This study proposes a novel bioinspired metaheuristic simulating how the coronavirus spreads and infects healthy people. From a primary infected individual (patient zero), the coronavirus rapidly infects new victims, creating large populations of infected people who will either die or spread infection. Relevant terms such as reinfection probability, super-spreading rate, social distancing measures, or traveling rate are introduced into the model to simulate the coronavirus activity as accurately as possible. The infected population initially grows exponentially over time, but taking into consideration social isolation measures, the mortality rate, and number of recoveries, the infected population gradually decreases. The coronavirus optimization algorithm has two major advantages when compared with other similar strategies. First, the input parameters are already set according to the disease statistics, preventing researchers from initializing them with arbitrary values. Second, the approach has the ability to end after several iterations, without setting this value either. Furthermore, a parallel multivirus version is proposed, where several coronavirus strains evolve over time and explore wider search space areas in less iterations. Finally, the metaheuristic has been combined with deep learning models, to find optimal hyperparameters during the training phase. As application case, the problem of electricity load time series forecasting has been addressed, showing quite remarkable performance.

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Agriculture has undergone some very important changes over the last few decades. The emergence and evolution of precision agriculture has allowed to move from the uniform site management to the site-specific management, with both economic and environmental advantages. However, to be implemented effectively, site-specific management requires within-field spatial variability to be well-known and characterized. In this paper, an algorithm that delineates within-field management zones in a maize plantation is introduced. The algorithm, based on triclustering, mines clusters from temporal remote sensing data. Data from maize crops in Alentejo, Portugal, have been used to assess the suitability of applying triclustering to discover patterns over time, that may eventually help farmers to improve their harvests.

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