Hongwei Zhu, Zhiqiang Lu, Chenyao Lu and Yifei Ren
To meet the requirement of establishing an effective schedule for the assembly process with overall detection and rework, this paper aims to address a new problem named…
Abstract
Purpose
To meet the requirement of establishing an effective schedule for the assembly process with overall detection and rework, this paper aims to address a new problem named resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem based on detection and rework (RCMPSP-DR).
Design/methodology/approach
First, to satisfy both online and offline scheduling, a mixed integer programming model is established with a weighted bi-objective minimizing the expected makespan and the solution robustness. Second, an algorithm that combines a tabu search framework with a critical chain-based baseline generation scheme is designed. The tabu search framework focuses on searching for a reasonable resource flow representing the execution sequence of activities, while the critical chain-based baseline generation scheme establishes a buffered baseline schedule by estimating the tradeoff between two aspects of bi-objective.
Findings
The proposed algorithm can get solutions with gaps from −4.45% to 2.33% when compared with those obtained by the commercial MIP solver CPLEX. Moreover, the algorithm outperforms four other algorithms in terms of both objective performance and stability over instances with different weighting parameters, which reveals its effectiveness.
Originality/value
The represented RCMPSP-DR considering the overall detection and rework is an extension of the scheduling problem for large-scale equipment. An effective algorithm is proposed to establish the baseline schedule and determine the execution sequence of activities for the assembly process, which is significant for practical engineering applications.
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Yu Zhu, Jun Yang, Hongwei Zhang, Wenmin Zhu, Jie Wang and Zelin Zhou
Marking and inspecting are key steps in hull structure construction. However, currently most marking and inspecting operations are still carried out manually, which leads to low…
Abstract
Purpose
Marking and inspecting are key steps in hull structure construction. However, currently most marking and inspecting operations are still carried out manually, which leads to low assembly efficiency and quality. This paper aims to solve these problems through the application of digital technology: the optical projection and machine vision.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the assembly process model of hull construction is established in 3D design environment. Second, the process information is presented to workers in a virtual form through optical projector, which provides accurate guidance for the manual operation. On this basis, the workers can complete welding and assembly operations readily. Finally, the machine vision method is used to check the assembly results, which can decrease the subjective errors.
Findings
A rapid and accurate assembly positioning for hull structure construction is realized based on optical projection, which can avoid the pollution caused by the marking machine and the error caused by human.
Originality/value
This paper combines the advantages of optical projection and machine vision to the field of shipbuilding. The shortcomings of the traditional marking and inspection methods is effectively solved, which may provide a new way for enhancing the assembly efficiency and quality.
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Meihua Zuo, Hongwei Liu, Hui Zhu and Hongming Gao
The purpose of this paper is to identify potential competitive relationships among brands by analyzing the dynamic clicking behavior of consumers.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify potential competitive relationships among brands by analyzing the dynamic clicking behavior of consumers.
Design/methodology/approach
Consumer sequential online click data, collected from JD.com, is used to analyze the dynamic competitive relationship between brands. It is found that the competition intensity across categories of products can differ considerably. Consumers exhibit big differences in purchasing time of durable-like goods, that is, the purchasing probability of such products changes considerably over time. The local polynomial regression model (LPRM) is used to analyze the relationship between brand competition of durable-like goods and the purchasing probability of a particular brand.
Findings
The statistical results of collective behaviors show that there is a 90/10 rule for the category durable-like goods, implying that ten percent of the brands account for 90 percent market share in terms of both clicking and purchasing behavior. The dynamic brand cognitive process of impulsive consumers displays an inverted V shape, while cautious consumers display a double V shaped cognitive process. The dynamic consumers’ cognition illustrates that when the brands capture a half of the click volume, the brands’ competitiveness reaches to its peak and makes no significant different from brands accounting for 100 percent of the click volume in terms of the purchasing probability.
Research limitations/implications
There are some limitations to the research, including the limitations imposed by the data set. One of the most serious problems in the data set is that the collected click-stream is desensitized severely, restricting the richness of the conclusions of this study. Second, the data set consists of many other consumer behavioral data, but only the consumer’s clicking behavior is analyzed in this study. Therefore, in future research, the parameters brand browsing by consumers and the time of browsing in each brand should be added as indicators of brand competitive intensity.
Practical implications
The authors study brand competitiveness by analyzing the relationship between the click rate and the purchase likelihood of individual brands for durable-like products. When the brand competitiveness is less than 50 percent, consumers tend to seek a variety of new brands, and their purchase likelihood is positively correlated with the brand competitiveness. Once consumers learn about a particular brand excessively among all other brands at a period of time, the purchase likelihood of its products decreases due to the thinner consumer’s short-term loyalty the brand. Till the brand competitiveness runs up to 100 percent, consumers are most likely to purchase a brand and its product. That indicates brand competitiveness maintain 50 percent of the whole market is most efficient to be profitable, and the performance of costing more to improve the brand competitiveness might make no difference.
Originality/value
There are many studies on brand competition, but most of these research works analyze the brand’s marketing strategy from the perspective of the company. The limitation of this research is that the data are historical and failure to reflect time-variant competition. Some researchers have studied brand competition through consumer behavior, but the shortcoming of these studies is that it does not consider sequentiality of consumer behavior as this study does. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by using consumers’ sequential clicking behavior and expands the perspective of brand competition research from the angle of consumers. Simultaneously, this paper uses the LPRM to analyze the relationship between consumer clicking behavior and brand competition for the first time, and expands the methodology accordingly.
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Mingjun Zhan, Hongming Gao, Hongwei Liu, Yidan Peng, Dan Lu and Hui Zhu
The objective of this paper is to propose a consumer-behavior-based intelligence (CBBI) model to identify market structure so as to monitor product competition. Competitive…
Abstract
Purpose
The objective of this paper is to propose a consumer-behavior-based intelligence (CBBI) model to identify market structure so as to monitor product competition. Competitive intelligence extracted from Chinese e-business clickstream data is exploited to examine the relevance of consumers' heterogeneous behavioral feedback, namely, click, tag-into-favorite, time-of-browsing, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart, to visualize the competitive product market structure and to predict product-level sales.
Design/methodology/approach
Our proposed CBBI model consists of visualization and prediction, which explore e-business clickstream data. We conduct the visualization and segmentation of market structure in the form of a perceptual map by employing K-means clustering algorithm and multidimensional scaling technique. Concurrently, we developed an updated Bayesian linear regression (BLR) to predict product-level sales by considering consumers' heterogeneous feedback. Our updated BLR specifically integrated the estimated knowledge of the previous periods to verify whether product sales are period-dependent due to the consumer memory effect in e-commerce, improving the conventional BLR of diffuse prior distribution setup in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE).
Findings
Considering the performance of consumers' heterogeneous actions, the present research visualized three different segments of the competitive market structure in a perceptual map, and its horizontal axis is shown as a signal of the ascending trend of product sales. The previous five-day period was ascertained to be the best size of a time window for the consumer memory effect on product sales prediction. This hypothesis is supported by the concept that product sales are period-dependent. The results of the proposed updated BLR indicate that consumer tag-into-favorite, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart feedback have positive impacts on product-level sales while click and time-of-browsing have the opposite effect.
Originality/value
While the identified competitive product market structure elaborates consumer heterogeneous feedback toward alternative product choices, this paper contributes by extending those homogeneous consumer preferences-related marketing studies. The perceptual map's configuration in respect to period-dependent product sales facilitates the effective inclusion of consumer behavior application in product sales prediction research in e-commerce. This paper helps sellers and retailers better comprehend the impacts of heterogeneous feedback and the consumer memory effect on the degree of competition in the form of product sales. The research results also offer a managerial implication about shaping the competitive edge by conducting different product management strategies in e-commerce platforms.
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Bo Zeng, Hongwei Liu, Hongzhou Song, Zhe Zhao, Shaowei Fan, Li Jiang, Yuan Liu, Zhiyuan Yu, Xiaorong Zhu, Jing Chen and Ting Zhang
The purpose of this paper is to design a multi-sensory anthropomorphic prosthetic hand and a grasping controller that can detect the slip and automatically adjust the grasping…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to design a multi-sensory anthropomorphic prosthetic hand and a grasping controller that can detect the slip and automatically adjust the grasping force to prevent the slip.
Design/methodology/approach
To improve the dexterity, sensing, controllability and practicability of a prosthetic hand, a modular and multi-sensory prosthetic hand was presented. In addition, a slip prevention control based on the tactile feedback was proposed to improve the grasp stability. The proposed controller identifies slippages through detecting the high-frequency vibration signal at the sliding surface in real time and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) was used to extract the eigenvalues to identify slippages. Once the slip is detected, a direct-feedback method of adjusting the grasp force related with the sliding times was used to prevent it. Furthermore, the stiffness of different objects was estimated and used to improve the grasp force control. The performances of the stiffness estimation, slip detection and slip control are experimentally evaluated.
Findings
It was found from the experiment of stiffness estimation that the accuracy rate of identification of the hard metal bottle could reach to 90%, while the accuracy rate of identification of the plastic bottles could reach to 80%. There was a small misjudgment rate in the identification of hard and soft plastic bottles. The stiffness of soft plastic bottles, hard plastic bottles and metal bottles were 0.64 N/mm, 1.36 N/mm and 32.55 N/mm, respectively. The results of slip detection and control show that the proposed prosthetic hand with a slip prevention controller can fast and effectively detect and prevent the slip for different disturbances, which has a certain application prospect.
Practical implications
Due to the small size, low weight, high integration and modularity, the prosthetic hand is easily applied to upper-limb amputees. Meanwhile, the method of the slip prevention control can be used for upper-limb amputees to complete more tasks stably in daily lives.
Originality/value
A multi-sensory anthropomorphic prosthetic hand is designed, and a method of stable grasps control based on slip detection by a tactile sensor on the fingertip is proposed. The method combines the stiffness estimation of the object and the real-time slip detection based on DWT with the design of the proportion differentiation robust controller based on a disturbance observer and the force controller to achieve slip prevention and stable grasps. It is verified effectively by the experiments and is easy to be applied to commercial prostheses.
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Wenfu Wang, Dongsheng Zhang, Hongwei Wang, Qingxiang Zhu and Hakimeh Morabbi Heravi
To attain green economic efficiency, small, micro and medium-sized firms must follow environmental paradigms. This research aims to discover the relationship between green…
Abstract
Purpose
To attain green economic efficiency, small, micro and medium-sized firms must follow environmental paradigms. This research aims to discover the relationship between green intellectual capital, green entrepreneurial orientation, green marketing, green organizational culture and competitive advantage strategies to attain sustainable manufacturing business success.
Design/methodology/approach
Today, many companies have accepted their responsibilities, that their operations should not harm the environment. This paper aims to discover the relationship between green factors and competitive advantage strategies to succeed in sustainable manufacturing. The employees of the large manufacturing firms in China are the sample population of the present investigation. Through simple random sampling, surveys were distributed via email. The present study was a quantitative analysis. The analytical tool utilized here was structural equation modeling and SmartPLS program applications.
Findings
The empirical outcomes find that green intellectual capital positively influences competitive advantages and sustainable success in business. In addition, the impact of green entrepreneurial orientation on competitive advantages and sustainable success is positive and significant. The findings illustrated that green marketing is an essential factor in competitive advantage and sustainable success in business. Another point is that green organizational culture positively affects competitive advantages and sustainable success. Finally, competitive advantages have significantly affected sustainable success in business.
Practical implications
The outcomes help specialists enhance their practices to reflect sustainable business efficiency and competitive advantages.
Originality/value
This is the first study that examined businesses' sustainable success and green factors in a comprehensive model and using a specific sample of manufacturing companies based on green technologies.
Details
Keywords
Bao Dai, Ahsan Ali and Hongwei Wang
Grounded on the cognition–affect–conation (C–A–C) framework, this study aims to explore how perceived information overload affects the information avoidance intention of social…
Abstract
Purpose
Grounded on the cognition–affect–conation (C–A–C) framework, this study aims to explore how perceived information overload affects the information avoidance intention of social media users through fatigue, frustration and dissatisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach/methodology/approach
A quantitative research design is adopted. The data collected from 254 respondents in China are analyzed via structural equation modeling (SEM).
Findings
Perceived information overload directly affects fatigue, frustration and dissatisfaction among social media users, thereby affecting their information avoidance intention. In addition, frustration significantly affects social media fatigue and dissatisfaction. Consequently, social media fatigue influences dissatisfaction among users.
Originality/value
The literature review indicates that social media overload and fatigue yield negative behavioral outcomes, including discontinuance. However, rather than completely abstaining or escaping, social media users adopt moderate strategies, including information avoidance, to cope with overload and fatigue owing to their high dependence on social media. Unfortunately, merely few studies are available on the information avoidance behavior of social media users. Focusing on this line of research, the current study develops a model to investigate the antecedents of information avoidance in social media.
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Hongwei Tang, Jing Wang, Nannan Sun and Jianrong Zhu
The influence of the cam angular speed on the pressure, film thickness and temperature profiles at some selected angular positions together with the oil characteristics are…
Abstract
Purpose
The influence of the cam angular speed on the pressure, film thickness and temperature profiles at some selected angular positions together with the oil characteristics are investigated.
Design/methodology/approach
A high-order polynomial cam is used, and thermal elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) calculations are carried out by the multi-grid method and line-line scanning technique.
Findings
It is found that the film thickness decreases with a decrease in angular speed. The depth of the dimple that occurred in the reverse motion is also reduced because of the recession in the “temperature–viscosity wedge” effect.
Originality/value
It is revealed that the reduction in the cam angular speed makes the classical big surface dimple evolve into a small centralized dimple during the opposite sliding motion.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2019-0327
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Jincheng Tang, Yongqi Xie, Jianqin Zhu, Xianwei Wang, Siyuan Liu, JianZu Yu and Hongwei Wu
The purpose of this paper is to numerically and experimentally evaluate the effect of the protection net icing on the inlet performance of helicopter engines.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to numerically and experimentally evaluate the effect of the protection net icing on the inlet performance of helicopter engines.
Design/methodology/approach
The ice shapes of the protection net at different times are first simulated by a two-dimensional (2D) icing calculation, then the porous media parameters are calculated based on the 2D ice shapes. Afterward, three-dimensional flow fields of the engine inlet with the iced net are simulated using the porous media model instead of the real protection net. The transient pressure losses of the iced protection net are calculated and tested through an icing wind tunnel test rig under different icing conditions.
Findings
Overall, the numerical results and experimental data show a good agreement. The effects of several control parameters, such as liquid water contents (LWC), water droplet diameters and airflow velocities on the pressure loss of the protection net during the icing process are analyzed in a systematic manner. The results indicate that the pressure loss increases with the increase of the LWC at the same icing time. The same trend occurs when the water droplet diameter and the airflow velocity increase.
Originality/value
A new method to predict the pressure loss of the iced protection net is proposed. A series of tests in an icing wind tunnel are performed to obtain the ice shapes and pressure loss of protection net during the icing process.
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Lawrence Hoc Nang Fong, Hongwei He, Melody Manchi Chao, Galli Leandro and David King
The purpose of this study is to understand Chinese consumers’ responses to ethnically tailored hotel services from the theoretical perspective of cultural essentialism.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand Chinese consumers’ responses to ethnically tailored hotel services from the theoretical perspective of cultural essentialism.
Design/methodology/approach
Data collection was conducted through an online survey with Chinese respondents. Hierarchical moderated regression was performed to analyze the data.
Findings
The results show a positive relationship between cultural essentialism and consumer responses to hotel services that are tailored to their culture. Furthermore, the findings show that prior service satisfaction does not only positively influence the consumer responses, but also amplifies the link between cultural essentialism and the consumer responses.
Practical implications
Hoteliers are recommended to consider the cultural essentialism of Chinese consumers when adaptive services are introduced. Hotel services that are tailored to Chinese culture is a viable strategy if most Chinese customers are cultural essentialists.
Originality/value
This study adds knowledge to the hospitality scholarship by introducing cultural essentialism and demonstrating its role in influencing consumer preferences for familiarity as opposed to exotic hotel services. Furthermore, the moderating role of service satisfaction extends the consumer behavior literature.