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The purpose of this paper is to first review the implementation of automatic identification and data capture) technologies in library/information science, focusing on barcode technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communication (NFC). This paper then presents S-Library, a new android-based application, to enable users to perform a wide range of information science-related transactions, such as borrowing, searching, returning and viewing transaction records.

This paper presents the design process and the database and software components. For analysis, the authors used application testing, and also usability testing, with a questionnaire distributed to 343 users.

The implementation of NFC technology means that S-Library has a number of technical advantages over other approaches. It was also shown with user acceptance testing that there was a high degree of user satisfaction with S-Library.

Although the findings combine technical assessment and usability testing and are extremely positive, further user evaluation could be performed. In addition, S-Library does not currently read existing RFID tags, which would improve the application further.

The system proposed here shows that S-Library is a feasible approach taken to improve the library transaction experience and that it can replace and improve upon older technologies.

This paper provides a first successful demonstration of a functioning and tested android and NFC-based library transaction system and shows that this approach generates a high degree of user reliability.

In the freeze-thaw zone, the pre-stressed concrete of bridge structure will be damaged by freezing-thawing, the bearing capacity of structure will decrease and the safety will be affected. The purpose of this paper is to establish the time-dependent resistance degradation model of structure in the freeze-thaw zone, and analysis the structural reliability and remaining service life in different freeze-thaw zones.

First, according to the theory of structural design, a calculation model of the resistance of pre-stressed concrete structures in f freeze-thaw zone is established. Second, the time-dependent resistance model was verified by the test beam bending failure test results done by the research group, which has been in service for 20 years in freeze-thaw zone. Third, using JC algorithm in MATLAB to calculate the index on the reliability of pre-stressed concrete structure in frozen thawed zones, forecasting the s remaining service life of structure.

First, the calculation model of the resistance of pre-stressed concrete structures in freeze-thaw zone is accurate and it has excellent applicability. Second, the structural resistance deterioration time in Wet-Warm-Frozen Zone is the earliest. Third, once the pre-stressed reinforcement rusts, the structural reliability index will reach limit value quickly. Finally, the remaining service life of structure meets the designed expectation value only in a few of freeze-thaw zones in China.

The research will provide a reference for the design on the durability of a pre-stressed concrete structure in the freeze-thaw zone. In order to verify the security of pre-stressed concrete structures in the freeze-thaw zone, engineers can use the model presented in this paper for durability checking, it has an important significance.

Surveys multiple‐stage production planning literature to reveal that this sizeable body of research is largely inspired by single‐item production planning. Suggests several promising research opportunities, including the possible development of scheduling techniques not derived from older, single‐item procedures. Highlights the need for further comparative testing between existing “improved” techniques, as well as the wealth of work yet to be done in multiple‐stage production planning with limited resources and possible extensions to supply‐chain management.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to optimize the cycles‐to‐failure of a peened component with respect to laser peening (LP) variables: pressure magnitude, mid‐span, and spot size when the component is subject to a variable amplitude loading.

To optimally design an LP process, an experimentally validated 3D finite element simulation of the LP process, a cycles‐to‐failure estimation capability incorporating residual stress, and a particle swarm optimization strategy were developed and employed to maximize the cycles‐to‐failure of a component of a titanium turbine disk.

The most critical finding of this research is that a minor difference in the residual stress profile can lead to a large difference in the cycles‐to‐failure. This finding implies that selecting the optimization objective to be the cycles‐to‐failure is a better option as compared to the residual stress profile.

The LP‐induced residual stresses are assumed static and do not change as number of load cycles increase.

The paper develops a framework that relates the LP variables and the cycles‐to‐failure of a peened component. A modified particle swarm optimization approach is developed to optimize the fatigue life of a turbine disk.

The disjunctive graph is a network representation of the job‐shop scheduling problem, while the longest path problem (LPP) is one of the most important subjects in this research field. This paper aims to study the special topological structure of the disjunctive graph, and proposes a suite of quick value‐setting algorithms for solving the LPPs commonly encountered in job‐shop scheduling.

The topological structure of the disjunctive graph is analyzed, and some properties and propositions regarding LPPs are presented. Subsequently, algorithms are proposed for solving LPPs encountered in job‐shop scheduling.

The proposed algorithms significantly improve the efficiency of the shifting‐bottleneck procedure, making it practicable to realise real‐time scheduling and hence effective operations of modern manufacturing systems.

The paper demonstrates that it is possible to develop very efficient algorithms by imposing a special topological structure on the network.

A method is presented for calculating the critical state profiles in bulk superconductors. It can be used for asymmetric samples in non‐uniform fields and for transport currents as well as magnetisation. In this technique the sample starts with no current flowing. Elements carrying Jc are then inserted at the point of maximum vector potential and the field recalculated. The process is continued until the external field is screened from the interior. As an example the force on a magnet above a cylindrical puck is calculated.

We present Bayesian models for finding the longitudinal causal effects of a randomized two-arm training program when compliance with the randomized assignment is less than perfect in the training arm (but perfect in the non-training arm) for reasons that are potentially correlated with the outcomes. We deal with the latter confounding problem under the principal stratification framework of Sommer and Zeger (1991) and Frangakis and Rubin (1999), and others. Building on the Bayesian contributions of Imbens and Rubin (1997), Hirano et al. (2000), Yau and Little (2001) and in particular Chib (2007) and Chib and Jacobi (2007, 2008), we construct rich models of the potential outcome sequences (with and without random effects), show how informative priors can be reasonably formulated, and present tuned computational approaches for summarizing the posterior distribution. We also discuss the computation of the marginal likelihood for comparing various versions of our models. We find the causal effects of the observed intake from the predictive distribution of each potential outcome for compliers. These are calculated from the output of our estimation procedures. We illustrate the techniques and ideas with data from the 1994 JOBS II trial that was set up to test the efficacy of a job training program on subsequent mental health outcomes.

With an increase in the amount of multilingual content on the World Wide Web, users are often striving to access information provided in a language of which they are non-native speakers. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive study of user profile representation techniques and investigate their use in personalized cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems through the means of personalized query expansion.

The user profiles consist of weighted terms computed by using frequency-based methods such as tf-idf and BM25, as well as various latent semantic models trained on monolingual documents and cross-lingual comparable documents. This paper also proposes an automatic evaluation method for comparing various user profile generation techniques and query expansion methods.

Experimental results suggest that latent semantic-weighted user profile representation techniques are superior to frequency-based methods, and are particularly suitable for users with a sufficient amount of historical data. The study also confirmed that user profiles represented by latent semantic models trained on a cross-lingual level gained better performance than the models trained on a monolingual level.

Previous studies on personalized information retrieval systems have primarily investigated user profiles and personalization strategies on a monolingual level. The effect of utilizing such monolingual profiles for personalized CLIR remains unclear. The current study fills the gap by a comprehensive study of user profile representation for personalized CLIR and a novel personalized CLIR evaluation methodology to ensure repeatable and controlled experiments can be conducted.