ALBERT

Description: With the rapid development of the mobile device and Internet usage, the mobile banking has seen remarkable growth across the world, especially in the past few years, as one of the emerging financial innovations. This paper attempts to explore the mobile banking services offered by selected commercial Chinese banks. The main data of this study were obtained through the comprehensive evaluation of mobile banking services. The DEMATEL-ANP method was used to evaluate the main factors influencing the adoption of mobile banking. The results show that there is still big space for the improvement of the mobile banking services for the selected Chinese banks. The management significance and suggestions for these banks are also discussed.

Description: The two-stage assembly scheduling problem is widely used in industrial and service industries. This study focuses on the two-stage three-machine flow shop assembly problem mixed with a controllable number and sum-of-processing times-based learning effect, in which the job processing time is considered to be a function of the control of the truncation parameters and learning based on the sum of the processing time. However, the truncation function is very limited in the two-stage flow shop assembly scheduling settings. Thus, this study explores a two-stage three-machine flow shop assembly problem with truncated learning to minimize the makespan criterion. To solve the proposed model, we derive several dominance rules, lemmas, and lower bounds applied in the branch-and-bound method. On the other hand, three simulated annealing algorithms are proposed for finding approximate solutions. In both the small and large size number of job situations, the SA algorithm is better than the JS algorithm in this study. All the experimental results of the proposed algorithm are presented on small and large job sizes, respectively.

Description: Standard scheduled flight block time (SBT) setting is of great concern for Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and airlines in China. However, the standard scheduled flight block times are set in the form of on-site meetings in practice and current literature has not provided any efficient mathematical models to calculate the flight block times fairly among the airlines. The objective of this paper is to develop and solve a mathematical model for standard SBT setting with consideration of both fairness and reliability. We use whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and an improved version of the whale optimization algorithm (IWOA) to solve the SBT setting problem. A novel nonlinear update equation of convergence factor for random iterations is used in place of the original linear one in the proposed IWOA algorithm. Experimental results show that the suggested approach is effective, and IWOA performs better than WOA in the concerned problem, whose solutions are better compared to the flight block times released by CAAC. In particular, it is interesting to find that MSE, RMSE, MAE, MAPE and Theil of the reliability in 60%–70% range are always the smallest and the average fairness of airlines is better than that of 60%–75% range. The model and solving approach presented in this article have great potential to be applied by CAAC to determine the standard SBTs strategically.

Description: Social unrest events are common happenings in modern society which need to be proactively handled. An effective method is to continuously assess the risk of upcoming social unrest events and predict the likelihood of these events. Our previous work built a hidden Markov model- (HMM-) based framework to predict indicators associated with country instability, leaving two shortcomings which can be optimized: omitting event participants’ interaction and implicitly learning the state residence time. Inspired by this, we propose a new prediction framework in this paper, using frequent subgraph patterns and hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs). The feature called BoEAG (Bag-of-Event-Association-subGraph) is constructed based on frequent subgraph mining and the bag of word model. The new framework leverages the large-scale digital history events captured from GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone) to characterize the transitional process of the social unrest events’ evolutionary stages, uncovering the underlying event development mechanics and formulating the social unrest event prediction as a sequence classification problem based on Bayes decision. Experimental results with data from five main countries in Southeast Asia demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method, which outperforms the traditional HMM by 5.3% to 16.8% and the logistic regression by 11.2% to 43.6%.

Description: This paper studies single-machine due-window assignment scheduling problems with truncated learning effect and resource allocation simultaneously. Linear and convex resource allocation functions under common due-window (CONW) assignment are considered. The goal is to find the optimal due-window starting (finishing) time, resource allocations and job sequence that minimize a weighted sum function of earliness and tardiness, due window starting time, due window size, and total resource consumption cost, where the weight is position-dependent weight. Optimality properties and polynomial time algorithms are proposed to solve these problems.

Description: Recycled resource and consumer satisfaction drive bicycle enterprises to take effort to recycle damaged bicycles. Considering consumers’ riding experience, this paper analyzes a closed-loop supply chain where the operator sets price and recycling effort, and the supplier determines wholesale price. Rent and recycling strategies in integrated and decentralized channels are analyzed, and four types of revenue and cost-sharing contracts are compared, and the linear transfer payment-CS contract is designed to coordinate the decentralized supply chain. The results show that the consumers’ concern for riding experience can encourage the operator to increase recycling effort and the operator increases the rents and recycling effort over time. Besides, the sharing deposit income among supply chain members only affects the wholesale price and does not change the decisions of rent and recovery effort. In other words, the deposit is used to adjust the profit distribution among members, and there is no difference for consumers and society.

Description: In this paper, an improved two-dimensional logistic-sine coupling map (N2D-LSCM) and an improved Henon map (NHenon) are proposed. Furthermore, by combining N2D-LSCM and NHenon map, an image encryption algorithm is proposed based on these two chaotic systems and DNA coding. The chaotic sequences generated by N2D-LSCM are used as the parameters of NHenon. In the scrambling stage, DNA encoding is carried out for pixels after scrambling by two chaotic sequences generated by N2D-LSCM; in the stage of diffusion, DNA random coding acts on random matrix obtained by two chaotic sequences generated by NHenon, and DNA XOR operation is carried out with the image obtained in the scrambling stage to diffuse. Compared with other 2D map for image encryption algorithm, this algorithm exhibits good security and holds high efficiency.

Description: Microtubules as essential biopolymers implicated into electrical intracellular transport open a lot of questions about their intrinsic character of dynamic instability. Both experimental and theoretical investigations are used to understand their behavior in order to mimic and build powerful and smart biomaterials. So, in this paper, by analytical and computational approaches, we proposed an electrical analogue computer of microtubule’s protofilament drawing from the partial differential equation which describes microtubule’s motion. Using the computing elements, namely, operational amplifiers, capacitors, and resistors, we designed analytically the bioelectronic circuit of the microtubule’s protofilament. To validate our model, Runge–Kutta code was used to solve the partial differential equation of MT’s motion on software Matlab, and then, the results obtained are used as a controller to fit and validate numerical results obtained by running the bioelectronic circuit on software PSpice. It is shown that the analogue circuit displayed spontaneous electrical activity consistent with self-sustained electrical oscillations. We found out that two behaviors were exhibited by the voltage generated from the electrical analogue computer of MT’s protofilament; amplification and damping behaviors are modulated by the values of the resistor of the summing operational amplifier. From our study, it is shown that low values of the resistor promote damping behavior while high values of the resistor promote an amplification behavior. So microtubule’s protofilament exhibits different spontaneous regimes leading to different oscillatory modes. This study put forward the possibility to build microtubule’s protofilament as a biotransistor.

Description: Conceptual models are built to depict and analyze complex systems. They are made of concepts and relationships among these concepts. In a particular domain, conceptual models are helpful for different stakeholders to reach a clear and unified view of domain problems. However, the process of building conceptual models is time-consuming, tedious, and expertise required. To improve the efficiency of the building process, this paper proposes a configurable semantic-based (semi-) automatic conceptual model transformation methodology (SbACMT) that tries to reuse existing conceptual models to generate new models. SbACMT contains three parts: (i) a configurable semantic relatedness computing method building on the structured linguistic knowledge base “ConceptNet” (SRCM-CNet), (ii) a specific meta-model, which follows the Ecore standard, defines the rules of applying SRCM-CNet to different conceptual models to automatically detect transformation mappings, and (iii) a multistep matching and transformation process that employs SRCM-CNet. A case study is carried out to detail the working mechanism of SbACMT. Furthermore, through a systematically analysis of this case study, we validate the performance of SbACMT. We prove that SbACMT can support the automatic transformation process of conceptual models (e.g., class diagrams). The scalability of SbACMT can be improved by adapting the meta-model and predefined syntax transformation rules.

Description: Carbon policies and consumer environmental consciousness are effective motivators that drive enterprises to adopt sustainability technology. To provide enterprises insights into sustainable investment and inventory-transportation decision-making and governments insights into policy-making, this study investigates integrated inventory-transportation scheduling considering consumer environmental consciousness and sustainability technology under carbon cap, tax, and cap-and-trade policies. We first examined sustainability that extends the economic order quantity (EOQ) models, simultaneously taking into account the comprehensive emission model, consumer environmental consciousness, and carbon policies. We then optimized the sustainability level and EOQ using the simulation method. Furthermore, we performed a regression analysis on the carbon policy effects on sustainability level, profit, and emission. Moreover, using the regression models, we estimated and discussed the optimal policy parameters from the perspective of social welfare maximization. The results indicate that the carbon cap-and-trade policy is superior to carbon cap and tax policies. Under carbon cap and tax policies, the tougher the carbon policy, the higher the sustainability level and the lower the profit and carbon emission. Meanwhile, under the carbon cap-and-trade policy, the carbon trading price is the decisive factor that affects the sustainability level, enterprises’ profit, and carbon emission; the carbon cap has a positive regulatory effect on profit.