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To improve unsafe workplace of Chinese SMEs, this paper aims to use the multi-agent simulation experiment to reveal the relationship between employees’ safety voice and safety level of enterprises.

Through simulation of employees’ safety voice activities, enterprises’ production activities, enterprises’ safety activities, an experiment platform is built. The experiment introduces external variable of labor resource and sets four experimental situations considering whether labor resource is sufficient and whether employees’ value is significant.

The result shows that not all the employees’ safety voice can change small- and medium-sized enterprises’ safety level. When there is sufficient labor supply, employee safety voice cannot improve the safety level of enterprises; when there is short of labor and employee safety voice is strong, safety level can be effectively improved. When employees have the strikingly different value variance, safety voice of common employees cannot improve safety level of enterprises, but employee safety voice with high value can improve safety level.

This fully provides that under the circumstances of disappearing demographic dividend in China, improving employees’ safety awareness and reasonably using their safety voice can boost SMEs to enhance safety level.

Logistics practitioners must continually improve inventory management processes as they daily respond to the twin drivers of customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the scenario of sourcing goods through lateral transshipments in a periodic-review policy setting, against a backdrop of cost optimization objectives.

The authors develop decision rules that make cost-optimized selection between backordering and combined reactive and proactive lateral transshipment options possible. This necessarily takes account of the trade-off between purchasing, holding and backorder cost components. In addition, the authors use simulation studies to illustrate the superior performance of the proposed decision options.

According to results of the simulation studies, the proposed two-step decision rule generates the lower inventory cost than the alternative decisions rules. The outperformance of proposed two-step decision rule is valid in different scenario.

This study develops the decision rules to assist wholesaler logistics practitioners to make optimized decisions with regard to whether they should proactively lateral transshipments and if selected, the optimum size of the extra lateral transshipment.

This study has made a significant contribution to the existing knowledge base as it develops decision rules for a combined proactive and reactive approach using lateral transhipments to meet both urgent demand and a part of the demand expected during the supplier lead time in a cost-efficient way.

Forecasting population movement trends is crucial for implementing effective policies to regulate labor force growth and understand demographic changes. Combining migration theory expertise and neural network technology can bring a fresh perspective to international migration forecasting research.

This study proposes a conditional generative adversarial neural network model incorporating the migration knowledge – conditional generative adversarial network (MK-CGAN). By using the migration knowledge to design the parameters, MK-CGAN can effectively address the limited data problem, thereby enhancing the accuracy of migration forecasts.

The model was tested by forecasting migration flows between different countries and had good generalizability and validity. The results are robust as the proposed solutions can achieve lesser mean absolute error, mean squared error, root mean square error, mean absolute percentage error and R² values, reaching 0.9855 compared to long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit, generative adversarial network (GAN) and the traditional gravity model.

This study is significant because it demonstrates a highly effective technique for predicting international migration using conditional GANs. By incorporating migration knowledge into our models, we can achieve prediction accuracy, gaining valuable insights into the differences between various model characteristics. We used SHapley Additive exPlanations to enhance our understanding of these differences and provide clear and concise explanations for our model predictions. The results demonstrated the theoretical significance and practical value of the MK-CGAN model in predicting international migration.

The new Silk Road provides cross-border-e-commerce firms with an opportunity to widen their markets. Under this circumstance, the preference recognition of countries and inventory allocation among overseas warehouses both become critical issues to solve. Three Chinese smartphone brands, including HTC, Huawei, and MI, are selected in this chapter for their relatively enormous sales. DHgate and AliExpress websites are chosen as platforms to analyze the sales for data availability. This chapter first depicts key features of the sales and then, based on which, divide countries into several groups according to their preference for phones by cluster analysis. Then, based on the results of cluster analysis, this chapter further models the inventory assignment among the seven major overseas warehouses that were built by AliExpress in 2015. The results show that the HTC seems to be pursuing the “high value with high price” strategy, while the other two companies seem to be pursuing a hybrid strategy of “low-price” strategy and “high value with low price” strategy. This chapter also provides an assignment pattern of inventory among the overseas warehouses based on the real data of sales and costs.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the total cost function of an inventory system with a reorder point/order quantity policy where the lead time is controllable based on the cost paid by the buyer for the service.

Cost functions are presented to investigate how the changes in lead time affect different components of inventory cost in the present of random demand. Two methods including an iteration technique and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm are presented to deal with the cost optimization issue. The application of proposed model is illustrated using numerical case scenarios.

The cost functions show that besides ordering cost, change in stochastic demand during lead time is the major factor that affects the other cost components such as holding and penalty costs. This finding is validated by numerical study. Results also show that performance of SA algorithm is highly similar to iteration methodology, while the former one is easier in application.

This paper develops less complex, more pragmatic methods, easily adoptable by logistics managers for cost minimization. This paper also analyzes and highlights the unique characteristics and features of these two approaches that can help practitioners in making the right choice when faced with the identified logistics issue.

This research explicitly investigate impacts of changing lead time on inventory cost components which enables informed decision making and inventory system planning for cost optimization by logistics practitioners. Two methodologies that can be easily used by practitioners without deep mathematical analysis and is cost effective are introduced to solve the optimization problem. Detailed roadmaps of how to implement proposed approaches have been illustrated by different case scenarios.

All along the length of the supply chain, fresh food firms face the challenge of managing both product quality, due to the perishable nature of the products, and product cost. The purpose of this paper to develop a method to assist logistics managers upstream in the fresh food supply chain in making cost optimized decisions regarding transportation, with the objective of minimizing the total cost while maintaining the quality of food products above acceptable levels.

Considering the case of multiple fresh food products collected from multiple farms being transported to a warehouse or a retailer, this study develops a total cost model that includes various costs incurred during transportation. The practical application of the model is illustrated by using several computational intelligence approaches including genetic algorithms (GA), fuzzy genetic algorithms (FGA) as well as an improved simulated annealing (SA) procedure applied with a repair mechanism for efficiency benchmarking. The authors demonstrate the practical viability of these approaches by using a simulation study based on pertinent data and evaluate the simulation outcomes.

The application of the proposed total cost model was demonstrated using three approaches of GA, FGA and SA with a repair mechanism. All three approaches are adoptable; however, based on the performance evaluation, it was evident that the FGA is more likely to produce a better performance than the other two approaches of GA and SA.

This study provides a pragmatic approach for supporting logistics and supply chain practitioners in fresh food industry in making important decisions on the arrangements and procedures related to the transportation of multiple fresh food products to a warehouse from multiple farms in a cost-effective way without compromising product quality.

This study extends the literature on cold supply chain management by investigating cost and quality optimization in a multi-product scenario from farms to a retailer and, minimizing cost by managing the quality above expected quality levels at delivery. The scalability of the proposed generic function enables the application to alternative situations in practice such as different storage environments and transportation conditions, etc.

Twenty-two coal samples and eleven parting samples were taken from Gashun Coal Mine, Hoxtolgay coalfield, Xingjiang Autonomous Region, and the samples were analyzed by using optical microscopy. The results indicate that the dominant macerals are vitrinite (av. 76.6%) with minor amounts of inertinite (av. 18.84%) and low liptinite (av. 2.7%), along with low content of mineral matters (av. 1.86%). All GI, TPI, VI, GWI values and two facies diagrams indicate that the main coal facies are in limnic area. Meanwhile, the overall petrographic composition and coal facies types indicate that the coal formed in strong wet reducing peat accumulating conditions which were the lacustrine marshes.

After the official definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Forum on Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries in 2002, the concept was soon introduced to China and popularised among scholars, practitioners, and educators. After ten years of proliferation, it is important to explore the landscape of Chinese OER research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper adopts social network analysis (SNA) to analyse the network defining the citations of 133 OER journal articles published in China.

The findings illustrate that the academic circle of OER in China is small, which leads to restricted innovation. Most publications are produced by researchers working at comprehensive universities and normal universities (teachers colleges).

In these universities, a number of active OER researchers are emerging, but no OER research team can be identified from their citation networks. Currently, most OER research is still descriptive research, and only few case studies are being to gradually be conducted.

As the Chinese OER research is still in the initial stage, more research projects in OER need to be explored to construct higher quality and more influential open content to achieve deep openness.

In the literature, no one has adopted the SNA to analyse the citation network of Chinese OER research.