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Aluminum alloy is considered an ideal material in aerospace, automobile and other fields because of its lightweight, high specific strength and easy processing. However, low hardness and strength of the surface of aluminum alloys are the main factors that limit their applications. The purpose of this study is to obtain a composite coating with high hardness and lubricating properties by applying GO–PVA over MAO coating.

A pulsed bipolar power supply was used as power supply to prepare the micro-arc oxidation (MAO) coating on 6061 aluminum sample. Then a graphene oxide-polyvinyl alcohol (GO–PVA) composite coating was prepared on MAO coating for subsequent experiments. Samples were characterized by Fourier infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analysis. The friction test is carried out by the relative movement of the copper ball and the aluminum disk on the friction tester.

Results showed that the friction coefficient of MAO samples was reduced by 80% after treated with GO–PVA composite film.

This research has made a certain contribution to the surface hardness and tribological issues involved in the lightweight design of aluminum alloys.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-12-2023-0427/

To improve the apparel e-customized system and meet consumers’ personalized requirement in the e-customization, the purpose of this paper is to develop an e-customized co-design system on garment design (ECS-GD) that enables users to co-design garment and communicate with stakeholders.

The e-customized co-design system mainly consists of function and modular structure, communication and evaluation modular. Based on the evolutionary algorithm and fuzzy theory, the e-customized system model is proposed with a presentation of garment interface. Based on the parameters of skirts, technical sketches, fabrics, color, patterns, comments and scores, the decision is made by consumers.

For the system to be effective, the system was conducted by multi-individuals co-work (consumers, designers, manufacturers and experts). The data flow was congruent to the design knowledge. The expert evaluation and communication were involved in the proposed system.

The limitation of this study is that the system is not tested in experiments. The model, main function and data flow are proposed in this study, which is important in the e-customized co-design system development.

Compared to the e-shopping and garment recommendation, the proposed ECS-GD is a good approach to improve the existing e-customized system and a well solution to help consumers with design knowledge recommending, professional suggestions and evaluations. Besides, the sketches and knowledge recommendation are provided to consumers which is a learning process.

At present, smartphones are embedded with accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers and WiFi sensors. Most researchers have delved into the use of these sensors for localization. However, there are still many problems in reducing fingerprint mismatching and fusing these positioning data. The purpose of this paper is to improve positioning accuracy by reducing fingerprint mismatching and designing a weighted fusion algorithm.

For the problem of magnetic mismatching caused by singularity fingerprint, derivative Euclidean distance uses adjacent fingerprints to eliminate the influence of singularity fingerprint. To improve the positioning accuracy and robustness of the indoor navigation system, a weighted extended Kalman filter uses a weighted factor to fuse multisensor data.

The scenes of the teaching building, study room and office building are selected to collect data to test the algorithm’s performance. Experiments show that the average positioning accuracies of the teaching building, study room and office building are 1.41 m, 1.17 m, and 1.77 m, respectively.

The algorithm proposed in this paper effectively reduces fingerprint mismatching and improve positioning accuracy by adding a weighted factor. It provides a feasible solution for indoor positioning.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decision making.

The online experiment, programmed in the PHP scripting language, had 107 participants: local managers of four large, well-known and supply chain–intensive firms in China (Lenovo, Shenhua, CMST and GM).

The authors find that, as compared with American subjects, Chinese subjects engage in more demand chasing, order quantities that are closer to the mean demand, have a lower expected profit and exhibit greater variance in order quantities. However, these observations may not hold when the cross-cultural comparison is conducted for each pair of ethnic subgroups whose members have the same cognitive reflection test score, a measure of individual differences. Moreover, cultural differences also affect how individual differences manifest in newsvendor decisions.

The authors findings have important implications for employee selection, training and management in any cross-cultural business environment.

Little attention has been paid, in the behavioural operations literature, to individual differences and how they interact with culture. This paper is the first to examine the interaction effects of cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decisions, and it highlights an important research area that is currently understudied in operations management.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to illustrate how network governance based on banks’ e-commerce platform reduces loan risks and mitigates credit rationing in supply chain financing (SCF).

The authors conceptualize network governance in terms of authority structure and interorganizational mechanism dimensions, and derive the model of its determinants through arguments drawn from the existing literature. Structural equation modeling is employed to test the theoretical model on data collected from a sample of 271 independent supply chain trading partners in rural China.

The findings indicate that network governance based on banks’ e-commerce platform could integrate the operations and finances in supply chain management to solve the problems of information asymmetry, costly monitoring, insufficient qualified collaterals and mitigate farmers’ credit rationing. The collaborative credit-granting mechanism and collaborative debt enforcement mechanism formed by the authority structure and interorganizational mechanisms are the key factors to realize the complete compatibility of incentives. The bank e-commerce platform can provide a foundation for the authority structure and interorganizational mechanisms to enhance the predictability of applicants’ transaction and then safeguard the financial exchanges in supply chain.

The research results indicate that it is important to support farmers to establish long-term transaction relationships with leading enterprises through organizational innovation in the development of agricultural industrialization and build a visualization platform for SCF through technological innovation.

This paper contributes to the limited knowledge about network governance mechanisms in SCF by illustrating the model of network governance based on banks’ e-commerce platform and its determinants.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the initial corrosion behavior of pure Mg, AZ31 and AZ91 alloys in phosphate buffer solution (PBS) and to characterize the features in corrosion type and resistance of the corrosion product layer.

The scanning electron microscopy, equipped with energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy have been used to characterize the as-corroded samples. Besides, the Mg²⁺ concentration in PBSs has been determined by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrum.

It has been found that pure Mg suffers pit corrosion, and AZ31 initially undergoes pit corrosion and then uniform corrosion dominates with an extended immersion duration. However, AZ91 exhibits the uniform corrosion with the highest corrosion rate among the three materials. Besides, the corrosion product layer on AZ31 has the best compactness and corrosion resistance.

The findings add depth in understanding the corrosion of pure Mg and its alloys in PBS and also have guiding significance in exploring the effects by alloyed elements to develop new biomaterials with better performance.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of similarities and differences between small and medium technology enterprises of Zhongguancun in China and Silicon Valley in the USA in the following aspects of their activities: scale, diversity and the strength of entrepreneurial networks; quality of collaboration network; reputation in the sense of stakeholders’ perception at the local market; and foreign networks.

The study uses a survey method. The analysis of variance statistical technique was applied to each aspect.

The investigation reveals that Chinese companies have more stakeholders among relatives and friends, government, universities, accounting/law, as well as collaborate more with competitors and suppliers, while the US companies have more and collaborate diverse relations with its clients. In America, companies tend to trust their partners more than they do in China. For Chinese companies, the local government appraises business more than the USA. Employees from the US companies also take more pride in telling others that they are members of the business. Domestic customers positively rate business products. Chinese companies actually have better access to foreign resources than the USA and collaborate more with their foreign stakeholders.

Understanding the distinctive features of each regional system is crucial for the success of small and medium technology enterprises for both Chinese and US entrepreneurs.

This paper is a pioneer in the comparison and analysis of the two regions.

The Western-centric nature of research into corporate social responsibility (CSR) has left gaps in one’s understanding of local culture's role in augmenting or undermining the impact of firms' CSR policies. This paper constructs and tests variables measuring “Confucian values” mediation between Chinese employees' perceived CSR and their job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior.

The hypotheses were tested through structural equation modeling, using data from 311 responses completed by employees at Chinese private companies, located in China's Cheng-Yu economic area (Chongqing and Chengdu).

Chinese employees' perceived CSR had a positive significant effect on job attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment). However, perceived CSR had no significant positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior. The authors also found that Confucian values are a partial mediator between perceived CSR and job attitudes and a full mediator between perceived CSR and organizational citizenship behavior.

The results enrich one’s understanding of cultural values in these relationships and suggest further research into how firms and governments in Confucian-based societies can better operationalize Confucian values to argument the firm's and country's CSR identity, thus improving job attitudes and public relations among customers who share this cultural heritage. For non-Confucian societies and foreign firms operating in China, the results encourage searches for Confucian value substitutes, such as trust and education, to incorporate into CSR mechanisms that promote these values among employees. The authors suggest approaches for furthering these agendas.

The global performance of industrial robots partly depends on the properties of drive system consisting of motor inertia, gearbox inertia, etc. This paper aims to deal with the problem of optimization of global dynamic performance for robotic drive system selected from available components.

Considering the performance specifications of drive system, an optimization model whose objective function is composed of working efficiency and natural frequency of robots is proposed. Meanwhile, constraints including the rated and peak torque of motor, lifetime of gearbox and light-weight were taken into account. Furthermore, the mapping relationship between discrete optimal design variables and component properties of drive system were presented. The optimization problem with mixed integer variables was solved by a mixed integer-laplace crossover power mutation algorithm.

The optimization results show that our optimization model and methods are applicable, and the performances are also greatly promoted without sacrificing any constraints of drive system. Besides, the model fits the overall performance well with respect to light-weight ratio, safety, cost reduction and others.

The proposed drive system optimization method has been used for a 4-DOF palletizing robot, which has been largely manufactured in a factory.

This paper focuses on how the simulation-based optimization can be used for the purpose of generating trade-offs between cost, performance and lifetime when designing robotic drive system. An applicable optimization model and method are proposed to handle the dynamic performance optimization problem of a drive system for industrial robot.

The authors empirically examined the theoretically recognized industrial linkages between manufacturing and services from the trade perspective. In particular, they confirmed the trade effect of manufacturing on services, given that global value chain fragmentation pervades and splits manufacturing and services segments separately in developed and developing countries.

Based on observations of 47 countries with manufacturing and service trade data from 1990 to 2020 and with gravity model specification, the authors primarily used the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation with multiple levels of fixed effects. Considering that many zero values are included in the dependent variable and potential endogeneity, other methods such as Tobit regression, Heckman estimation and two-stage least squares estimation (2SLS) are used. Subsample estimation also supplemented the empirical research.

The results showed that manufacturing trade is a stepping-stone rather than an obstacle to service trade. This finding exhibited significant robustness under different model specifications, instrumental variable estimation and subsample checks. Moreover, in contrast to the north–north country ties, manufacturing trade between northern and southern countries has played a prominent stepping-stone role; meanwhile, manufacturing trade among core–peripheral countries has a considerably more significant impact than the outcomes of core–core and peripheral–peripheral countries.

The authors provided direct clarification and revealed that trade in manufacturing remains the demand basis for service trade. As trade in manufacturing and services are typical phenomena of transnational production linkages, the authors suggested exploring the underlying role of global value chain (GVC) fragmentation and the offset and even barrier effect of biased institutional arrangements on GVC fragmentation.