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The offshore basins in the East Asian Continental Shelf have undergone distinct tectono-geomorphic-sedimentary evolution since the Neogene, driven by complex interactions between tectonic and surface Earth processes. However, the contribution of the latter to the evolution of the offshore basins has been less studied. The landscape simulation software Badlands serves as an ideal tool to investigate the impacts of tectonic and surface processes on sedimentation as it simulates the sediment routing in a source-to-sink context. Focusing on the southern East China Sea Basin (ECSB) and the northern South China Sea Shelf Basin (SCSSB), two key components of the East Asian Continental Shelf, we used Badlands to reconstruct the tectono-geomorphic-sedimentary evolution since the Neogene. It revealed two-phase evolutionary processes: (1) the southern ECSB and the northern SCSSB were in the unified shelf environment and represented as an integral during the Early Miocene, though the northern SCSSB experienced anomalous subsidence due to the southward jump of the SCS mid-ocean ridge. The integrated southern ECSB and northern SCSSB experienced uplift and denudation since the Middle Miocene, under the influence of the Philippine Sea Plate extrusion. (2) Subsequently, the southern ECSB and the northern SCSSB were separated into two independent basins in the Late Miocene, when Taiwan Island was significantly uplifted due to the Philippine Sea Plate extrusion and the arc-continental collision. Then Taiwan Island experienced a multi-stage uplift characterized by southward and westward migration. It concluded that tectonics (i.e. Taiwan Orogeny and the subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate) primarily dominated the differential evolution of the southern ECSB and the northern SCSSB. Surface Earth processes (i.e. the intensification of the East Asian Monsoon and the sea-level fluctuation) are the secondary contributors. • The southern ECSB and the northern SCSSB were an integral during the early Miocene. • The integral was divided into two independent basins due to Taiwan Orogeny. • Taiwan orogeny is characterized by diachronous westward and southward migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In construction industry, cost escalation is a major cause of project failure. The reason is that construction prices fluctuate over time and they are influenced by numerous factors. This study establishes a hybrid intelligence system, named as ELSVM, for modeling construction price variations quantified by the construction cost index (CCI). The proposed method is developed based on the fusion of Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) and Differential Evolution (DE). LS-SVM is used for mining the mapping function between CCI and its causative input factors. Meanwhile, DE is employed to optimize LS-SVM tuning parameters. In this research, a database consisting of 122 historical cases was collected to establish the intelligence system. Based on experimental results, ELSVM can successfully model CCI fluctuations since it has achieved a comparatively low MAPE which is less than 1%. Thus, the proposed system can be a promising tool to assist decision-makers in construction management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a variable scaling hybrid differential evolution (VSHDE) for solving the economic dispatch (ED) problem in large-scale systems. Different from the hybrid differential evolution (HDE), the concept of a variable scaling factor is used in the VSHDE method. The variable scaling factor based on 1/5 success rule of evolution strategies (ESs) is used to overcome the drawback of the fixed and random scaling factor used in the HDE method. One 15-unit system from the literature and one practical economic dispatch system of Taiwan power company (TPC) are used to compare the performance of the proposed method with HDE, genetic algorithms (GAs) and simulated annealing (SA). Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than the other methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]