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The skin and skeleton of aircraft are connected by adhesives or rivets to bear and transfer aerodynamic load. It is easy for crack and fracture damage to occur under the action of cyclic load, thus reducing aircraft bearing capacity/integrity and causing serious security risks. Therefore, it is particularly important that passive wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors be used for the health monitoring of aircraft skin in its whole life cycle. This paper aims to investigate the influence of miniaturization on the coupling effect between RFID tag sensors.

Two groups of crack sensing systems based on RFID tags were designed. Gain and mutual impedance of sensor tags were analyzed via mode analysis. The reliability of crack detection of both sensing systems was compared using a preset experimental scheme.

Miniaturized antennas can reduce edge influence and the coupling effect. Gain and mutual impedance decrease with the increase in distance between dual tags. Backscatter power shows a decreasing trend and threshold power to activate tags in reader antenna increases. Results show that the miniaturization of size is more suitable for the application of multiple sensors.

By comparing two groups of sensing systems, the consistency of crack detection sensitivity is better when small tags are placed in parallel, which provides a theoretical basis for the application of small, passive and densely distributed crack sensors in the future.

Crack sensor based on RFID tag has become a research hotspot in the field of metal structural health monitoring for its significant benefit of passive wireless transmission. While in practice, crack location will impact the performance of crack depth-sensing tag. The purpose of this paper is to provide a method for reducing disturbance of crack location on crack depth-sensing tag.

The effect analysis of crack location on crack depth-sensing tag is presented first to find disturbance reason and disturbance law. On the basis of that, a miniaturized tag is proposed to improve the current distribution and reduce the disturbance introduced by crack location.

The degree of crack location disturbance is closely related to the current distribution in the coverage area of tag. Because sensing tag performs better when crack locates in the high current density area, miniaturization of sensing tag is exploited to expand the high current density area and make the area more symmetrical. The simulated and experimental results demonstrate that tag miniaturization can enhance the performance of crack depth-sensing tag.

This paper provides a method to enhance the performance of crack depth-sensing tag.

RFID tags for sensing are available to operate and transmit sensing data to measurement equipment without battery and wires, which is a great advantage in establishing IoT environment. For crack sensing tags, however, the short service life of tags restricted their application. This paper aims to introduce a method of surface crack detection and monitoring based on RFID tag, which makes it possible for tags to be reused.

Metal plate to be monitored, acting as the ground plane of microstrip patch antenna, is underneath the crack sensing tag. The propagating surface crack in metal plate will change the electric length of tag’s antenna that is directly proportional to the crack depth and length. Thus, the deformation of sensing tag introduced by the load on metal structure is no longer a prerequisite for crack sensing.

The simulated and experimental results show that the proposed crack sensing tag can sense the change of surface crack with mm-resolution and sense surface crack propagation without a deformation, which means the proposed crack sensing tag can be reused.

The key advantage of the proposed method is the reusability of the RFID tags.

Radio frequency identification tags for passive sensing have attracted wide attention in the area of Internet of Things (IoT). Among them, some tags can sense the property change of objects without an integrated sensor, which is a new trend of passive sensing based on tag. The purpose of this paper is to review recent research on passive self-sensing tags (PSSTs).

The PSSTs reported in the past decade are classified in terms of sensing mode, composition and the ways of power supply. This paper presents operation principles of PSSTs and analyzes the characteristics of them. Moreover, the paper focuses on summarizing the latest sensing parameters of PSSTs and their matching equipment. Finally, some potential applications and challenges faced by this emerging technique are discussed.

PSST is suitable for long-term and large-scale monitoring compared to conventional sensors because it gets rid of the limitation of battery and has relatively low cost. Also, the static information of objects stored in different PSSTs can be identified by a single reader without touch.

This paper provides a detailed and timely review of the rapidly growing research in PSST.

Cross-border e-commerce in China has been booming in recent years. This paper aims to study pricing in Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies and focuses on the baby food market, which is simply examined as a case study to highlight broader implications. In this intensely competitive sector, the biggest challenge faced by such companies is ensuring that they are in a position to be able set prices in the short-term to maximize their competitive advantage and profitability. The study of pricing will help management to make correct operational decisions.

This study utilizes transaction data, which were obtained from the Taobao e-commerce platform. Taobao is the largest e-commerce retail platform in the world. We analyzed factors, including business models, homogeneity, reputation ratings and sales volumes, which may affect pricing.

This study found that consumers in the baby food sector of Chinese cross-border e-commerce are not price-sensitive. Consumers are reputation-rating-sensitive. The reputation ratings of sellers affect the price dispersion in e-commerce markets. The Core Price Dispersion Rate Model not only considers the prices but also takes sales volumes into account in the calculations. Finally, based on Gaussian processes, a model was developed for price forecasting in the area of cross-border e-commerce. The experimental results show that the proposed method is highly valuable for price forecasting.

This study provides a novel understanding of the baby food sector in the Chinese cross-border e-commerce market by examining the business model, price dispersion, reputation rating and correlation between the reputation of sellers, prices and sales volume. Furthermore, a model for price forecasting is proposed.

The development of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is vital to the economy, as such the financing of SMEs has become the focus of government and enterprises. The purpose of this paper is to find the operational and financial strategies of the supplier and retailer in supply chain.

In a Stackelberg game, supplier moves first setting wholesale price, while the retailer follows, setting the ordering quantity. Enterprises maximize their profits by optimization. When measuring profit targets, the capital constraints and income taxes of two companies are considered. In the portfolio financing model, the retailer can obtain products from suppliers through trade credit, and the supplier can use asset-backed securitization (ABS) to solve his/her financing problems.

The wholesale price is a decreasing function of retailer’s initial cash balance, and the supplier’s financing interest rate is a decreasing function of his/her own capital, the incentive effect of the supplier’s price discount strategy on retailer is more intense in the supply chain with high-priced product or high-capital retailer. And in a capital-constrained supply chain, an increase in tax rate or financing rate does not necessarily motivate the supplier to increase wholesale price. Most importantly, if the supplier’s markup is moderate, portfolio financing has value for both retailer and supplier, while solving the financing problems of both parties.

Future research can consider the explicit and implicit interest when supplier provides trade credit to retailer. It is also possible to consider the portfolio financing when multiple retailers are facing financial constraints.

It provides guidance for supply chain enterprises with financing needs, helping them find optimal decisions. With financial interest, enterprise income tax on the enterprises’ financing factors will produce a tax shield effect; thus, a cost–benefit analysis with the tax shield effect can provide more accurate picture when making corresponding decisions.

Government takes feasible adjustments of tax rate for the sake of motivation on financial SMEs tax shield. Furthermore, ABS calls for service from financial institutions, which will, in turn, expedite financial institutions revenue.

The authors provide insights on enterprise financing models, combining ABS with trade credit, expanding enterprise financing channels and enriching the theory of financial supply chain and supply chain management. The authors analyze in detail the influence of tax factors on enterprises by introducing tax factors into traditional process of enterprise operation and financing strategy.

This paper considers an e-tailer planning to distribute a product under one direct sales channel and multiple asymmetric agency platforms. Based on the multinomial logit (MNL) choice model, this study optimizes the pricing strategy and channel selection strategy to maximize the e-tailer’s profit.

A two-stage channel selection and pricing problem is formulated, where the profit-maximizing e-tailer first optimally selects a specified number of agency platforms from a set of alternatives to distribute the product and then determines the optimal prices in those channels.

An optimal pricing strategy is proposed to maximize the e-tailer’s total profit on multiple asymmetric channels. The results show that the e-tailer can obtain a higher profit by selling products on more asymmetric agency platforms. Moreover, an effective channel selection algorithm is provided to help the e-tailer optimally select the M agency platforms from N alternatives.

This study enriches the relevant research on multichannel selection and pricing by proposing an optimal pricing strategy and an effective channel selection algorithm. Evaluation results based on real-world industrial data show that the proposed optimal multichannel pricing strategy in this paper can significantly improve the profit of a real-world e-tailer compared to the e-tailer’s actual profit.

A tower crane mainly ensures the success or efficiency of building construction. Fatigue crack analysis is important for tower crane components to prevent any accidents to workers in construction sites caused by component failure and to ease the maintenance or replacement of failed components. This work aimed to characterise the damage of failed components, analyse the relationship between the metal magnetic memory (MMM) result and the damage of failed components, and to validate the relationship between MMM and finite element analysis (FEA).

MMM was used in this work to detect any irregularities or early failure on the basis of the high stress concentration zone of ferromagnetic steel using magnetic flux leakage. Magnetic flux leakage was used on the MMM device to achieve the first objective using the MMM system by detecting the irregularities. The results of MMM analysis were validated through comparison with FEA results by determining their relationship.

MMM results show that the position of defects on the tower crane pulley is within the stress area shown on FEA.

Hence, MMM method is a potential tool in monitoring failure mechanism in construction site.

This paper aims to introduce the history and major achievement of the Chinese private enterprise survey (CPES), which is one of the most enduring large-scale nationwide sample surveys in China, providing important micro firm-level data for understanding and studying the development of Chinese enterprises and entrepreneurs over the past 26 years.

The main body of this paper is based on a bibliometric analysis of all literature using CPES until 2017.

This paper discusses problems that users may encounter during data mining. By doing so, it can assist other researchers to get a better understanding of what has been done (e.g. journals, topics, scholars and institutions) and do their research in a more targeted way.

As members of the survey project team, the authors also take a prospect of the future data design and use, as well as offer some suggestions about how to use the CPES data to improve high-quality development and business environment evaluation in China.

This paper is the first to provide an overall picture of academic papers in China and abroad that have used the CPES data.

The Accounting Standards Board of Japan (ASBJ) proposed a new set of endorsed International Financial Reporting Standards in June 2015. ASBJ claims that non-recycling of other comprehensive income (OCI) items decreases the information usefulness of earnings in a proposed comprehensive income standard. There has been no existing empirical evidence which supports the ASBJ’s statement and the purpose of the study is to test whether OCI recycling improves information usefulness of net income from six perspectives: relative and incremental value relevance, persistence, variability, operating cash flow and net income predictive power.

This paper is an empirical work using a listed Japanese firms sample of 5,385 firm-years from fiscal year 2012-2014.

The results challenge the ASBJ’s claim that recycling improves the general information usefulness characteristics of net income. The empirical results show that OCI recycling improves net income’s relative value relevance characteristic of financial firms. However, recycling information by itself does not improve the incremental value relevance, and the predictive power of operating cash flow and net income. The authors also find that the inclusion of recycling decreases the persistence and increases the variability of net income.

This paper has two research limitations. First, this study is constrained to analyze a limited OCI recycling data that is recently disclosed by listed Japanese firms. Second, the results of this study have limited external validity to capital markets with OCI reclassification standards that deviate from Japanese GAAP.

This study provides initial empirical evidence that examines information usefulness of OCI recycling in Japan. The findings of this study are relevant for accounting standards setters aiming to increase the information usefulness of earnings for capital market investors.