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This chapter reviews three main issues in the interactions between air transport and high-speed rail (HSR) in China, namely the interaction between low-cost carriers (LCCs) and HSR, HSR speed effect on airlines, and airline–HSR integration. Studies on these three aspects of airline–HSR interactions have yet been well reviewed, and our chapter aims to fill in this gap. In this chapter, we comprehensively survey literature on the topics, especially studies on Chinese markets that have recently witnessed major HSR developments (and have planned further large-scale HSR expansion in the coming years). Our review shows that, first, compared to full-service carriers, LCCs face fiercer competition from HSR. However, the expansion of HSR network in China can be better coordinated with LCC development. Second, HSR speed exerts two countervailing effects on airline demand and price (the “travel-time” effect and “safety” effect, respectively). Specifically, an HSR speed reduction can have a positive effect on airlines due to longer HSR travel time, but a negative effect on airlines due to improved perception on HSR safety. Third, airline–HSR integration can be implemented through cooperation between airlines and HSR operators and through co-location of airports and HSR stations and can have important implications for intermodal transport and social welfare.

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) and electrical resistance tomography (ERT) are promising techniques for multiphase flow measurement due to their high speed, low cost, non-invasive and visualization features. There are two major difficulties in image reconstruction for ECT and ERT: the “soft-field”effect, and the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, which includes two problems: under-determined problem and the solution is not stable, i.e. is very sensitive to measurement errors and noise. This paper aims to summarize and evaluate various reconstruction algorithms which have been studied and developed in the word for many years and to provide reference for further research and application.

In the past 10 years, various image reconstruction algorithms have been developed to deal with these problems, including in the field of industrial multi-phase flow measurement and biological medical diagnosis.

This paper reviews existing image reconstruction algorithms and the new algorithms proposed by the authors for electrical capacitance tomography and electrical resistance tomography in multi-phase flow measurement and biological medical diagnosis.

The authors systematically summarize and evaluate various reconstruction algorithms which have been studied and developed in the word for many years and to provide valuable reference for practical applications.

In this chapter, we will review the history, deregulation, policy reforms, and airline consolidations and mergers of the Chinese airline industry. The measurement of airline competition in China’s domestic market will also be discussed. Although air deregulation is still ongoing, the Chinese airline industry has become a market-driven business subject to some mild regulations. Then, we will review the impressive development of the high-speed rail (HSR) network in China and its effects on the domestic civil aviation market. In general, previous studies have found that the introduction of HSR services has a significant negative impact on airfare and air travel demand in China. The rapidly expanding network of HSR has important policy implications for Chinese airlines.

Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.

Most of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.

The work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.

The study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.

Knowledge sharing has entered the stage of knowledge payment with the typical models of paid Q&A, live session, paid subscription, course column and community service. Numerous knowledge suppliers have begun to pour into the knowledge payment market, and users' willingness to pay for premium content has increased. However, the academic research on knowledge payment has just begun.

In this paper, the authors searched several bibliographic databases using keywords such as “knowledge payment”, “paid Q&A”, “pay for answer”, “social Q&A”, “paywall” and “online health consultation” and selected papers from aspects of research scenes, research topics, etc. Finally, a total of 116 articles were identified for combing studies.

This study found that in the early research, scholars paid attention to the definition of knowledge payment concept and the discrimination of typical models. With the continuous enrichment of research literature, the research direction has gradually been refined into three main branches from the perspective of research objects, i.e. knowledge provider, knowledge demander and knowledge payment platform.

This paper focuses on discussing and sorting out the key research issues from these three research genres. Finally, the authors found out conflicting and contradictory research results and research gaps in the existing research and then put forward the urgent research topics.

Due to the increasing size and complexity of construction projects, construction engineering and management involves the coordination of many complex and dynamic processes and relies on the analysis of uncertain, imprecise and incomplete information, including subjective and linguistically expressed information. Various modelling and computing techniques have been used by construction researchers and applied to practical construction problems in order to overcome these challenges, including fuzzy hybrid techniques. Fuzzy hybrid techniques combine the human-like reasoning capabilities of fuzzy logic with the capabilities of other techniques, such as optimization, machine learning, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and simulation, to capitalise on their strengths and overcome their limitations. Based on a review of construction literature, this chapter identifies the most common types of fuzzy hybrid techniques applied to construction problems and reviews selected papers in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique to illustrate their capabilities for addressing construction challenges. Finally, this chapter discusses areas for future development of fuzzy hybrid techniques that will increase their capabilities for solving construction-related problems. The contributions of this chapter are threefold: (1) the limitations of some standard techniques for solving construction problems are discussed, as are the ways that fuzzy methods have been hybridized with these techniques in order to address their limitations; (2) a review of existing applications of fuzzy hybrid techniques in construction is provided in order to illustrate the capabilities of these techniques for solving a variety of construction problems and (3) potential improvements in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique in construction are provided, as areas for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to study the parameter estimation problem of nonlinear multivariable output error moving average systems.

A partially coupled extended stochastic gradient algorithm is presented for nonlinear multivariable systems by using the decomposition technique.

The proposed algorithm can realize the coupled computation of the parameter estimates between subsystems.

This paper develops a coupled parameter estimation algorithm for nonlinear multivariable systems and directly estimates the system parameters without over-parameterization.

More and more attention has been paid to the financing of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and environmental protection. Many literatures have done detailed research on them; yet, few of them studied the interaction between corporate financing behaviors and environmental concerns. This study aims to incorporate the impact of the role of data collection into the mathematical model to explore the optimal financial and ordering strategies when considering environmental protection.

A Stackelberg game modeling and backward induction methods are used to derive the optimal equilibrium solutions, using numerical experiments to further explore the influences of various financing strategies on the green degree of product and ordering policies.

No matter which financing modes the capital-constrained retailer chooses, both the loan interest rate and order quantity considering environmental protection are larger than that without environmental protection concerns. As the retailer's initial capital increases, the optimal loan interest rates under various financing modes are all decreasing. The application of big data technology would promote the environmental protection of enterprises and increase the accuracy of financing decisions.

This paper studies financing activities of a supply chain considering data collection and environmental protection behaviors, which provides meaningful guidance for the financing and environmental decision-making of enterprises.

This paper aims to present a control strategy that eliminates the longitudinal and lateral drifting movements of the coaxial ducted fan unmanned helicopter (UH) during autonomous take-off and landing and reduce the coupling characteristics between channels of the coaxial UH for its special model structure.

Unidirectional auxiliary surfaces (UAS) for terminal sliding mode controller (TSMC) are designed for the flight control system of the coaxial UH, and a hierarchical flight control strategy is proposed to improve the decoupling ability of the coaxial UH.

It is demonstrated that the proposed height control strategy can solve the longitudinal and lateral movements during autonomous take-off and landing phase. The proposed hierarchical controller can decouple vertical and heading coupling problem which exists in coaxial UH. Furthermore, the confronted UAS-TSMC method can guarantee finite-time convergence and meet the quick flight trim requirements during take-off and landing.

The designed flight control strategy has not implemented in real flight test yet, as all the tests are conducted in the numerical simulation and simulation with a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform.

The designed flight control strategy can solve the common problem of coupling characteristics between channels for coaxial UH, and it has important theoretical basis and reference value for engineering application; the control strategy can meet the demands of engineering practice.

In consideration of the TSMC approach, which can increase the convergence speed of the system state effectively, and the high level of response speed requirements to UH flight trim, the UAS-TSMC method is first applied to the coaxial ducted fan UH flight control. The proposed control strategy is implemented on the UH flight control system, and the HIL simulation clearly demonstrates that a much better performance could be achieved.

Bounds on the rate of convergence of learning processes based on random samples and probability are one of the essential components of statistical learning theory (SLT). The constructive distribution‐independent bounds on generalization are the cornerstone of constructing support vector machines. Random sets and set‐valued probability are important extensions of random variables and probability, respectively. The paper aims to address these issues.

In this study, the bounds on the rate of convergence of learning processes based on random sets and set‐valued probability are discussed. First, the Hoeffding inequality is enhanced based on random sets, and then making use of the key theorem the non‐constructive distribution‐dependent bounds of learning machines based on random sets in set‐valued probability space are revisited. Second, some properties of random sets and set‐valued probability are discussed.

In the sequel, the concepts of the annealed entropy, the growth function, and VC dimension of a set of random sets are presented. Finally, the paper establishes the VC dimension theory of SLT based on random sets and set‐valued probability, and then develops the constructive distribution‐independent bounds on the rate of uniform convergence of learning processes. It shows that such bounds are important to the analysis of the generalization abilities of learning machines.

SLT is considered at present as one of the fundamental theories about small statistical learning.