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We introduce an original concept of the backroom effect for perishable products when the deterioration rate in a backroom is lower than that on retail shelves. With IoT-generated real-time informat...

Intelligent transformation of manufacturers requires smart logistics transformation collaboration, which improves competitiveness. In this study, we construct a Stackelberg game model based on the mutual influence and restriction in the relationship between a manufacturer and a logistics service provider (LSP) undergoing smart logistics transformation. We investigate whether cost-sharing (CS) or revenue-sharing (RS) contracts can coordinate the supply chain and suggest a hybrid CS-RS contract to improve performance. We find that, compared with decentralized options, CS and RS contracts achieve a higher level of smart logistics transformation. While the coordination and effectiveness of CS contracts are superior to those of RS contracts, neither can fully coordinate the supply chain. The proposed hybrid CS-RS contract allows the manufacturer to share the LSPs costs before the transformation and its partial revenue after transformation, so that the LSP can reduce its service charge, thereby achieving full supply chain coordination. (c) 2021 China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd.

Background Mutations in the XPR1 gene are associated with primary familial brain calcifications (PFBC). All reported mutations are missense and inherited as an autosomal dominant trait. PFBC patients exhibited movement disorders, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and other associated symptoms with diverse severity, even within the same family. Materials and methods We identified and enrolled a patient with PFBC. Clinical data were comprehensively collected, including the age of onset, seizure types and frequency, trigger factors of paroxysmal dyskinesia, response to drugs, and general and neurological examination results. Whole-exome sequencing (WES) was performed to detect pathogenic variants. We further systematically reviewed the phenotypic and genetic features of patients with XPR1 mutations. Results The patient showed bilateral calcification involving basal ganglia and cerebellar dentate. Clinically, he presented as paroxysmal kinesigenic dyskinesia with infantile convulsions (PKD/IC) with favorable outcome. We identified a compound heterozygous XPR1 mutation (c.786_789delTAGA/p.D262Efs*6, c.1342C>T/p.R448W), which were inherited from unaffected parents respectively. Further literature review shows a wide range of clinical manifestations of patients with XPR1 mutations, with movement disorders being the most common. Conclusions This is the first report of biallelic mutations in XPR1. The findings suggest for the first time a possible link between PKD/IC and XPR1 mutations.

As environmental issues attract more concern, shifting towards sustainable manufacturing that includes remanufacturing has become a strategic solution to enable a profitable business while improving environmental performance. The aim of this paper is to investigate the economic feasibility of remanufacturing at different supply chain locations for a robotic lawn mower manufacturer attempting to expand their business. Through a case study, five potential location categories were identified, of which two were deemed economically feasible: spare parts warehouse (OEM) and decentralized (dealers). The other three alternatives were deemed inferior in comparison, or only plausible, but identified as risky through a sensitivity analysis.

In this study, we aim to explore the role of the involvement of suppliers while firms execute sustainable initiatives. We have based the entire study on a survey covering 101 Swedish manufacturers. The structural equation models of partial least squares are adopted to analyse their responses, examining the relationship among the constructs, stakeholders' influence, sustainable practices, sustainable performance, and supplier involvement. We find that, in the firms, the effects of stakeholder influence on the sustainable practices is both significant and positive; the sustainable practices of sampled firms are to a great extent facilitating the sustainable performance. In addition, intensely participating in the initiatives related to environmental protection (e.g., cleaner production) by the suppliers, helps reinforce the relationship of sustainable practice and sustainable performance in the firms, however the moderating effects of supplier's involvement in economic and social activities is not significant. This has significant implications to firms' decision regarding where to invest in sustainability.

Delivery time and delivery reliability are two top-level measures of delivery performance, and they both influence customers’ perception of service value. However, the classic queue-pricing literature emphasizes the former and ignores the latter. In order to bridge the gap between research and practice, this study addresses the interactive impact of price, delivery time, and delivery-reliability level on the equilibrium behaviour of rational customers and the optimal decisions of a revenue-maximizing service provider. We assume that the customers’ sensitivity to the delivery-reliability level is characterized by an increasing concave service value function. We model the operations of the service provider as an M/M/1 queue. Two cases are investigated: homogeneous customers and heterogeneous customers. For the homogeneous customers case, we analytically characterize the service provider’s optimal price, delivery time, and delivery-reliability level decisions. We show how the service provider’s decisions on whether to provide faster or more reliable service are affected when different problem parameters are subject to variation. For instance, when customers become more sensitive to the delivery-reliability level, the service provider increases the delivery-reliability level at the expense of a longer delivery time. However, the optimal price may either increase or decrease depending on a benchmark value for the delivery-reliability level. For the heterogeneous customers case, our results suggest that when the potential arrival rate is sufficiently high, the service provider always benefits from markets with higher levels of customer heterogeneity.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influencing factors of new logistics service product design (NLSPD) in China to establish a theoretical framework for the future development of the logistics industry. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts the multi-case study method based on a sample of four Chinese logistics enterprises, in which the authors consider the logistics service maturity (LSM), a distinct characteristic of logistics enterprises. Findings NLSPD is directly related to the degree of supply–demand matching (SDM) and LSM. Customer demand, service capability and peer competition influence the performance of NLSPD through the SDM degree, whereas LSM moderates these influencing mechanisms. Moreover, the degree of SDM has a positive impact on LSM. Practical implications The findings can help the managers of logistics enterprises and practitioners in the logistics industry understand the complexity of NLSPD. First, they should broaden and deepen their service offering to enhance the degree of LSM. Second, they should pay attention to the factors that affect SDM systematically. Finally, it is vital to balance the relationship between LSM and SDM. Originality/value NLSPD has become an important tool affecting the competitiveness and sustainability of logistics service enterprises. This is the first paper to propose a theoretical framework for NLSPD that considers the characteristic of the logistics industry. It clarifies the mechanisms of influencing factors, and contributes to the literature by filling the research gap.

In order to eliminate the negative effects of customer strategic\ud behavior, retailers often adopt quick response or value-added services. While in a luxury market with conspicuous customers, retailers’ pricing decisions of these two strategies become more complicated. This paper studies a supply chain with a retailer serving a mixture of conspicuous and ordinary strategic customers. We develop three models so that the retailer provides i) neither quick response nor value-added services; ii) only quick response; iii) only value-added services. Subsequently, we analyze the impacts of conspicuous customers on quick response and value-added services by pricing and strategy comparisons. The model further extends to the situation including both strategies. The results show that, firstly, when the proportion is less than a threshold, the retailer should adopt a low price strategy, and vice versa. Besides, the quick response could induce the retailer to adopt high price while value-added services inhibit it. Secondly, the customer conspicuous behavior can motivate retailers to provide quick response and inhibit their value-added services. Finally, by observing the retailer’s decisions when they can adopt two strategies simultaneously, we find that the existence of quick response can amplify the benefits of value-added services.

In the aftermath of large-scale natural disasters, supply shortage and inequitable distribution cause various losses, hindering humanitarian supply chains? performance. The optimal decisions are difficult due to the complexity arising from the multi-period post-disaster consideration, uncertainty of supplies, hierarchal decision levels and conflicting objectives in sustainable humanitarian supply chains (SHSCs). This paper formulates the problem as a fuzzy tri-objective bi-level integer programming model to minimize the unmet demand rate, potential environmental risks, emergency costs on the upper level of decision hierarchy and maximize survivors? perceived satisfaction on the lower level of decision hierarchy. A hybrid global criterion method is devised to incorporate a primal-dual algorithm, expected value and branch-and-bound approach in solving the model. A case study using data from the Wenchuan earthquake is presented to evaluate the proposed model. Study results indicate that the hybrid global criterion method guides an optimal strategy for such a complex problem within a reasonable computational time. More attention should be attached to the environmental and economic sustainability aspects in SHSCs after golden rescue stage. The proposed bi-level optimization model has the advantages of reducing the total unmet demand rate, total potential environmental risks and total emergency costs. If the decision-agents with higher authorities act as the leaders with dominant power in SHSCs, the optimal decisions, respectively taking hierarchical and horizontal relationships into account would result in equal performance. Funding Agencies|National Natural Science Foundation of ChinaNational Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [71904021]; Social Science Planning Project of Chongqing [2019QNGL27]; Chunhui Plan of the Ministry of Education of the Peoples Republic of China [CQ2019001]; Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing, ChinaNatural Science Foundation of Chongqing [cstc2020jcyj-msxmX0164]; Project of Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission of China [KJQN201900830]; Key Project of Special Research regarding Response to Major Public Health Emergency of Chongqing Technology and Business University [ctbuyqzx01]; China Scholarship CouncilChina Scholarship Council [202008500051]; Scientific Research Startup Foundation for Introduction of Advanced Talents of Chongqing Technology and Business University [1955011]; Research Project of Chongqing Technology and Business University [1951025]; MOE Layout Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences [20YJA630079]; International Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Project of Sichuan Provice [20GJHZ0039]

In light of a circular economy, to encourage core returns, the remanufacturer charges a deposit and refund it to the customer based on quality inspection of cores. Generally, two types of classification errors exist and interact with each other during the inspection process: either low-quality cores are sorted as remanufacturable, or high-quality cores are sorted as non-remanufacturable. The remanufacturer needs to choose refund policies and determine a reasonable deposit value, considering customers potential responses. This paper firstly develops analytical solutions for these issues within a game theory framework. The effect of inspection information transparency is evaluated by comparing two settings: the information of inspection errors is available to customers or not. The study results show the advantage of inspection information transparency from the remanufacturers perspective. The analysis indicates the importance of avoiding overestimating customers payoff of products and the significance of inspection accuracy. The study also highlights that the salvage value of different cores significantly influences the remanufacturers profits, and the improvement of inspection accuracy does not necessarily reduce the customers return of low-quality cores.

With more renewables on the Swedish electricity market, while decommissioning nuclear power plants, electricity supply increasingly fluctuates and electricity prices are more volatile. There is, hence, a need for securing the electricity supply before energy storage solutions become widespread. Electricity price fluctuations, moreover, affect operating income of nuclear power plants due to their inherent operational inflexibility. Since the anticipated new applications of hydrogen in fuel cell vehicles and steel production, producing hydrogen has become a potential source of income, particularly when there is a surplus supply of electricity at low prices. The feasibility of investing in hydrogen production was investigated in a nuclear power plant, applying Swedish energy policy as background. The analysis applies a system dynamics approach incorporating the stochastic feature of electricity supply and prices. The study revealed that hydrogen production brings alternative opportunities for large-scale electricity production facilities in Sweden. Factors such as hydrogen price will be influential and require in-depth investigation. This study provides guidelines for power sector policymakers and managers who plan to engage in hydrogen production for industrial applications. Although this study was focused upon nuclear power sources, it can be extended to hydrogen production from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Funding Agencies|Familjen Kamprads Stiftelse, Sweden [20200103]

Purpose Oil is the natural resource recognized as the most important source of revenue in oil-dependent countries and is most often referred to as being susceptible to corruption owing to its strategic importance. A major challenge in addressing and encountering the problems in complex social systems, such as corruption, is how to structure the problematic situation and how to capture mental models of the stakeholders involved in the situation, and also how to identify the system’s behavior in response to various policy intervention attempts in the long run. This study aims to shed new lights on modeling and simulating corrupt system of the oil industry, as a complex social system needed to be structured according to social system theories’ principles. Design/methodology/approach Parson’s theory is applied as a basic framework to capture the complexities of a corrupt system, dividing the system into political and structural, economic, legal and judicial and cultural and social sub-systems. Then soft system dynamics methodology, which is a combination of the two well-known methodologies, soft system methodology and system dynamics, is applied to model and simulate the complexities involved in the oil industry of Iran, which owns the second-largest oil reservoir in the world and its economy is much dependent on the oil revenue, struggles with corruption, and plans for a large amount of anti-corruption activities. Findings After simulating and calibrating the model, three groups of policies, namely, “reducing corruption opportunities,” “reducing corruption demand,” and “increasing anti-corruption capacity” are implemented in the model. As to the simulation results, due to the mutual inter-causality of opportunity and demand for corruption, individual application of each group of policies will not be helpful for long, rather a combination of policies will conduce to substantial improvements in declining corruption in the oil industry. Originality/value The developed model addresses the dynamics of the complex socio-economic system of corruption in the system of oil industry via modeling and simulation. The developed four-dimension system dynamics framework could be considered as a guidance for corruption modeling in general and as a basic model for corruption modeling of oil-dependent countries’ systems in particular.

In 2017, China's online e-commerce sales has already reached 29.16 trillion Yuan. While gaining huge benefits, it also poses great challenges for each industry. One of the biggest challenge is the change of sales channels. Of course, there are also huge opportunities between them. Among them, it is a huge impact on the perishable products industry such as the airline industry and the hotel industry. Because of the perishable of the product, both hotels and airlines want to be able to sell the product for a limited period of time and gain considerable benefits. Therefore, at the beginning of the industry, airlines and hotels hoped to sell their products through more channels and attracted channels to sell products by paying their commission fee. With the rapid development of e-commerce, more and more online channels are replacing traditional offline channels. The change of channels has brought great challenges to airline management and costs. For example, although online channels absorb more customer demand, the commission costs of airlines have increased significantly. In addition to the cost pressures imposed on airlines, the increase in channels has brought conflicts between channels and between channels and airlines. Some of the channels' behaviour has caused great losses to the airlines. For example: change the condition of retreat fee, increase ticket or room price, maliciously reduce the price to compete with the airline and so on. These behaviours have affected the airline's reputation and have also brought losses to the airlines. In order to deal with the challenges of online agents, the airline has also taken some corresponding measures, such as the opening of online direct marketing websites, direct sales APP and so on. However, the effect has not been very good and it is difficult to compete with online agents who have customer volume. At the same time, we also see that the airline industry and hotels are also facing great competitive pressure. For example, the high-speed rail increases the competitive of civil transport markets. High-speed trains generally have higher on-time rates than aircraft and also high-speed rail stations are generally more convenient for customers in the city. Therefore, for passengers, high-speed rail has advantages in short trips. In addition, the emergence of low-cost airlines has also intensified competition in the civil aviation industry such as China's Spring Airlines, Europe's Easyjet and Ryanair. Therefore, recently reducing channel distribution costs has been concerned for many airlines which are facing fierce competition in airline markets. In a long period since the 1970s, capacity control has always played a pivotal role in defining airlines market strategy. However, when airlines select distribution channels and make capacity allocation decisions, they still separately make different decisions. Hence, when a customer purchases a ticket from a channel with an appropriate fare class, the channel might not be an optimal channel from the airlines' perspective. When the airline sells a ticket in a right channel, the ticket price is probably not a right fare. Therefore, how to establish a better channel and fare class capacity control model has become the key for airlines to increase revenue. This thesis is a study based on the above issues. The main work includes the following aspects: At first, we studied the single-leg capacity allocation problem that considers the channel factor. Although the network revenue management has a lot of academic research and has been applied in international routes, for many domestic routes airlines still basically use single-leg revenue management system. In addition, from the historical development of revenue management, the single-leg revenue management model is the basic model of all revenue management models. Therefore, it is important to first establish a single-leg revenue management model that considers the channel issues. In this study, we will integrate channel distribution into dynamic capacity control model. The model can make channel decisions in conjunction with inventory and this is similar to the procedure shown in pure capacity allocation. The study has proposed an optimal policy basing on bid price that incorporates commission fee, price, and capacity. The numerical experiment results illustrate that introducing the channel distribution into airline revenue system can significantly improve the revenues and efficiently reduce the channel distribution cost for airlines. The numerical experiments demonstrate that airline revenues will increase more than 3% in a simple integrated system with two channels compared to the independent model. This study also analyses the reasons for improvements in different situations (such as multi-channels have better improvements than a single-channel and the model has a better match of channels and fare classes) so that management insights are obtained for airlines. Secondly, we analyse customer demand behaviours and we find that customers will experience demand transfer behaviours when facing channels. In the Internet age, due to more transparent information, the customer's transfer behaviour has been continuously expanded. For customers, the transfer of channels is more likely to occur than the transfer of fare classes because they do not need to pay for it. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a better revenue management model to consider the customer's channel transfer behaviour.In this part, we added customer channel transfer behaviour based on the original single-leg dynamic capacity allocation model that considers channel issues. We also developed the optimal policy for this model and made some numerical experiments. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the customer shift behaviour can influence the results of the model and subsequently the decisions of airlines. In the general numerical result, the new model can increase 1.23% than the above channel model. At the same time, through the analysis of the results, the airlines are provided with corresponding suggestions to face the customer's choice behaviour. For example, the airline needs to increase the customer's transfer rate through some methods, such as joining a price comparison network and increasing policy incentives. Thirdly, on the base of single-leg model, we propose a new network dynamic model to integrate network revenue management and channel distribution. To take a network structure airline, the airlines can make more revenue benefits comparing the single-leg method. Although the network dynamic model can make more improvements, the exact optimization is impossible for practical purposes because of the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, we use determined linear programming method for approximating to dynamic model. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the airline revenues can increase more than 3% in a simple network when the commission rate is 15% compared to the traditional network model. In addition to the above studies, the paper also summarizes the original literature on revenue management and channel issues and proposes future research directions.

In developing countries, coal power plants still play a major role in the power sector and they are considered as a major emission source of air pollution. Strict regulations have compelled the coal power plants to improve environmental performance by reducing carbon emissions and the emission of pollutants. However, due to cost disadvantages, the coal power plants often lack motivation to internalize environmental externalities through investing in green technology. This situation raises a question: is there any alternative to reduce pollutants in operations economically? With a focus on service supply as well as a consideration of government policies, this paper develops a model to investigate the opportunity of outsourcing a pollutant-reduction service to meet the environmental constraint. The service supply chain consists of a coal power plant (end user) and a pollutant-reduction service provider, with the former outsourcing the service to the latter. We study the policy for improving the profit of this service supply chain whereas the benefit allotment is adjusted through outsourcing price negotiation between the two partners. The results show that the green service outsourcing price is interrelated with the government incentive policy which defines the shares of the two partners. Our key contribution lies in integrating the complex factors affecting the supply chain collaboration such as green service, financial feasibility, environmental constraint, government policies, outsourcing price negotiation, and profit sharing. Our research findings have the following implications: considering environmental externalities, the government should motivate the collaboration between supply chain partners; the economic scale of output and sales price subsidy of electricity generation are the primary factors affecting the price of outsourcing green service and, consequently, the allotment of supply chain profits. The study results indicate the collaboration is potentially effective in improving environmental performance.

It is of importance for restaurants to identify their competitors to gain competitiveness. Meanwhile, opinion-rich resources like online reviews sites can be used to understand others opinion toward restaurant services. We thus propose a novel model to extract comparative relations from online reviews, and then construct three types of comparison relation networks, enabling competitiveness analysis for three tasks. The first network help restaurants analyze market structure for their positioning. The second network enables to identify top competitors using competitive index and dissimilarity index. The third network help restaurants identify strengths and weaknesses through aspects-comparison relation mining. Finally, the market environment is illustrated in a visual way according to the three types of networks. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed competitiveness analysis using text analytics, which can identify top competitors and evaluate the market environment, as well as help the focal restaurant effectively develop a service improvement strategy.

In order to increase market share and enhance business competitiveness, comprehensive retail platforms (CRPs), such as Taobao.com and JD.com , are currently cooperating with social service platforms (SSPs), such as TikTok and Meiyou. Therefore, more research attention needs to be paid to such platform supply chains. To this end, this study develops stylized models to explore the impacts of the market power of an SSP and the precision marketing of a CRP on platform cooperation. Our major research findings include the following. First, we investigate the equilibrium strategy and find that if the CRP’s commission rate is low (high), cooperation becomes the equilibrium strategy when the SSP’s market power is low (high). Second, in most cases, market power will affect the equilibrium strategy with a change in the commission rate. However, in a certain range of commission rates, the equilibrium strategy remains unchanged. That is, market power has an “invalidation effect” on the equilibrium strategy. Finally, we find that as the commission rate increases, precision marketing reduces the willingness of supply chain members to implement platform cooperation. However, when the commission rate is low, precision marketing stimulates cooperation between platforms. The study results provide guidelines for improving the cooperation between CRPs and SSPs.

New technology is altering business strategies and innovation capabilities while increasing the possibilities of production and process innovation. Supply chain collaboration undertaken for the sake of sustainability is currently speeding up this process of change; a growing pool of research is exploring the links between sustainability collaboration and company performance on economic, environmental, and social metrics. It is a good time to review the literature to reveal what has been studied and what are the gaps in the current body of knowledge, and also to comment on what the future research agenda should include. For these purposes, the authors conducted a systematic literature review and a quantitative bibliometric analysis. Results indicate that research about supply chain collaboration for the purpose of sustainability is gaining growing attention in the business field; however, environmental and economic considerations still dominate the research, while there is a lack of consideration about social concerns such as child labor and personal development. In addition, the collaboration partners under investigation have mainly been the company and its customers and suppliers, whereas competitors and other horizontal collaboration partners have received little attention.

Energy policy has a vital impact on the investment in renewable energy capacities and on the decommissioning of traditional ones. Currently Sweden and Norway aim to expand the renewable electricity production by 26.4 TWh between 2012 and 2020, and subsequently to reduce CO 2 emissions. To achieve this, the Swedish Energy Agency issues to renewable producers electricity certificates, which are sold on an open market to increase revenues. Meanwhile, the electricity is priced based on a marginal cost principle, and the price is highly reliant on the capacity profile and energy balance in the system, and consequently on the expanding and decommissioning decisions. The above price issues, together with the intermittent availability of renewable energy sources and the uncertainty of future fuel costs, will significantly affect the economic performance of the electricity producers. It is only after understanding the interaction of those factors that we can define companies’ business models for achieving a sustainable development in the electricity sector. This study applies a system dynamics approach and presents a model to integrate both strategic decisions such as capacity expansion/decommission, and operational features such as randomness and seasonal factors in electricity production. The model highlights the complex and nonlinear interaction of important factors in the electricity sector. The study results indicate that the energy policy should not be introduced in an isolated manner, but rather need to incorporate the incentives of renewables with other decisions such as nuclear decommission. Additionally, this study predicts an upcoming increase in electricity price, as well as a more volatile price after the capacity profile has been changed and dominated by hydro, biomass and wind. This study provides guidelines for policy makers and managers to make better-informed decisions for a healthy development of their businesses as well as of the entire electricity sector.

This paper studies the influence of the demand-supply environment on the capacity scheduling performance of the logistics service supply chain. According to the key characteristics of the demand-su ...

Negative impacts on environment such as carbon emissions and pollution resulting from the business activities of firms in a supply chain have attracted great attention worldwide. Hence, one of the crucial issues for supply chain management is the trade-off between economic objectives and environmental sustainability. This paper focuses on investigating the government policy incentive mechanism, with which supply chain members are motivated to work collaboratively to reduce carbon and pollutant emissions by investing in producing environmental-friendly products (EFP). Such a mechanism affects the transfer price through negotiation between the supply chain firms, and consequently it has an impact on the supply chain׳s value transition and profit allocation. A collaborative supply chain decision-making framework is formulated with environmental constraints and carbon caps; its objective is to maximize the net present value of an integrated supply chain as well as satisfy the interests of its individual members. Our key contribution lies in exploring a decision-making mechanism for an environmentally sustainable supply chain that is jointly constrained by environmental carrying capacities and carbon caps, and also takes into account government policy incentives. The results show that collaboration between supply chain members plays a crucial role in improving their environmental performance, as the transfer price is determined through negotiations to share government subsidies to satisfy the individual interests of supply chain members while the level of pollutants and carbon emissions are in compliance with environmental standards.

Whether the corporate social performance affects the financial performance is still unclear in many manufacturing companies. We commonly expect, on one side, that profitable corporations have stronger incentives to reveal information on the social performance in order to improve their publicity; on the other hand, companies may face the fear of rising costs due to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. With increasing concerns of CSR, it is timely to investigate the relationship between the disclosure of corporate social performance and the financial performance. In this paper with the above study objective, we use Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reports of 75 sample companies, collect evidences by applying the method of structured content analysis of the cases and attempt to identify this relationship. The corporate social performance is measured by the indicators according to the GRI guidelines, i.e. within the categories of Labor practices and decent work, Human Rights, Society as well as Product responsibility. Financial performance is measured by return on equity, sales growth and cash flow/sales ratio. Using statistical evaluation methods, our results indicate that the categories of Human Rights, Society as well as Product responsibility display a significant and positive correlation with the return on equity. Same conclusion also holds for many CSR indicators. Nevertheless, when examining the CSR practices across different manufacturing sectors, we have not observed significant differences. The study results are important for understanding the development and implementation of CSR practices in the manufacturing industry.

Background: To study the characters of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) in the seizure onset zones (SOZ) and the nonseizure onset zones (NSOZ) in the electrocorticography (ECoG) of patients with neocortical epilepsy. Methods: Only patients with neocortical epilepsy who were seizure-free after surgery as determined with ECoG were included. We selected patients with normal magnetic resonance imaging before surgery in order to avoid the influence of HFOs by other lesions. Three minutes preictal and 10 min interictal ECoG as recorded in 39 channels in the SOZ and 256 channels in the NSOZ were analyzed. Ripples and fast ripples (FRs) were analyzed by Advanced Source Analysis software (ASA, The Netherlands). Average duration of HFOs was analyzed in SOZ and NSOZ separately. Results: For ripples, the permillage time occupied by HFOs was 0.83 in NSOZ and 1.17 in SOZ during the interictal period. During preictal period, they were 2.02 in NSOZ and 7.93 in SOZ. For FRs, the permillage time occupied by HFOs was 0.02 in NSOZ and 0.42 in SOZ during the interictal period. During preictal period, they were 0.03 in NSOZ and 2 in SOZ. Conclusions: High-frequency oscillations are linked to SOZ in neocortical epilepsy. Our study demonstrates the prevalent occurrence of HFOs in SOZ. More and more burst of HFOs, especially FRs, means the onset of seizures.

In order to ensure the continued, safe administration of pharmaceuticals, particularly those agents that have been recently introduced into the market, there is a need for improved surveillance after product release. This is particularly so because drugs are used by a variety of patients whose particular characteristics may not have been fully captured in the original market approval studies. Even well-conducted, randomized controlled trials are likely to have excluded a large proportion of individuals because of any number of issues. The digitization of medical care, which yields rich and accessible drug data amenable to analytic techniques, provides an opportunity to capture the required information via observational studies. We propose the development of an open, accessible database containing properly de-identified data, to provide the substrate for the required improvement in pharmacovigilance. A range of stakeholders could use this to identify delayed and low-frequency adverse events. Moreover, its power as a research tool could extend to the detection of complex interactions, potential novel uses, and subtle subpopulation effects. This far-reaching potential is demonstrated by our experience with the open Multi-parameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care (MIMIC) intensive care unit database. The new database could also inform the development of objective, robust clinical practice guidelines. Careful systematization and deliberate standardization of a fully digitized pharmacovigilance process is likely to save both time and resources for healthcare in general.

The perspectives on the manufacturing footprint of global firms are widening from the economic aspects to also include the environmental and social aspects. Thus, sustainability is becoming an important issue for the location of manufacturing facilities. It is therefore timely to review the relevant aspects and dimensions in the extant literature to investigate the relationship between sustainability and facility location. In this paper, we aim to understand how sustainability aspects are included in decision-making concerning manufacturing facility locations and the role of location in evaluating manufacturing sustainability. We examine the literature streams on sustainability and facility location. A comprehensive search includes peer-reviewed literature from 1990 to 2011. We propose a literature classification scheme with respect to focal area and research methodology. The content analysis identifies the environmental, social and economic perspectives and factors affecting location decisions. We synthesize the findings into a framework for taking sustainability aspects into account in manufacturing facility location decision-making. We also propose a research agenda for further research on sustainable locations.

The China Postal Express and Logistics Corporation (CPEL), China’s largest corporation in the express delivery industry, is restructuring its nationwide land express network after completing its reorganization. In this redesign project, we proposed a network design framework and developed a decision support system (MMHHSNDDSS) to integrate and optimize the topology structure and functional configuration of CPEL’s intermodal and multilayered network. Our model seeks to minimize operations and investment costs, constrained by the delivery time limits of CPEL’s service products. Using MMHHSNDDSS, CPEL’s senior management team can determine the optimal network by incorporating soft constraints, such as the experience of CPEL’s decision makers, into a series of solutions. According to an evaluation based on data gathered in 2009, CPEL expects the new network to improve service levels and provide savings of more than 20 percent in annual operations costs. The implementation of our proposed solution began in 2010. In addition, the quantitative methods applied in this project have changed the company’s attitude toward applying operations research methods to strategic decision-making processes.

Nowadays supply chains are facing challenges in managing risk issues. Supply of raw materials may exhibit a random yield due to technical failure of production resources or supply disruption after ...

Seamless steel tubes often have various categories and specifications, which further require complicated operations in production, especially in the cold treating process (CTP). This paper investigates the scheduling problem using the seamless tube plant of Baoshan Iron and Steel Complex as a study background. By considering the practical production constraints such as sequence-dependent setup times, maintenance schedule, intermediate material buffers, job-machine matches, we formulate the hybrid flowshop scheduling problem with a non-linear mixed integer programming model (NMIP). In addition, our model provides a flexibility to remove the permutation assumption, which is often a limitation in early studies. In order to obtain the solution of the above NMIP problem, a two-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed and it combines a modified genetic algorithm and a local search method. With real production instances, our computation experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and it outperform...

PurposeThe concept of the customer order decoupling point (CODP) has been used in many different contexts as an important structural concept for the traditional forward supply chain. The CODP is rarely explicitly applied in reverse supply chain management and the purpose of this paper is to show that the CODP can be an important corner stone of a framework for analysis of the closed‐loop supply chain containing both forward and reverse material flows.Design/methodology/approachConceptual similarities are identified using analogies between forward and reverse supply chains. First, the concepts are discussed in their original context of forward flows and thereafter the concepts are applied on reverse flows. Finally, a holistic closed‐loop model is established.FindingsThe conventional CODP framework for forward flow supply chains can be extended to cover also reverse material flows and therefore providing a foundation for a more comprehensive discussion of closed‐loop supply chains useful in both education, research, and industrial applications. Using the suggested extended framework it is possible to identify nine fundamental supply chain configurations.Practical implicationsDifferentiating between demand driven and forecast driven activities plays a critical role in practical supply chain management and this paper highlights that this approach also can be applied to closed‐loop supply chains and therefore extending the reach of the toolbox previously developed for the forward supply chain.Originality/valueThe concept CODP has not previously been comprehensively treated for the closed‐loop supply chain and this paper provides a foundation for establishing a strategic structural framework for discussing issues such as lean vs agile and balancing efficiency and responsiveness in a more comprehensive context involving also reverse material flows.

Having emerged in the middle of the 20th century, the information and communication technology (ICT) industry has sprung up during the past 20 years. China plays a significant role within the ICT segment in that it has become a major supplier and a fast growing market in the world. This paper, based on interviews in 2006 with nine important Chinese ICT companies, identifies the supply network structure for Chinese ICT industry and its value-adding opportunities. The essential finding is that the domestic operators are the focal companies within the Chinese ICT supply network. This result is further verified by an alliance analysis using the UCINET software.

In recent years, remanufacturing has emerged in various industrial sectors, and it adds an additional production alternative apart from the conventional manufacturing process. With remanufacturing, a used return product is often disassembled, reprocessed, and then reassembled into a new product. The remanufactured product is often of the same quality as those from regular manufacturing. Even though remanufacturing saves a substantial cost of materials, it often requires more labour and other inputs. Thus, it becomes important to examine the expanded production opportunity of the system. In this paper, we therefore make a first attempt to model such a system with respect to its optimal production. This model is based on the Cobb-Douglas (Wicksell) production function. More specifically, we focus on how labour costs, material costs, and the budget influence optimal production decisions. Explicit properties of the optimal plan are derived and presented as theorems. Results of this study are intended to provide a guideline for managers to make sound decisions, when dealing with the increasingly important remanufacturing systems.

In recent years, remanufacturing has emerged as an important research area. This requires developing methods and models in order to aid companies in systematically evaluating current as well as projected remanufacturing systems. This paper addresses the inventory control problem in a hybrid inventory system with manufacturing and remanufacturing options. In this study, by changing the definition of inventory position of the serviceable stock, we introduce a shift PULL inventory control policy, which is compared with PULL, DUAL, and Separate PULL control policies studied previously in the literature. Besides evaluating the economic consequences with different control policies, we also study system dynamic behaviour such as the bullwhip effect, in order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different policies. After the experiments, we propose several management guidelines for such a hybrid inventory system. The major findings are: (1) separate PULL and DUAL can be good alternatives when the man...

A combined manufacturing/remanufacturing system is modelled and its dynamic behaviour is investigated using a control engineering approach. The model is an extension of the automated pipeline, inventory and order based production control system (APIOBPCS), which is well understood from a dynamic perspective. It is assumed that the remanufacturing process is based on a PUSH policy. Utilising different levels of information transparency from the remanufacturing process, three system types are developed and compared. Mathematical and simulation analyses of the system types were undertaken and their robustness to remanufacturing process uncertainties were tested. Our analysis indicates that the greater the degree of information transparency, the greater the robustness of the hybrid system.

This paper studies a two-echelon logistics service supply chain (LSSC) composed of one logistics service integrator (LSI) and one functional logistics service provider (FLSP). We develop a two-period service capacity procurement model where market demand surges in the second period. The LSI, as the Stackelberg game leader, tends to be overconfident when market demand surges. The results show that when the demand surges in the second period, if the overconfident purchasing capacity of LSI cannot meet the market demand, the overconfidence behaviour will negatively affect LSI's optimal pricing. Besides, the overconfidence behaviour leads to the lowest service level of the FLSP in the second period under demand surge. However, such negative impacts can be reduced or even eliminated in certain conditions through the FLSP-led mechanism and the dynamic wholesale price mechanism. The numerical simulation and the case study from China are used to illustrate the model and draw some conclusions. [Received 17 August 2017; Revised 19 February 2018; Accepted 30 March 2018]

The Master Production Schedule (MPS) is essential in maintaining customer service levels and stabilising production planning in a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) environment. Traditionally, an ...

As coal power plants are major players in power sector in China, they are considered as the major source of emissions that bring air pollutions. Increasing pressures from society have thus impelled...

Stochastic properties of a multi-period production-inventory system have been studied in several papers by applying the Laplace transform. However, the source of uncertainty has been limited to external demand and the production/replenishment lead time has been assumed to be constant. In this paper, we investigate the situation when the lead time is a random variable. Transform methods are again used to capture the stochastic properties of the system, such as stockout functions. With the objective of maximizing the net present value of the cash flow, we derive conditions for optimal production decisions in this system. The properties of cash outflow due to stockouts will also be discussed.

Managers and researchers are increasingly interested in the factor that logistics enterprise competitiveness(LEC) has significant effects on the development of Chinese logistics enterprises, especially in view of theenterprise life cycle. This paper investigates the contents and evolution of the composing factors of LEC inChina by a survey.With Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS 15.0) software, the factor analysismethod is used to determine the effects of each factor on LEC. Furthermore, the comparative analysismethod is applied to compare the composing factors of LEC in different types of logistics enterprises andat different enterprise life cycle stages. The results show that factors of LEC according to their descendingimportance level are corporate capabilities, corporate resources, and dynamic mechanism. Three kindsof corporate capabilities (financial management capability, logistics risk control capability, and humanresource management capability) and two kinds of corporate resources (corporate human resources andcorporate culture) have the greatest influence on the development of LEC, but in reality have poor practicalperformance, and hence deserve more consideration from the enterprises. National Natural Science Foundation of China Humanity and Social ScienceYouth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China China State Scholarship Fund China State Scholarship Fund

The integration of scheduling and control in the process industry is a topic that has been frequently discussed during the recent years, but many challenges remain in order to achieve integrated solutions that can be implemented for large-scale industrial sites. In this paper we consider production control under disturbances in the supply of utilities at integrated sites together with the integration towards production scheduling. Utilities, such as steam and cooling water, are often shared between the production areas of a site, which enables formulation of an optimization problem for determining the optimal supply of utilities to each area at the occurrence of a disturbance. Optimization in two timescales is suggested to handle the scheduling and disturbance management problems in a hierarchical fashion. The suggested structure has been discussed with companies within the chemical process industry. A simple example is provided to show how the structure may be used.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the research development in supply chain risk management (SCRM), which has shown an increasing global attention in recent years. Literature survey and citation/co-citation analysis are used to fulfil the research task. Literature survey has undertaken a thorough search of articles on selected journals relevant to supply chain operations management. Meanwhile, citation/co-citation analysis uses Web of Sciences database to disclose SCRM development between 1995 and 2009. Both the approaches show similar trends of rising publications over the past 15 years. This review has piloted us to identify and classify the potential risk associated with different flows, namely material, cash and information flows. Consequently, we identify some research gaps. Even though there is a pressing need and awareness of SCRM from industrial aspect, quantitative models in the field are relatively lacking and information flow risk has received less attention. It is also interesting to observe the evolutions and advancements of SCRM discipline. One finding is that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant increase during 2000-2005 and evolved from passively reacting to vague general issues of disruptions towards more proactively managing supply chain risk from system perspectives.

This paper begins by consolidating industrial challenges and research issues concerning Product/Service Systems obtained through various activities by the authors. Based on this, it points out the importance of the holistic view in further research in this area so that PSS providers do not fall into local optimization. The intent of this contribution to our research community includes shedding light on interesting issues that thus far have been relatively invisible and with narrower scope.

In the recent years, companies have begun to strengthen their supply agreements, such as sharing the management of inventories. This type of co-soperation implies that the members of the supply chain share information and arrange a mutual agreement on their performance targets. The increased interest on supply chain topics has attracted researchers’ attention to the problem of co-operation between the buyer and vendor, the two actors directly interacting in the supply mechanism. The present research investigates the way how a particular VMI policy, known as Consignment Stock (CS), may lead to a successful strategy for both buyer and vendor. The previous study [1] developed an analytical model of the CS policy, with reference to the centralised decision and deterministic settings. In order to fully explore the potentiality of CS policy, an extension of the model is proposed in this paper. The results indicate that the CS policy could be a strategic and profitable approach to improve supply chain performance in uncertain environments.

Airway inflammation and remodeling in chronic asthma are characterized by airway eosinophilia, hyperplasia of goblet cells and smooth muscle, and subepithelial fibrosis. We examined the role of leukotrienes in a mouse model of allergen-induced chronic lung inflammation and fibrosis. BALB/c mice, after intraperitoneal ovalbumin (OVA) sensitization on Days 0 and 14, received intranasal OVA periodically Days 14-75. The OVA-treated mice developed an extensive eosinophil and mononuclear cell inflammatory response, goblet cell hyperplasia, and mucus occlusion of the airways. A striking feature of this inflammatory response was the widespread deposition of collagen beneath the airway epithelial cell layer and also in the lung interstitium in the sites of leukocytic infiltration that was not observed in the saline-treated controls. The cysteinyl leukotriene(1) (CysLT(1)) receptor antagonist montelukast significantly reduced the airway eosinophil infiltration, mucus plugging, smooth muscle hyperplasia, and subepithelial fibrosis in the OVA-sensitized/challenged mice. The presence of Charcot-Leyden-like crystals in airway macrophages and the increased interleukin (IL)-4 and IL-13 mRNA expression in lung tissue and protein in BAL fluid seen in OVA-treated mice were also inhibited by CysLT(1) receptor blockade. These data suggest an important role for cysteinyl leukotrienes in the pathogenesis of chronic allergic airway inflammation with fibrosis.

This paper investigates the potential value adding capability of dynamic product tracing to the food supply chain management. As the environment of supply chain processes affect product quality significantly, technologies and approaches for tracking and tracing products have the potential to improve the food supply chain performance by dynamically identifying product quality situations. This can be achieved by tracing the product manufacturing and supply process with Automatic Product Identification (AutoID) technologies. An optimisation model has been developed to generate optimal pricing policies based on the dynamically identified product quality information. The research concluded that the dynamic identification of the product value (quality) would generate benefits to the food supply chain management with widely adopted optimal pricing approaches.

Core acquisition is essential for the success of remanufacturing business. To describe the current status of the quantitative research in Core Acquisition Management and to indicate possible future research directions, a literature review is conducted in this paper about the quantitative modeling in Core Acquisition Management research area. The activities included in Core Acquisition Management are categorized into topics such as acquisition control, forecasting return, return strategies, quality classification and reverse channel design. While most of the studies focus on acquisition control, studies on return strategies and return forecast are relatively limited. Furthermore, this paper analyzes the research papers according to the key assumptions such as, hybrid/non-hybrid remanufacturing systems, acquisition functions, quality classification methods and perfect/imperfect substitutions. In conclusion, studies based on the assumptions of non-hybrid remanufacturing systems and imperfect substitution should gain more attentions, since these situations frequently occur in practice but are less investigated in the existing literature. In addition, empirical validation of the various forms of the acquisition function (relations between acquisition incentives and acquisition volume) should be important for further investigations. At the time for thesis presentation publication was in status: Manuscript