research. Fault tolerance enables the performing and provisioning of services despite failures and maintains anti-fragility and resiliency. Fog computing is highly diverse in terms of failures as compared to cloud computing and requires wide research and investigation. From this perspective, this study primarily focuses on the provision of uninterrupted services through fog computing. A framework has been designed to provide uninterrupted services while maintaining resiliency. The geographical information system (GIS) services have been deployed as a test bed which requires high computation, requires intensive resources in terms of CPU and memory, and requires low latency. Keeping different types of failures at different levels and their impacts on service failure and greater response time in mind, the framework was made anti-fragile and resilient at different levels. Experimental results indicate that during service interruption, the user state remains unaffected.

Evaluating groundwater quality in irrigated areas is crucial for sustainable agriculture, especially as limited water resources and climate change pose significant threat to groundwater resources. Spatial information on groundwater quality is essential for effective management and utilization of water resources, particularly in intensive cropping areas such as irrigated regions in IBIS, Pakistan. However, recent advancements in machine learning (ML) techniques have highlighted that conventional groundwater quality assessment methods are costly and time-consuming, especially for developing nations. Accurate and efficient ML models can address this challenge in agricultural water management by optimally identifying the categories of water quality. This study is conducted to predict groundwater quality using an innovative ensemble-boosting methodology. The data is collected from Rahim Yar Khan’s irrigation system by the Scarp Monitoring Organization. Four irrigation water quality indicators, including sodium adsorption ratio, total dissolved solids, residual sodium carbonate, and electrical conductivity, are used to predict groundwater quality by applying four ML models. The performance of the ML models is assessed using mean squared error, correlation coefficients (r), and root mean square error measures. The proposed Gradient Boosting (GB) approach combines the advantages of interpretable tree models and boosting approaches. Experimental results validate the utility of the proposed approach with a 99% accuracy in predicting groundwater quality, compared to conventional ML techniques. Based on the proposed GB model and the inverse distance weighting interpolation technique, the groundwater quality distribution in the Hazardous Area is 17.34%, the Marginal Area is 79.36%, and the Safe Area is 3.30%. Enhancement and validation of groundwater quality index predictions are carried out using k-fold validation and hyperparameter tuning. Results indicate that the ML models have the potential to accurately delineate different groundwater quality zones for managing water resources and ensuring sustainable agriculture. Water quality assessment through the proposed approach can help managing the groundwater for the regions susceptible to deterioration of water quality thus contributing to better irrigation governance.

Innovation plays a pivotal role in the progress and goodwill of an organization, and its ability to thrive. Consequently, the impact analysis of innovation on the performance of an organization holds great importance. This paper presents a two-stage analytical framework to examine the impact of business innovation on a firm’s performance, especially firms from the manufacturing sector. The prime objective is to identify the factors that have an impact on firm-level innovation, and to examine the impact of firm-level innovation on business performance. The framework and its analysis are based on the latest World Bank enterprise survey, with a sample size of 696 manufacturing firms. The first stage of the proposed framework establishes the analytical results through Bivariate Probit, which indicates that research and development (R&D) has a significantly positive impact on the product, process, marketing, and organizational innovations. It thus highlights the important role of the allocation of lump-sum amounts for R&D activities. The statistical analysis shows that innovation does not depend on the size of the firms. Moreover, the older firms are found to be wiser at conducting R&D than newer firms that are reluctant to take risks. The second stage of the proposed framework separately analyzes the impacts of the product and organizational innovation, and the process and marketing innovation on the firm performance, and finds them to be statistically significant and insignificant, respectively.

This is an effort to analyze the reaction of stock prices of Indian public and private banks listed in NSE and BSE to the announcement of seven best case news events. Several recent studies have analyzed the correlation between stock prices and news announcements; however, there is no evidence on how private and public sector Indian bank stocks react to important news events independently. We examine these features by concentrating on a sample of banking and government news events. We classify these news events to create a group of negative and a group of positive tone of announcements (sentiments). The statistical results show that the negative banking news announcements had a one-month impact on private banks, with statistically significant negative mean CARs. However, with highly statistically substantial negative mean CARs, the influence of the negative banking news announcements on public banks was observed for two months after the news was published. Furthermore, the influence of the positive banking news on private banks persisted a month after the news was published. Positive banking news events had an influence on public banks for five days after they were published. The study concludes that public bank stocks react more to negative news announcements than positive news announcements in the same manner as the sentimental polarity of the news announcements as compared to private bank stocks. First, we retrieved the news articles published in prominent online financial news portals between 2017 and 2020, and the seven major news events were extracted and classified using multi-class text classification. The Random Forest classifier produced a significant accuracy of 94% with pre-trained embeddings of DistilBERT, a neural network model, which outperformed the traditional feature representation technique, TF-IDF. The training data for the classifier were balanced using the SMOTE sampling technique.

Rivers play a major role within ecosystems and society, including for domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses, and in power generation. Forecasting of suspended sediment yield (SSY) is critical for design, management, planning, and disaster prevention in river basin systems. It is difficult to forecast the SSY using conventional methods because these approaches cannot handle complicated non-stationarity and non-linearity. Artificial intelligence techniques have gained popularity in water resources due to handling complex problems of SSY. In this study, a fully automated generalized single hybrid intelligent artificial neural network (ANN)-based genetic algorithm (GA) forecasting model was developed using water discharge, temperature, rainfall, SSY, rock type, relief, and catchment area data of eleven gauging stations for forecasting the SSY. It is applied at individual gauging stations for SSY forecasting in the Mahanadi River which is one of India’s largest peninsular rivers. All parameters of the ANN are optimized automatically and simultaneously using the GA. The multi-objective algorithm was applied to optimize the two conflicting objective functions (error variance and bias). The mean square error objective function was considered for the single-objective optimization model. Single and multi-objective GA-based ANN, autoregressive and multivariate autoregressive models were compared to each other. It was found that the single-objective GA-based ANN model provided the best accuracy among all comparative models, and it is the most suitable substitute for forecasting SSY. If the measurement of SSY is unavailable, then single-objective GA-based ANN modeling approaches can be recommended for forecasting SSY due to comparatively superior performance and simplicity of implementation.