Ahmad Zia¹, Nazia Azim², Bekarystankyzy Akbayan³, Khalid J. Alzahrani⁴, Ateeq Ur Rehman^5,*, Faheem Ullah Khan⁶, Nouf Al-Kahtani⁷, Hend Khalid Alkahtani^8,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.073818 - 12 January 2026

Abstract The cloud-fog computing paradigm has emerged as a novel hybrid computing model that integrates computational resources at both fog nodes and cloud servers to address the challenges posed by dynamic and heterogeneous computing networks. Finding an optimal computational resource for task offloading and then executing efficiently is a critical issue to achieve a trade-off between energy consumption and transmission delay. In this network, the task processed at fog nodes reduces transmission delay. Still, it increases energy consumption, while routing tasks to the cloud server saves energy at the cost of higher communication delay. Moreover, the… More >

Ahmed Awad Mohamed¹, Eslam Abdelhakim Seyam^2,*, Ahmed R. Elsaeed³, Laith Abualigah⁴, Aseel Smerat^5,6, Ahmed M. AbdelMouty⁷, Hosam E. Refaat⁸

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.073171 - 12 January 2026

Abstract In recent years, fog computing has become an important environment for dealing with the Internet of Things. Fog computing was developed to handle large-scale big data by scheduling tasks via cloud computing. Task scheduling is crucial for efficiently handling IoT user requests, thereby improving system performance, cost, and energy consumption across nodes in cloud computing. With the large amount of data and user requests, achieving the optimal solution to the task scheduling problem is challenging, particularly in terms of cost and energy efficiency. In this paper, we develop novel strategies to save energy consumption across… More >

Feng Lv^*, Huili Chu, Cheng Yang, Jiajie Zhang

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072915 - 12 January 2026

Abstract To address the issue that hybrid flow shop production struggles to handle order disturbance events, a dynamic scheduling model was constructed. The model takes minimizing the maximum makespan, delivery time deviation, and scheme deviation degree as the optimization objectives. An adaptive dynamic scheduling strategy based on the degree of order disturbance is proposed. An improved multi-objective Grey Wolf (IMOGWO) optimization algorithm is designed by combining the “job-machine” two-layer encoding strategy, the timing-driven two-stage decoding strategy, the opposition-based learning initialization population strategy, the POX crossover strategy, the dual-operation dynamic mutation strategy, and the variable neighborhood search… More >

Yonghua Huo^1,2, Ying Liu^1,*, Anni Jiang³, Yang Yang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072681 - 12 January 2026

Abstract With the advent of sixth-generation mobile communications (6G), space–air–ground integrated networks have become mainstream. This paper focuses on collaborative scheduling for mobile edge computing (MEC) under a three-tier heterogeneous architecture composed of mobile devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and macro base stations (BSs). This scenario typically faces fast channel fading, dynamic computational loads, and energy constraints, whereas classical queuing-theoretic or convex-optimization approaches struggle to yield robust solutions in highly dynamic settings. To address this issue, we formulate a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) for an air–ground-fused MEC system, unify link selection, bandwidth/power allocation, and task… More >

Olanrewaju Lawrence Abraham^1,2,*, Md Asri Ngadi¹, Johan Bin Mohamad Sharif¹, Mohd Kufaisal Mohd Sidik¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072279 - 12 January 2026

Abstract Task scheduling in cloud computing is a multi-objective optimization problem, often involving conflicting objectives such as minimizing execution time, reducing operational cost, and maximizing resource utilization. However, traditional approaches frequently rely on single-objective optimization methods which are insufficient for capturing the complexity of such problems. To address this limitation, we introduce MDMOSA (Multi-objective Dwarf Mongoose Optimization with Simulated Annealing), a hybrid that integrates multi-objective optimization for efficient task scheduling in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environments. MDMOSA harmonizes the exploration capabilities of the biologically inspired Dwarf Mongoose Optimization (DMO) with the exploitation strengths of Simulated Annealing (SA), More >

Sai Xu^1,*, Jun Liu^1,*, Shengyu Huang¹, Zhi Li²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071865 - 12 January 2026

Abstract In scenarios where ground-based cloud computing infrastructure is unavailable, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) act as mobile edge computing (MEC) servers to provide on-demand computation services for ground terminals. To address the challenge of jointly optimizing task scheduling and UAV trajectory under limited resources and high mobility of UAVs, this paper presents PER-MATD3, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm with prioritized experience replay (PER) into the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework. Specifically, PER-MATD3 enables each agent to learn a decentralized policy using only local observations during execution, while leveraging a shared replay buffer with More >

Tsu-Yang Wu¹, Chengyuan Yu¹, Yanan Zhao², Saru Kumari³, Chien-Ming Chen^1,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.069139 - 12 January 2026

Abstract With the increasing complexity of logistics operations, traditional static vehicle routing models are no longer sufficient. In practice, customer demands often arise dynamically, and multi-depot systems are commonly used to improve efficiency. This paper first introduces a vehicle routing problem with the goal of minimizing operating costs in a multi-depot environment with dynamic demand. New customers appear in the delivery process at any time and are periodically optimized according to time slices. Then, we propose a scheduling system TS-DPU based on an improved ant colony algorithm TS-ACO to solve this problem. The classical ant colony More >

Heping Qi, Wenyao Sun^*, Yi Zhao, Xiaoyi Qian, Xingyu Jiang

Energy Engineering, Vol.123, No.1, 2026, DOI:10.32604/ee.2025.069603 - 27 December 2025

Abstract Virtual power plant (VPP) integrates a variety of distributed renewable energy and energy storage to participate in electricity market transactions, promote the consumption of renewable energy, and improve economic efficiency. In this paper, aiming at the uncertainty of distributed wind power and photovoltaic output, considering the coupling relationship between power, carbon trading, and green card market, the optimal operation model and bidding scheme of VPP in spot market, carbon trading market, and green card market are established. On this basis, through the Shapley value and independent risk contribution theory in cooperative game theory, the quantitative… More > Graphic Abstract

Bing Zhang, Wenqi Shi^*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.2, pp. 1-19, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.067470 - 09 December 2025

Abstract To address the challenge of low survival rates and limited data collection efficiency in current virtual probe deployments, which results from anomaly detection mechanisms in location-based service (LBS) applications, this paper proposes a novel virtual probe deployment method based on user behavioral feature analysis. The core idea is to circumvent LBS anomaly detection by mimicking real-user behavior patterns. First, we design an automated data extraction algorithm that recognizes graphical user interface (GUI) elements to collect spatio-temporal behavior data. Then, by analyzing the automatically collected user data, we identify normal users’ spatio-temporal patterns and extract their… More >

Jiqiang Xia¹, Qi Zhan¹, Le Tian^1,2,3,*, Yuxiang Hu^1,2,3, Jianhua Peng⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.1, pp. 1-19, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.069533 - 10 November 2025

Abstract The rapid growth of distributed data-centric applications and AI workloads increases demand for low-latency, high-throughput communication, necessitating frequent and flexible updates to network routing configurations. However, maintaining consistent forwarding states during these updates is challenging, particularly when rerouting multiple flows simultaneously. Existing approaches pay little attention to multi-flow update, where improper update sequences across data plane nodes may construct deadlock dependencies. Moreover, these methods typically involve excessive control-data plane interactions, incurring significant resource overhead and performance degradation. This paper presents P4LoF, an efficient loop-free update approach that enables the controller to reroute multiple flows through More >