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The main operations of the powder-coating process are staggered along a closed-loop conveyor. Given the volatile market demands, using a fixed level of staffing may result in significant productivity losses. The present study aims to capture stochastic behavior and optimize operator assignment problems in a practical powder-coating process. By using the proposed methodology, when demand changes, the optimal operator assignment configuration can be provided, ensuring high labor productivity.

The powder-coating process is an important industrial application and is often a labor-intensive system. The present study adopts a practical case to optimize its staffing level. Because of its operational complexity, the problem is solved by a proposed simulation-optimization approach. The results are promising, and the proposed methodology is shown to be an effective approach.

The proposed methodology was tested for various demand levels. The optimized operator assignment configuration always improves on the performance of other staffing levels. Given the same daily throughput, the optimized operator assignment configuration can improve performance by as much as 19%. In scenarios where there is increased demand, the resulting reduction in overtime work improves performance by between 20.33% and 56.72%. In scenarios where there is reduced demand, the optimized staffing level produces improvements between 3.13% and 50%. Compared with the fixed staffing policy of the case company, the flexible staffing policy of the proposed methodology can maintain high labor productivity across demand variations. The results are consistent with the Shojinka philosophy of the Toyota Production System.

This study proposes a solution to the operator assignment decision in a labor-intensive manufacturing system – a powder-coating processing system. Powder coating provides a solid powder coating without any solvent. Because of its excellent application performance and environmental protection, it is widely used in the field of metal coating, especially appliances for offices and homes. Most of the existing literature has solved the problem by making unrealistic assumptions. The present study proposes a simulation-optimization method to solve a practical problem in powder-coating processing. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is illustrated by a practical application. According to the experimental results, five operators can be saved for the same daily throughput. An average of 35 and 19 min of overtimes can be saved when demand increases by 10% and 20% with one less operator; between 2 and 16 operators can be saved when demand falls by 10%–60%.

This paper examines the effect of market knowledge on market success of product innovativeness and the moderating role of absorptive capacity. We separated market knowledge into market diversity and market significance components and examined their effects on radical product innovation performance.

This paper adopted the secondary database study. Excluding cases with missing values of main variables, a total of 1,219 Taiwanese manufacturing firms from the Third Taiwan Technology Innovation Survey (TTIS3) database were used to test the hypotheses. A moderated hierarchical regression approach was utilized to analyze the data.

The results revealed that the relationship between market diversity and radical product innovation performance is a predominantly positive concave downward curve. In contrast, the relationship between market significance and radical product innovation performance is a predominantly negative concave downward curve. Furthermore, the results also indicated that absorptive capacity has different moderating effects on the relationships between market diversity/significance and radical product innovation performance. Absorptive capacity enhances the negative effect of market significance but suppresses the positive effect of market diversity on radical product innovation performance.

This paper is the first research which contributes to examining the relationship between market knowledge and radical product innovation sale performance.

This paper aims to present the fabrication of 6061 aluminum alloy (AA6061) using a promising laser additive manufacturing process, called the laser-foil-printing (LFP) process. The process window of AA6061 in LFP was established to optimize process parameters for the fabrication of high strength, dense and crack-free parts even though AA6061 is challenging for laser additive manufacturing processes due to hot-cracking issues.

The multilayers AA6061 parts were fabricated by LFP to characterize for cracks and porosity. Mechanical properties of the LFP-fabricated AA6061 parts were tested using Vicker’s microhardness and tensile testes. The electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) technique was used to reveal the grain structure and preferred orientation of AA6061 parts.

The crack-free AA6061 parts with a high relative density of 99.8% were successfully fabricated using the optimal process parameters in LFP. The LFP-fabricated parts exhibited exceptional tensile strength and comparable ductility compared to AA6061 samples fabricated by conventional laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes. The EBSD result shows the formation of cracks was correlated with the cooling rate of the melt pool as cracks tended to develop within finer grain structures, which were formed in a shorter solidification time and higher cooling rate.

This study presents the pioneering achievement of fabricating crack-free AA6061 parts using LFP without the necessity of preheating the substrate or mixing nanoparticles into the melt pool during the laser melting. The study includes a comprehensive examination of both the mechanical properties and grain structures, with comparisons made to parts produced through the traditional LPBF method.

This study aims to investigate whether higher value creation leads to higher value appropriation and to identify the boundary conditions in a buyer–supplier relationship that can explain why a particular supplier can appropriate higher value than others.

The study uses questionnaire surveys. The sample of the survey has 150 publicly-listed supplier firms in Taiwan. The unit of analysis is the buyer–supplier relationship.

In the buyer–supplier relationship, suppliers’ bargaining power, partnership and a supplier’s original brand manufacturing (OBM) business can strengthen the positive relationship between value creation and value appropriation.

This study adopts the unilateral viewpoint of suppliers; however, some constructs might require dyadic evaluation. This study only explores the spillover effect of OBM business on the relationship between value creation and appropriation.

The spillover effect of a supplier’s OBM business in a buyer–supplier relationship allows the buyer to share more common benefits and the supplier to capture more private benefits as compensation. By broadening its customer base, a supplier can increase its bargaining power. A supplier can also maintain a strategic partnership with each essential buyer.

To avoid the dark-side effect of partnership, the model provides the contingency that a supplier can capture more value from a buyer–supplier relationship.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships of environmental concern and risk perception with residents' waste mobile recycling behavior in the scenario of continuously increasing electronic waste (aka e-waste) around the world.

For empirically testing proposed research model, this study utilized convenience sampling strategy and collected 346 responses from residents in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through an online survey. The hypotheses were tested utilizing the structural equation modeling (SEM) framework through Mplus 7.0 program (Muthen and Muthen, 1998–2012). Robust maximum likelihood (MLR) was used as the method of estimation.

The results revealed that environmental concern is positively associated with individuals' intentions to recycle waste mobile phones and that the relationship between concern for the environment and individuals' intention to recycle is mediated by the factors such as individuals' mobile phone recycling attitude and subjective norms. The results further indicated that individuals' information security risk perception moderates the relationship between individuals' intention for recycling and subsequent recycling behavior.

This study provides substantial theoretical and practical implications for residents' e-waste recycling behavior while considering their environmental concern and information security risk perceptions.

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of adding a small amount of Ti to a Cu-based alloy, specifically the commercial Hyper Titanium Copper alloy (C1990 HP), which contains Cu-3.28 wt.% Ti, on its interfacial reaction with Sn-9.0 wt.% Zn (SnZn) solder, using the liquid/solid reaction couple technique.

The SnZn/C1990 HP couples were subjected to a reaction temperature of 240–270°C for a duration of 0.5–5 h. The resulting reaction couple was characterized using a scanning electron microscope, energy dispersive spectrometer, electron probe microanalyzer and X-ray diffractometer.

It was observed that the scallop-shaped CuZn5 and planar Cu5Zn8 phases were formed in almost all SnZn/C1990 HP couples. With increased reaction duration and temperature, the Cu-rich intermetallic compound (IMC)-Cu5Zn8 phase became a dominant IMC formed at the interface. The total thickness of the IMCs was increased with the increase in the reaction duration and temperature. The IMC growth obeyed the parabolic law, and the IMC growth mechanism was diffusion controlled. The activation energy of the SnZn/C1990 HP couple was 64.71 kJ/mol.

This article presents an analysis of the IMC thickness in each sample using ImageJ software, followed by kinetic analysis using Origin software at various reaction temperatures of SnZn/C1990 HP in liquid/solid couples. The study also includes detailed reports on the morphology, interface composition and X-ray diffraction analysis, as well as the activation energy. The findings can serve as a valuable reference for electronic packaging companies that utilize C1990 HP substrates.

This paper aims to examine the effects of bonding temperature, bonding time, bonding pressure and the presence of a Pt catalyst on the bonding strength of Cu/SB/P-Cu/SB/Cu joints by transient liquid phase bonding (TLPB).

TLPB is promising to assemble die-attaching packaging for power devices. In this study, porous Cu (P-Cu) foil with a distinctive porous structure and Sn-58Bi solder (SB) serve as the bonding materials for TLPB under a formic acid atmosphere (FA). The high surface area of P-Cu enables efficient diffusion of the liquid phase of SB, stimulating the wetting, spreading and formation of intermetallic compounds (IMCs).

The higher bonding temperature decreased strength due to the coarsening of IMCs. The longer bonding time reduced the bonding strength owing to the coarsened Bi and thickened IMC. Applying optimal bonding pressure improved bonding strength, whereas excessive pressure caused damage. The presence of a Pt catalyst enhanced bonding efficiency and strength by facilitating reduction–oxidation reactions and oxide film removal.

Overall, this study demonstrates the feasibility of low-temperature TLPB for Cu/SB/P-Cu/SB/Cu joints and provides insights into optimizing bonding strength for the interconnecting materials in the applications of power devices.

Apart from, the smart edge computing (EC) robot (SECR) provides the tools to manage Internet of things (IoT) services in the edge landscape by means of real-world test-bed designed in ECR. Eventually, based on the results from two experiments held in little constrained condition, such as the maximum data size is 2GB, the performance of the proposed techniques demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability and performance efficiency of the proposed IoT model.

Certainly, the proposed SECR is trying primarily to take over other traditional static robots in a centralized or distributed cloud environment. One aspect of representation of the proposed edge computing algorithms is due to challenge to slow down the consumption of time which happened in an artificial intelligence (AI) robot system. Thus, the developed SECR trained by tiny machine learning (TinyML) techniques to develop a decentralized and dynamic software environment.

Specifically, the waste time of SECR has actually slowed down when it is embedded with Edge Computing devices in the demonstration of data transmission within different paths. The TinyML is applied to train with image data sets for generating a framework running in the SECR for the recognition which has also proved with a second complete experiment.

The work presented in this paper is the first research effort, and which is focusing on resource allocation and dynamic path selection for edge computing. The developed platform using a decoupled resource management model that manages the allocation of micro node resources independent of the service provisioning performed at the cloud and manager nodes. Besides, the algorithm of the edge computing management is established with different path and pass large data to cloud and receive it. In this work which considered the SECR framework is able to perform the same function as that supports to the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS).

While many companies begin to promote ethically produced products, much remains to be known about consumers' buying intention toward these products. This paper attempts to integrate the theory of planned behavior and the Hunt–Vitell theory of marketing ethics to explore the buying intention toward ethically produced food products in a developing economy.

Data were collected through a questionnaire survey in Bangladesh. Structural equation modeling technique was used to test the research model.

Research findings showed that deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation have significantly positive effects on perceived behavioral control and subjective norm. Perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, attitude, hedonic and utilitarian value have significantly positive effects on buying intention toward ethically produced foods.

The results are practically and theoretically meaningful because the integrated model holds well explanatory power to predict consumers' intention toward buying ethical foods and thereby understand consumers' ethical decision-makings.

As an alternative to hiring financial specialists or investment consultants, robo-advisors offer financially automated investment services. This study aims to investigate how robo-advisors' service attributes, risk attitude and financial self-efficacy influence customers' choice preferences of adopting robo-advisors.

Two hundred fifty-one online surveys were used to collect data, and choice-based conjoint analysis was conducted.

Results show that increasing annual fees negatively impact customers' choice preferences. Promotion, general investment education and additional human assistance have a positive impact. Furthermore, risk-seeking and risk-averse customers require more human assistance than risk-neutral customer and customers with high levels of financial self-efficacy prefer more general investment education and additional human assistance than those with lower levels. In addition, customers in the older age group prefer promotion, general investment education and additional human assistance, while wealthy customers prefer lower annual fees, higher general investment education and more additional human assistance compared to middle-class and low-income groups.

This study contributes to robo-advisor providers to provide appropriate service attributes for each customer group.