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1 – 10 of 18The paper examines how local governments’ responses to citizens’ complaints about environment issues are affected when the complaints involve conflicting goals, particularly…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper examines how local governments’ responses to citizens’ complaints about environment issues are affected when the complaints involve conflicting goals, particularly economic versus environmental goals. This study focuses on the responsiveness of provincial governments to citizen environmental complaints on the Local Leader Message Board (LLMB) in China.
Design/methodology/approach
This study collected 125,364 environment-related complaints lodged by citizens on the LLMB from 2013 to 2021 and identified complaints embodying conflicting goals through a Structural Topic Model (STM). Advanced supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms were employed to enhance the robustness of the findings.
Findings
The results indicate that provincial governments prioritize citizens’ complaints across different types of issues. However, complaints embodying conflicting goals (related to environmental issues) are less likely to get a response. This relationship is moderated by an inverted U-shaped effect of economic dependence on industries. This suggests that the impact of conflicting goals on government responsiveness is dynamic, with the likelihood of provincial governments responding to conflicting complaints initially increasing and then decreasing as economic dependence on industries rises.
Originality/value
The findings enrich the understanding of the consequences of conflicting goals by highlighting their potential as a mechanism to explain the strategic reactions of governments to citizens.
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Keywords
Xinghua Shan, Xiaoyan Lv, Jinfei Wu, Shuo Zhao and Junfeng Zhang
Revenue management (RM) is a significant technique to improve revenue with limited resources. With the macro environment of dramatically increasing transit capacity and rapid…
Abstract
Purpose
Revenue management (RM) is a significant technique to improve revenue with limited resources. With the macro environment of dramatically increasing transit capacity and rapid railway transport development in China, it is necessary to involve the theory of RM into the operation and decision of railway passenger transport.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes the theory and framework of generalized RM of railway passenger transport (RMRPT), and the thoughts and methods of the main techniques in RMRPT, involving demand forecasting, line planning, inventory control, pricing strategies and information systems, are all studied and elaborated. The involved methods and techniques provide a sequential process to help with the decision-making for each stage of RMRPT. The corresponding techniques are integrated into the information system to support practical businesses in railway passenger transport.
Findings
The combination of the whole techniques devotes to railway benefit improvement and transit resource utilization and has been applied into the practical operation and organization of railway passenger transport.
Originality/value
The development of RMRPT would provide theoretical and technical support for the improvement of service quality as well as railway benefits and efficiency.
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Keywords
Yandong Hou, Zhengbo Wu, Xinghua Ren, Kaiwen Liu and Zhengquan Chen
High-resolution remote sensing images possess a wealth of semantic information. However, these images often contain objects of different sizes and distributions, which make the…
Abstract
Purpose
High-resolution remote sensing images possess a wealth of semantic information. However, these images often contain objects of different sizes and distributions, which make the semantic segmentation task challenging. In this paper, a bidirectional feature fusion network (BFFNet) is designed to address this challenge, which aims at increasing the accurate recognition of surface objects in order to effectively classify special features.
Design/methodology/approach
There are two main crucial elements in BFFNet. Firstly, the mean-weighted module (MWM) is used to obtain the key features in the main network. Secondly, the proposed polarization enhanced branch network performs feature extraction simultaneously with the main network to obtain different feature information. The authors then fuse these two features in both directions while applying a cross-entropy loss function to monitor the network training process. Finally, BFFNet is validated on two publicly available datasets, Potsdam and Vaihingen.
Findings
In this paper, a quantitative analysis method is used to illustrate that the proposed network achieves superior performance of 2–6%, respectively, compared to other mainstream segmentation networks from experimental results on two datasets. Complete ablation experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the elements in the network. In summary, BFFNet has proven to be effective in achieving accurate identification of small objects and in reducing the effect of shadows on the segmentation process.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper is the proposal of a BFFNet based on multi-scale and multi-attention strategies to improve the ability to accurately segment high-resolution and complex remote sensing images, especially for small objects and shadow-obscured objects.
Details
Keywords
Jiuli Yin, Qing Ding and Xinghua Fan
Reductions in emissions intensity have been expressed in commitments of many countries’ intended nationally determined contribution. Energy structure adjustment is one of the main…
Abstract
Purpose
Reductions in emissions intensity have been expressed in commitments of many countries’ intended nationally determined contribution. Energy structure adjustment is one of the main approaches to reduce carbon emissions. This paper aims to study the causal relationship between carbon emission intensity and energy consumption structure in China based on path analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
After data collection, this paper performs correlation analysis, regression and path analysis.
Findings
Correlation results display clear collinearity among energy structure variables. Regression finds that coal, oil, natural gas and technology can be used as indicators for carbon intensity while primary electricity has been excluded. Path analysis shows that coal had the largest direct and positive impact on emission intensity. Natural gas had a positive direct and negative indirect effect through its negative relationship with coal on emission intensity. Technology has the largest negative elasticity while all fossil energies are positive. Results indicate a negative effect of energy structure adjustment on China’s national carbon intensity.
Originality/value
Given the major role of China in global climate change mitigation, significant future reductions in China’s CO2 emissions will require transformation toward low-carbon energy systems. Considering the important role in mitigating global climate change, China needs to transition toward a low-carbon energy system to significantly reduce its carbon intensity in the future.
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Keywords
Shuting Fang, Xiang Ji, Xinghua Ji and Jie Wu
The purpose of this paper is to develop a suitable framework of sustainable urbanization performance evaluation from the view of efficiency for mitigating the unbalance between…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a suitable framework of sustainable urbanization performance evaluation from the view of efficiency for mitigating the unbalance between the theoretical research of sustainable urbanization and the practical need of sustainable urbanization.
Design/methodology/approach
A slack-restricted slack-based measure data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and two sustainable urbanization benchmarking methods with individual and centralized view, respectively, are developed based upon the classical DEA theory.
Findings
The empirical results show that China is now suffering a relatively low level of sustainable urbanization. Too much waste water emission, too small an urban population proportion, and too much resource wastage are the major factors that drive China’s urbanization away from sustainability.
Originality/value
Having the overall aim of practical urbanization, the proposed framework can help stakeholders recognize different sustainable urbanization performance levels by offering them accurate sustainable urbanization performance scores. The framework can also direct governments to improve the sustainable urbanization performance. The empirical analysis of China’s provincial region sustainable urbanization performance with the proposed framework further demonstrates the theoretical and practical value of this research.
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Muhammad Yasir Faheem, Muhammad Basit Azeem, Abid Ali Minhas, Shun'an Zhong and Xinghua Wang
RF transceiver module is considered a vital part of any wireless communication system. This module consists of two important parts the RF transceiver and analog-to-digital…
Abstract
Purpose
RF transceiver module is considered a vital part of any wireless communication system. This module consists of two important parts the RF transceiver and analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Usually, both these parts – RF transceiver and ADC – are used to enhance the perspective of size and power. The data processing in 4G communication makes hurdles and need research attention to make it faster and smaller in size. Accuracy and fast processing are the critical challenges in the modern communication system.
Design/methodology/approach
After theoretical and practical investigations, this research work proposes key new techniques for the RF transceiver module. These techniques will make RF transceiver small, power-efficient and on the other hand, make dual SAR-ADC more effective as well. The proposed design has no intermediate frequency where the RF transceiver is reduced its major blocks from five to four, which includes crystal oscillator, phase lock loop, power amplifier and low noise amplifier. Moreover, the shared circuitry is introduced in the architecture of the SAR-ADC for the production of dual outputs, specifically in bootstrapped switch and comparator.
Findings
The miniaturized RF transceiver and SAR-ADC are well tested separately before the plantation on the printed circuit board (PCB). The operating voltage and frequency of the RF transceiver module are 1.2 V and 5.8 GHz, where the sampling rate, bandwidth and output power are 25 MHz, 200 MHz and 5 dBm, respectively. The core area of the PCB is 58.13 mm2. The bandwidth efficiency is 93% using surface acoustic wave less transmitter. The circuit is based on the library of 90 nm CMOS technology.
Originality/value
The entire circuit is highly synchronized with the input and reference clocks to avoid self-interference.
Details
Keywords
BinBin Zhang, Fumin Zhang and Xinghua Qu
Laser-based measurement techniques offer various advantages over conventional measurement techniques, such as no-destructive, no-contact, fast and long measuring distance. In…
Abstract
Purpose
Laser-based measurement techniques offer various advantages over conventional measurement techniques, such as no-destructive, no-contact, fast and long measuring distance. In cooperative laser ranging systems, it’s crucial to extract center coordinates of retroreflectors to accomplish automatic measurement. To solve this problem, this paper aims to propose a novel method.
Design/methodology/approach
We propose a method using Mask RCNN (Region Convolutional Neural Network), with ResNet101 (Residual Network 101) and FPN (Feature Pyramid Network) as the backbone, to localize retroreflectors, realizing automatic recognition in different backgrounds. Compared with two other deep learning algorithms, experiments show that the recognition rate of Mask RCNN is better especially for small-scale targets. Based on this, an ellipse detection algorithm is introduced to obtain the ellipses of retroreflectors from recognized target areas. The center coordinates of retroreflectors in the camera coordinate system are obtained by using a mathematics method.
Findings
To verify the accuracy of this method, an experiment was carried out: the distance between two retroreflectors with a known distance of 1,000.109 mm was measured, with 2.596 mm root-mean-squar error, meeting the requirements of the coarse location of retroreflectors.
Research limitations/implications
The research limitations/implications are as follows: (i) As the data set only has 200 pictures, although we have used some data augmentation methods such as rotating, mirroring and cropping, there is still room for improvement in the generalization ability of detection. (ii) The ellipse detection algorithm needs to work in relatively dark conditions, as the retroreflector is made of stainless steel, which easily reflects light.
Originality/value
The originality/value of the article lies in being able to obtain center coordinates of multiple retroreflectors automatically even in a cluttered background; being able to recognize retroreflectors with different sizes, especially for small targets; meeting the recognition requirement of multiple targets in a large field of view and obtaining 3 D centers of targets by monocular model-based vision.
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Yingying Su, Taifu Li, Debiao Wang and Xinghua Liu
For many optimization problems such as optimal techniques, compositions, producing process, the optimizing objectives in systems are complex relations with respect to a great deal…
Abstract
Purpose
For many optimization problems such as optimal techniques, compositions, producing process, the optimizing objectives in systems are complex relations with respect to a great deal of parameters. Generally, the objective function is hardly obtained, even the searching objective is unquantifiable. So it is difficult to model and optimize the complex systems to some extent.
Design/methodology/approach
To the above purpose, a novel approach is presented in this paper. It firstly utilizes the excellent fitting performance of neural network (NN) combined with expert knowledge (EK) to obtain the objective function, and secondly searches the optimal influential parameters with genetic algorithm (GA).
Findings
Peaks function inside Matlab and the acural application of comprehensive performance optimization in analog PID control system are studied, respectively. The results of simulation and the actual experiment both show that the modeling and optimizing method presented in the paper are effective.
Research limitations/implications
Expert knowledge is needed for the fuzzy/unquantifiable objective.
Practical implications
The paper presents a useful way to model and optimize complex systems.
Originality/value
The combined approach based on NN, EK and GA is firstly presented and is effectively used in modeling and optimizing complex systems.
Details
Keywords
Sensen Hu, Jingyi Lu, Xinghong Qin and Shahnawaz Talpur
As a potentially disruptive technology, blockchain technology ensures that all the data cannot be merely tampered with once they are recorded on-chain. However, the fake source…
Abstract
Purpose
As a potentially disruptive technology, blockchain technology ensures that all the data cannot be merely tampered with once they are recorded on-chain. However, the fake source information may be input into the blockchain, which is mistaken for truthful data and results in a trust divide between the on-chain and the actual world. One missing perspective from previous studies is information manipulation at the source still exists under the blockchain mode. The authors’ goal was to analyze how blockchain technology affects the information deception of the agricultural product supply chain (APSC) under this premise. Also, the authors further analyzed some factors that influence the effectiveness of blockchain technology.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors build an APSC game model consisting of a farmer and an agricultural product broker, which employs the principal–agent game model to explore the conditions for achieving the mutual trust equilibrium between the two parts. Then, through numerical simulation, the authors further analyze how the quality of on-chain information and the numbers of on-chain firms affect blockchain’s effect on deception in APSC and examine the circumstances in which blockchain technology is more suitable.
Findings
The authors demonstrate that only by meeting the threshold of high-quality on-chain information and having a sufficient number of on-chain firms, can the blockchain-based supply chain initiate a better information ecosystem, which helps eradicate deception in the APSC.
Originality/value
This paper provides valuable insights for participants in supply chains as well as is probably generalizable to other industrial products that require similar services in the early stage of blockchain.
Details