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The purpose of this study was to investigate the tribological properties of bulk Fe₂B with pre-oxidation treatment.

Bulk Fe₂B was oxidized in an electric box furnace with a soaking time of 9 min under 750°C in air. Then, the tribological experiments were carried out on an UMT-Tribolab tester.

The oxide layer was composed of Fe, Fe₂O₃, Fe₃O₄, B₂O₃ and H₃BO₃. The oxidative direction of bulk Fe₂B was perpendicular to the sample surface. But, the oxidative direction of Fe₂B crystals was irregular. At 0.1 m/s, the friction coefficient was the lowest. The effects of shortening the running-in period of friction and reducing the friction coefficient by pre-oxidation treatment at 0.1 m/s were remarkable. Nevertheless, the effect of pre-oxidation treatment was futile at 0.2 m/s. Wear mechanisms of oxidized Fe₂B mainly were adhesive and abrasive wear.

The effects of shortening the running-in period of friction and reducing the friction coefficient by pre-oxidation treatment were remarkable.

To enrich the research on the economic consequences of enterprise digital development from the perspective of capacity utilization.

Using a sample of listed firms from 2010 to 2020, this paper exploits text analysis of annual reports to construct a proxy for enterprise digital development.

Results show that enterprise digital development not only improves their own capacity utilization but also generates a positive spillover effect on the capacity utilization of peer firms and firms in the supply chain. Next, based on the incomplete information about market demand and potential competitors when making capacity-building decisions, the mechanism tests show that improving the accuracy of market forecasts and reducing investment surges are potential channels behind the baseline results. Cross-sectional tests show the baseline result is more pronounced when industries are highly homogeneous and when firms have access to less information.

This paper contributes to the research related to the economic consequences of digital development. With the development of the digital economy, the real effects of enterprise digital development have also triggered extensive interest and exploration. Existing studies mainly examine the impact on physical operations, such as specialization division of labor, innovation activities, business performance or total factor productivity (Huang, Yu, & Zhang, 2019; Yuan, Xiao, Geng, & Sheng, 2021; Wang, Kuang, & Shao, 2017; Li, Liu, & Shao, 2021; Zhao, Wang, & Li, 2021). These studies measure the economic benefits from the perspective of the supply (output) side but neglect the importance of the supply system to adapt to the actual market demand. In contrast, this paper focuses on capacity utilization, aimed at estimating the net economic effect of digital development by considering the supply-demand fit scenario. Thus, our findings enrich the relevant studies on the potential consequences of digital development.

How to manage outsourced employees in interorganizational teams with triangular relationships has not yet attracted enough attention. Based on relative deprivation theory, this study explores how relative deprivation affects outsourced employees’ innovative behavior and investigates the complex moderating effects of dual organizational support.

The authors tested their hypothesis by conducting a two-wave survey; responses to a questionnaire were collected from 283 outsourced employees and their managers among 52 client organizations.

Results found that relative deprivation negatively influences the outsourced employees’ innovative behavior by eliciting their perceptions of status conflict. Support from client (supplier) organization attenuates (aggravates) the positive impact of relative deprivation on innovative behavior throughout status conflict. The moderating effect of client organizational support was moderated by support from supplier organization.

The authors selected the outsourced employees in a Chinese context to conduct this study, and the results need to be generalized in future research.

Client organizational support can alleviate the negative effect of relative deprivation on outsourced employees, whereas supplier organization support aggravates the negative effect; managers should pay attention to the different effects of the two organizations’ support and provide reasonable support for outsourced employees.

This study identified the mechanism of relative deprivation’s effect on outsourced employees’ innovative behavior from the perspective of interpersonal interaction and compared the effect of support from dual organizations. This study expands the research on triangular relationships, relative deprivation, status conflict and other field.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a DC-port voltage balance strategy realizing it by logic combination modulation (LCM). This voltage balance strategy is brief and high efficient, which can be used in many power electronic devices adopting the cascaded H-bridge rectifier (CHBR) such as power electronic transformer (PET).

The CHBR is typically as a core component in the power electronic devices to implement the voltage or current conversion. The modulation method presented here is aiming to solve the voltage imbalance problem occurred in the CHBR with more stable work station and higher reliability in ordinary operating conditions. In particular, by changing the switch states smoothly and quickly, the DC-port voltage can be controlled as the ideal value even one of the modules in CHBR is facing the load-removed problem.

By using the voltage balance strategy of LCM, the problem of voltage imbalance occurring in three-phase cascaded rectifiers has been solved properly. With the lower modulation depth, the efficiency of the strategy is shown to be better and stronger. The strategy can work reliably and quickly no matter facing the problem as load-removed change or the ordinary operating conditions.

The limitation of the proposed DC-port voltage balance strategy is calculated and proved, in a three-module CHBR, the LCM could balance the DC-port voltage while one module facing the load-removed situation under 0.83 modulation depth.

This paper provides a useful and particular voltage balance strategy which can be used in the topology of three-phase cascaded rectifier. The value of the strategy is that a brief and reliable voltage balance method in the power electronic devices can be achieved. What is more, facing the problem, such as load-removed, in outport, the strategy can response quickly with no switch jump and switch frequency rising.

The purpose of this paper is to build a link between empowering leadership and change-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) based on the theory of the socially embedded model so as to explore why empowering leadership has an impact on change-oriented OCBs and for whom this effect may be amplified or alleviated.

Using data collected from 203 employees and 80 supervisors in one information technology company, the authors examined the mediating role of thriving at work and the moderating role of autonomy between empowering leadership and change-oriented OCBs. The authors used statistical methods such as hierarchical regression, bootstrapping test, and so on to analyze the data.

The results indicated that empowering leadership was positively related to thriving at work, and thus in turn influenced change-oriented OCBs. In addition, employees’ autonomy orientation moderated those relationships such that when employees were had high autonomy orientations, they thrived at work to a high degree and were more likely to perform change-oriented OCBs.

The authors collected the data of this study within a single organization, and that may limit the observed viability and decrease external validity.

The findings suggest that leaders’ empowering behaviors are a critical factor for simulating employees’ change-oriented OCBs. They also indicate that leaders are better off empowering individuals with high autonomy orientations.

This study contributes to the literature by linking empowering leadership and change-oriented OCBs. It clarifies how and why empowering leadership can stimulate employees’ change-oriented OCBs.

This paper aims to identify data set entities in scientific literature. To address poor recognition caused by a lack of training corpora in existing studies, a distant supervised learning-based approach is proposed to identify data set entities automatically from large-scale scientific literature in an open domain.

Firstly, the authors use a dictionary combined with a bootstrapping strategy to create a labelled corpus to apply supervised learning. Secondly, a bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT)-based neural model was applied to identify data set entities in the scientific literature automatically. Finally, two data augmentation techniques, entity replacement and entity masking, were introduced to enhance the model generalisability and improve the recognition of data set entities.

In the absence of training data, the proposed method can effectively identify data set entities in large-scale scientific papers. The BERT-based vectorised representation and data augmentation techniques enable significant improvements in the generality and robustness of named entity recognition models, especially in long-tailed data set entity recognition.

This paper provides a practical research method for automatically recognising data set entities in scientific literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply distant learning to the study of data set entity recognition. The authors introduce a robust vectorised representation and two data augmentation strategies (entity replacement and entity masking) to address the problem inherent in distant supervised learning methods, which the existing research has mostly ignored. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively improves the recognition of data set entities, especially long-tailed data set entities.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method that can calculate the transportation infrastructure network service capacity enhancement given by planned transportation infrastructure projects construction. Managers can sequence projects more rationally to maximize the construction effectiveness of infrastructure investments.

This paper designed a computational network simulation software to generate topological networks based on established rules. Based on the topological networks, the software simulated the movement path of users and calculated the average travel time. This software allows the adjustment of parameters to suit different research objectives. The average travel time is used as an evaluation index to determine the most appropriate construction sequence.

In this paper, the transportation infrastructure network of Sichuan Province in China was used to demonstrate this software. The average travel time of the existing transportation network in Sichuan Province was calculated as 211 min using this software. The high-speed railways from Leshan to Xichang and from Xichang to Yibin had the greatest influence on shortening the average travel time. This paper also measured the changes in the average travel time under two strategies: shortening the maximum and minimum priorities. All the transportation network optimisation plans for Sichuan Province will be somewhere between these two strategies.

The contribution of this research are three aspects: First, a complex network analysis method that can take into account the differences of node elements is proposed. Second, it provides an effective tool for decision makers to plan transportation infrastructure construction. Third, the construction sequence of transportation infrastructure development plan can effect the infrastructure investment effectiveness.

China's marine economy occupies an important position within the national economy, and its contribution thereto is constantly improving. The overall operation of the marine economy shows positive developmental trends with potential for further growth. The purpose of this research is to analyse the prosperity of China's marine economy, reveal trends therein and forecast the likely turning point in its operation.

Based on the periodicity and fluctuation of China's marine economy development, China's marine economic prosperity indicator system is established from five perspectives. On this basis, China's marine economic operation prosperity index can be synthesised and calculated, then a dynamic factor model is constructed. Using the filtering method to calculate China's marine economic operational Stock–Watson index, Markov switching has been used to determine the trend to transition. Furthermore, China's current marine economic prosperity is evaluated through analysis of influencing factors and correlation analysis.

The analysis shows that, from 2017 to 2019, the operation of the marine economy is relatively stable, and the prosperity index supports this finding; meanwhile it also exposes problems in China's marine economy, such as an unbalanced industrial structure, low marine economic benefits and insufficient capacity for sustainable development.

Through the analysis of the prosperity of China's marine economy, the authors reveal the trends in China's marine economy and forecast its likely future turning point.

Managers of megaprojects face social risk management challenges throughout the various design, construction, and operation stages, owing to the various conflicts of interest among stakeholders, public skepticism, and opposition. However, most existing studies have not focused on the dynamic analysis of integrating social risks in these stages. This study developed a dynamic analysis approach to explore the dynamics of critical social risk factors and related stakeholders of megaprojects and built the managerial maps for various stakeholders.

Based on the social analysis network (SNA), a dynamic network analysis approach for understanding the dynamics of social risk and related stakeholders has been developed by literature and case analysis. The approach comprises the following steps: (1) generating social risk–stakeholder networks in different stages; (2) analysis of the critical stakeholders and social risk factors; (3) dynamic analysis of social risk factors; and (4) developing social risk management maps for various stakeholders. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, 40 megaprojects from China were analyzed.

According to the results, the local government is a critical stakeholder during all stages, inadequate information promotion (IIP) and imperfect communication and coordination mechanism (ICCM) are key social risk sources throughout the megaproject life cycle. Furthermore, the management maps for government organizations, project implementation groups, and external stakeholders were constructed.

This research has three contributions. First, a dynamic analysis approach of stakeholder-associated social risks in megaprojects is developed, which enriches the social risk management theory of megaprojects and provides inspiration for future research focus. Second, the social risk–stakeholder networks and critical social risks in different stages are confirmed to provide a more valid and accurate picture of social risk management in megaprojects. Third, the social risk managerial maps for different stakeholders built in this research will be beneficial for governments, project implementation groups, and external stakeholders to optimize management strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the public safety risks of international construction projects (ICPs) from the perspective of threat and vulnerability. A novel and comprehensive risk assessment approach is developed from a systemic perspective and applied to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to improve the public safety risk management strategy for ICPs in BRI.

First, a public safety risk indicator system was constructed from the two dimensions, namely threat and vulnerability. Next, an integrated measurement model was constructed by combining the Genetic Algorithm-Backpropagation (GA-BP) neural network, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method and matter-element extension (MME) method. Data from 49 countries involved in the BRI, as well as five typical projects, were used to validate the model. Finally, targeted risk prevention measures were identified for use at the national, enterprise and project levels.

The findings indicate that while the vulnerability risks of typical projects in each region of the BRI were generally low, threat risks were high in West Asia and North Africa, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and South Asia.

First, the structure of the public safety risk system of ICPs was analyzed using vulnerability and system theories. The connotation of public safety risk was defined based on two dimensions, namely threat and vulnerability. The idea of measuring threat risk with public data and measuring vulnerability risk with project data was clarified, and the risk measurement was integrated into the measurement results to help researchers and managers understand and systematically consider the public safety risks of ICPs. Second, a public safety risk indicator system was constructed, including 18 threat risk indicators and 14 vulnerability risk indicators to address the gaps in the existing research. The MEE model was employed to overcome the problem of incompatible indicator systems and provide stable and credible integrated measurement results. Finally, the whole-process public safety risk management scheme designed in this study can help to both provide a reference point for the Chinese enterprises and oversea contractors in market selection as well as improve ICP public safety risk management.