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An industrialized building system (IBS) is regarded as an effective residential building system that provides several benefits, including high quality, low cost, short time, good flexibility, reduced waste, and strong environmental performance. This system is considered to be valuable in promoting sustainable practices in China, where plans for urbanization have been established. However, the adoption of IBS in China is extremely limited. Potential risks exist and affect the attitudes of practitioners toward the use of this system. The purpose of this paper is to prioritize and analyze these risks and to develop corresponding strategies for mitigating these risks in China.

In total, 24 risks that inhibit the implementation of IBS in China are identified through literature review and examined through interviews for consistency. A questionnaire survey is conducted to quantify the significance of these risks. Cronbach’s coefficient α is employed to measure the internal consistency among the risk factors. The survey results are further analyzed using three case studies.

The top five risks identified are “poor cooperation between multi-interface,” “inappropriate design codes and standards for industrialized buildings,” “lack of management practices and experiences,” “enormous difficulty in achieving return on high initial investment,” and “lack of a quality monitoring mechanism for the production process.” The findings emphasize the government’s leading role in promoting the new building system in its introduction and enforcement of adequate policies and regulations. Practitioners are also instrumental in establishing proper understanding and knowledge of IBS and its application.

This study bridges the knowledge gaps on risk identification for implementing IBS in China. The findings provide practitioners and decision makers with valuable references for adopting adequate risk management methods and policies to promote IBS in China.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a web-based system that provides an efficient means for managing suppliers’ performance which also facilitates the leveraging of suppliers’ knowledge for the benefit of the on-going projects.

Case study approach is adopted. In total, 12 semi-structured interviews are conducted with Malaysia-based public listed construction companies to study their current practice and the requirements for the development of an information and communication technology (ICT) aided system for the purpose. Subsequently, a web-based system for managing suppliers’ performance is developed using ASP.net and MSSQL database.

Most of the case study companies are found to have low levels of ICT adoption and still resort to handling the majority of the tasks involved in the selection and management of suppliers’ performance manually. An ICT-based system that can improve the recording of important information about the suppliers, provide a function for supplier selection and facilitate the capture of useful reusable knowledge of the suppliers is needed.

The paper has shown empirically that a web-based suppliers’ performance management system eases the supplier selection process and the monitoring of suppliers’ performance. In addition, it demonstrates how such systems can be designed to capture and facilitate the leveraging of suppliers’ knowledge, and how suppliers’ knowledge contribution can be recognised as part of their performance. The system adopts a novel two-way communication model which provides the suppliers the access to their own performance records to identify room for improvements.

This study aims to predict the unstable period-1 orbit (UPO-1) of DC–DC converters and find analytical expressions to describe it.

Nonlinear dynamical phenomena of a peak–current–mode controlled direct current–direct current (DC–DC) Boost converter are discussed briefly first. Then fast fourier transform (FFT) analysis of state variables under different dynamic states is provided, and the characteristic of the harmonic content in different states is summarized. Following these, a scientific hypothesis on the harmonic content of the UPO-1 is presented, and the Equivalent Small Parameter method is adopted then, thus analytic-form expressions of the UPO-1 can be derived.

According to results of theoretical analysis, numerical simulations and experiments, this paper illustrates that, like stable period-1 orbit, the UPO-1 is also made up of the DC component and harmonics with integer times of switching frequency.

This work provides an unreported approach for extracting the UPO-1 of DC–DC converters, which is mainly based on predicting the harmonic structure information of the orbit. According to experimental parts of the work, it shows that the stabilizer can be designed easier by using the proposed method. Additionally, from a broader perspective, the results could also have implications in a wide class of forced oscillation systems.