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The goal of making buy-in decisions is to purchase materials at the right time with the required quantity and a minimum material cost (MC). To help achieve this goal, the purpose of this paper is to find a way of optimizing the buy-in decision with the consideration of flexible starting date of non-critical activities which makes daily demand adjustable.

First, a specific algorithm is developed to calculate a series of demand combinations modeling daily material demand for all the possible start dates. Second, future material prices are predicted by applying artificial neural network. Third, the demand combinations and predicted prices are used to generate an optimal buy-in decision.

By comparing MC in situation when non-critical activities always start at the earliest date to that in situations when the starting date is flexible, it is found that making material buy-in decision with the consideration of the flexibility usually helps reduce MC.

In this paper, a material buy-in decision-making method that accounts non-critical activities’ flexible starting date is proposed. A ternary cycle algorithm is developed to calculate demand combinations. The results that making material buy-in decision considering non-critical activities’ flexible starting date can reduce MC in most times indicates that contractors may consider non-critical activities’ flexibility a part of the buy-in decision-making process, so as to achieve an MC decrease and profit increase.

The purpose of this study is to illuminate financial commitment of a firm vis-a-vis corporate behavior of 519 reported fabric businesses in G-20 states. This study also aims to take into account the regional baseline comparisons (i.e. subsampling) of G-20 firms based on the available data. The pattern of the current study comes from the registered companies in the G-20 states. For the fabricating business, the 2007–2018 annual financial statements are obtained from the Thomson Reuters Data Stream and World Stock Exchange.

For the investigation, the panel data were analyzed from the period 2007–2018 by applying summary statistics of ordinary least square, correlation matrix and generalized method of moments.

The findings of this study suggest that Ln assets, dividends and investments have a positive association with the debt level. In addition, profitability and working capital were negatively associated with change in total debt under pecking order theory.

The effects of the geographical location of the firms and current global economic downturn were accounted for the capital structure decisions and corporate performance of G-20 firms.

This study instigates observed phenomenon elicited from capital structure theory by applying analytical method, instead of describing them in terms of administrative selection, taking measure and chief financial officers risk preference. Finally, work is required to form new hypothesis and explore novel factors that could enrich academic scholars’ motivation.

In the digital age, personalized services and accurate recommendations enhance the customer experience and streamline shopping. However, increasing concerns about personal privacy have led to resistance from consumers, necessitating a balance between providing high-quality online services and safeguarding personal data. The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive review of the fragmented literature on consumer privacy decision-making and to identify key issues worth exploring in future research.

Although previous studies have analyzed the antecedents and outcomes of privacy decisions, they have often been conducted in a fragmented manner. There remains a lack of a holistic understanding of the factors influencing privacy decisions, including their boundaries. Therefore, we build on the Theory of Planned Behavior to combine consumer privacy decision-making with a graphically conceptual framework used in a similar scoping methodology. We attempt to dissect the antecedent, moderator and outcome variables that influence consumer privacy decision-making, ultimately providing a comprehensive framework for understanding these dynamics.

Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we analyze the entire process of consumer privacy decision-making in terms of antecedent, moderating and outcome variables. The results indicate that consumer privacy decision-making is not an isolated behavior or a single choice but a complex, multi-level dynamic process. The factors influencing consumer privacy decisions primarily encompass five aspects: individual characteristics, information, organization, platform and interaction management, leading to various outcomes in both behavioral and perceptual dimensions. Furthermore, the process is constrained by multiple moderating variables, such as information sensitivity, platform knowledge and prior experience.

We build on the Theory of Planned Behavior to combine consumer privacy decision-making with a graphically conceptual framework used in a similar scoping methodology. We dissect the antecedent, moderator and outcome variables that influence consumer privacy decision-making, aiming to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding these processes.

The framework, panorama, related applications and development of pansystems thinking are introduced and some problems concerning generalized systems, derivatives, symmetry and quantification are investigated, a sort of difference‐identity theory within the framework of pansystems thinking is cultivated, and a new type of clustering method with many intertransformations among some important pansystems concepts is presented. Related contents include: pansystems combination of mathematics, systems, dialectics and poetry thinking, methodology to comprehend laws by pansymmetries or by moving networks, the pansystems views of generalized order, quotientization and series‐parallel relations, control‐reachability, duality transformation, discoupling principle, communication theorems, general parental relations, etc.

This study aims to investigate the satisfaction of farmers with the compensation policy for wildlife-caused damages and its influencing factors, analyze the current situation of satisfaction with the compensation policy among farmers, identify factors significantly affecting satisfaction, and explore ways to optimize the compensation policy and improve the satisfaction of farmers based on the effects of various influencing factors.

The Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Yunnan Province, China, is selected as the research area for the study. Through field interviews, 370 valid questionnaires were collected to obtain relevant data on farmers' satisfaction with the compensation policy for wildlife-caused damages. The Oprobit model is utilized to explore the factors influencing farmer satisfaction and to analyze their underlying reasons.

The study reveals that farmers in the communities surrounding the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve generally experience low satisfaction with the compensation policy, particularly concerning satisfaction with compensation amounts, which tends to be dissatisfied on average. Satisfaction with the compensation policy is significantly influenced by individual characteristics and household labor structure, while the degree of human-wildlife conflict, wildlife conservation attitudes and household income structure have insignificant impact. Among individual characteristics, gender, education level, health status, and ethnicity are highly significant. In household labor structure, the number of agricultural laborers, non-agricultural laborers, and household agricultural labor time are highly significant.

Building on the overall satisfaction of farmers with the compensation policy, this study further decomposes policy satisfaction into satisfaction with compensation amounts, coverage, and procedures. It provides more targeted recommendations for enhancing satisfaction with the compensation policy, which can help effectively mitigate human-wildlife conflicts and achieve harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.

This paper aims to comprehensively review the preparation methods of superhydrophobic surfaces (SHPS) for corrosion protection of Mg alloy in recent years.

The preparation methods, wettability and corrosion resistance of SHPS on Mg alloy in the past three years are systematically described in this paper.

Two types of SHPS, including single-layer and multilayer coatings for corrosion protection of Mg alloy are summarized. Preparing multilayered coatings with multifunction is the current trend in developing SHPS on Mg alloy.

This paper reviewed the preparation methods and corrosion resistance of SHPS on Mg alloys. It provides a valuable reference for researchers to develop highly durable SHPS with excellent corrosion resistance for Mg alloys.

A robotic wheelchair system was designed to assist disabled people with disabilities to walk.

An anticipated sharing control strategy based on topological map is proposed in this paper, which is used to assist robotic wheelchairs to realize interactive navigation. Then, a robotic wheelchair navigation control system based on the brain-computer interface and topological map was designed and implemented.

In the field of robotic wheelchairs, the problems of poor use, narrow application range and low humanization are still not improved.

In the system, the topological map construction is not restricted by the environment structure, which helps to expand the scope of application; the shared control system can predict the users’ intention and replace the users’ decision to realize human-machine interactive navigation, which has higher security, robustness and comfort.

In corridor environments, human-following robot encounter difficulties when the target turning around at the corridor intersections, as walls may cause complete occlusion. This paper aims to propose a collision-free following system for robot to track humans in corridors without a prior map.

In addition to following a target and avoiding collisions robustly, the proposed system calculates the positions of walls in the environment in real-time. This allows the system to maintain a stable tracking of the target even if it is obscured after turning. The proposed solution is integrated into a four-wheeled differential drive mobile robot to follow a target in a corridor environment in real-world.

The experimental results demonstrate that the robot equipped with the proposed system is capable of avoiding obstacles and following a human target robustly in the corridors. Moreover, the robot achieves a 90% success rate in maintaining a stable tracking of the target after the target turns around a corner with high speed.

This paper proposes a human target following system incorporating three novel features: a path planning method based on wall positions is introduced to ensure stable tracking of the target even when it is obscured due to target turns; improvements are made to the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, enhancing its accuracy in calculating wall positions. The system is integrated into a four-wheeled differential drive mobile robot effectively demonstrates its remarkable robustness and real-time performance.