This paper reports on an empirical study to assess the impacts, benefits, and critical success factors of mobile applications to enhance an electronic procurement system. For different user groups, we analyze the role of the work environment for the usage and, ultimately, the benefits of the...

Firms benefit from participating in a consortium in two ways: from the final products and from the cooperation process. We define the latter as process benefits, which include both inter-organizational learning benefits and social capital benefits. This paper examines the drivers of these two...

Firms benefit from participating in a consortium in two ways: from final products and from the cooperation process. Process benefits, including interorganizational learning and social capital benefits, are critical to motivate firms to participate in a consortium. However, there is limited...

This paper discusses the underlying relationship between surplus labor and the Lewis turning point in the duration of rapid economic growth in China. An agent-based model was proposed for studying the Lewis turning point and labor resource allocation, in which the decision-making interactions...

This paper identifies the main features of CO2 emission from fossil energy combustion in China. Then it estimates China's future energy requirements and projects its CO2 emission from 2010 to 2020 based on the scenario analysis approach. China's rate of carbon productivity growth is estimated to...

Extrusion is one of the fundamental production methods in the polymer processing industry and is used in the production of a large number of commodities in a diverse industrial sector. Being an energy intensive production method, process energy efficiency is one of the major concerns and the...

Thermal stability is of major importance in polymer extrusion, where product quality is dependent upon the level of melt homogeneity achieved by the extruder screw. Extrusion is an energy intensive process and optimisation of process energy usage while maintaining melt stability is necessary in...

Township and Village Foundries (TVFs) are playing a more important role in the national foundry industry. The proportion of casting produced by TVFs has increased in the past two decades, taking about 65% of total national output. The average scale of TVFs is small. The integrated energy...

Quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) is an efficient and powerful population-based optimization technique, which is inspired by the conventional particle swarm optimization (PSO) and quantum mechanics theories. In this paper, an improved QPSO named SQPSO is proposed, which combines...