Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has posed a serious threat to both the human health and economy of the affected nations. Despite several control efforts invested in breaking the transmission chain of the disease, there is a rise in the number of reported infected and death cases around the world. Hence, there is the need for a mathematical model that can reliably describe the real nature of the transmission behaviour and control of the disease. This study presents an appropriately developed deterministic compartmental model to investigate the effect of different pharmaceutical (treatment therapies) and non-pharmaceutical (particularly, human personal protection and contact tracing and testing on the exposed individuals) control measures on COVID-19 population dynamics in Malaysia. The data from daily reported cases of COVID-19 between 3 March and 31 December 2020 are used to parameterize the model. The basic reproduction number of the model is estimated. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effect of various control combination strategies involving the use of personal protection, contact tracing and testing, and treatment control measures on the disease spread. Numerical simulations reveal that the implementation of each strategy analysed can significantly reduce COVID-19 incidence and prevalence in the population. However, the results of effectiveness analysis suggest that a strategy that combines both the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical control measures averts the highest number of infections in the population.

A Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a type of wireless ad hoc network that facilitates ubiquitous connectivity between vehicles in the absence of fixed infrastructure. Multi-hop routing and beaconing approaches are two important research challenges in high mobility vehicular networks. Routing protocols are divided into two categories of topology-based and position-based routing protocols. In this article, we perform a comparative study among the existing routing solutions, which explores the main advantages and drawbacks behind their design. After implementing the representatives of geographical and topology routing protocols, we analyze the simulation results and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these routing protocols in regard to their suitability to vehicular networks. Lastly, we discuss the open issues and research directions related to VANET routing protocols.

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Minimization of cost is very important in airline as great profit is an important objective for any airline system. One way to minimize the costs in airline is by developing an integrated planning process. Airline planning consists of many difficult operational decision problems including aircraft routing and crew pairing problems. These two sub-problems, though interrelated in practice, are usually solved sequentially leading to suboptimal solutions. We propose an integrated aircraft routing and crew pairing problem model, one approach to generate the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs, followed by three approaches to solve the integrated model. The integrated aircraft routing and crew scheduling problem is to determine a minimum cost aircraft routes and crew schedules while each flight leg is covered by one aircraft and one crew. The first approach is an integer programming solution method, the second formulation is developed in a way to lend itself to be used efficiently by Dantzig Wolfe decomposition whereas the third one is formulated as a Benders decomposition method. Encouraging results are obtained when tested on four types of aircraft based on local flights in Malaysia for one week flight cycle.