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The shipper selects a suitable shipping route and plans for a voyage in order to import and export cargo on the basis of published sailing schedules. The reliability of the sailing schedule will influence the shipper’s logistics expense, which means that the logistics costs will depend on the reliability of schedules published by container shipping companies. Therefore, it is important to consider factors which can cause delays would for container ships sailing on sea routes. The reliability of published sailing schedules can be affected by a number of different factors. This study adopts the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to estimate the importance of the delaying factors in a sailing schedule. In addition, the consistent fuzzy preference relations (CFPR) method is applied to identify the subjective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. The entropy weight method combined with the actual performance of the container shipping company are both used when estimating the objective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. According to the analysis results, the criteria can be divided into four quadrants with different management implications, which indicate that instructions for chase strategy, sailing schedule control, fleet allocation, transship operation arrangement and planning for ports in routes are often ignored by container shipping companies. Container shipping companies should consider adjusting their operational strategies, which would greatly improve their operational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to apply social network analysis (SNA) to study faculty research productivity, to identify key leaders, to study publication keywords and research areas and to visualize international collaboration patterns and analyze collaboration research fields from all Management Information System (MIS) departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015.

The authors first retrieved results encompassing about 1,766 MIS professors and their publication records between 1982 and 2015 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) website. Next, the authors merged these publication records with the records obtained from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Airiti Library and Springer Link databases. The authors further applied six network centrality equations, leadership index, exponential weighted moving average (EWMA), contribution value and k-means clustering algorithms to analyze the collaboration patterns, research productivity and publication patterns. Finally, the authors applied D3.js to visualize the faculty members' international collaborations from all MIS departments in Taiwan.

The authors have first identified important scholars or leaders in the network. The authors also see that most MIS scholars in Taiwan tend to publish their papers in the journals such as Decision Support Systems and Information and Management. The authors have further figured out the significant scholars who have actively collaborated with academics in other countries. Furthermore, the authors have recognized the universities that have frequent collaboration with other international universities. The United States, China, Canada and the United Kingdom are the countries that have the highest numbers of collaborations with Taiwanese academics. Lastly, the keywords model, system and algorithm were the most common terms used in recent years.

This study applied SNA to visualize international research collaboration patterns and has revealed some salient characteristics of international cooperation trends and patterns, leadership networks and influences and research productivity for faculty in Information Management departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015. In addition, the authors have discovered the most common keywords used in recent years.

This study aims to establish a dynamic process model of an electromagnetic thermotherapy system (ETS) to predict the temperature of a thermotherapy needle.

The model is used for real-time predicting the static and dynamic responses of temperature and can therefore provide a valuable analysis for system monitoring.

The electromagnetic thermotherapy process is a nonlinear problem in which the system identification is implemented by a neural network identifier. It can simulate the input/output relationship of a real system with an excellent approximation ability to uncertain nonlinear system. A system identifier for an ETS is analyzed and selected with recurrent neural networks models to deal with various treatment processes.

The Elman neural network (ENN) prediction model on ETS proposed in this study is an easy and feasible method. Comparing two situations of inputs with more and fewer data, both are trained to present low mean squared error, and the temperature response error appears within 15 per cent. The ENN, with the advantages of simple design and stable efficacy, is useful for establishing the temperature prediction model to ensure the security in the thermotherapy.

Customer engagement (customers’ behavioral manifestations going beyond customer-firm purchase transactions) has been regarded as strategic imperatives for generating enhanced corporate performance. The plethora of new media has provided customers with different options to interact with firms and other customers. However, the primacy of value-laden interactive customer relationships and value co-creation raises challenges for firms and customers, especially in the context of broader business ecosystems such as brand partnership for extending value co-creation. This study aims to explore how customer engagement with well-designed choreograph of various new media’s channels can increase the value co-creation extent in the context of broader business ecosystems, resulting in higher levels service offerings, experiences and innovation.

This exploratory study presents a new framework of customer engagement that holistically integrates the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations. The framework considers new media’s different information service and technologies (e.g. search engine, social recommender, social media) that can be properly choreographed to achieve a virtuous customer engagement circle.

This paper uses an exemplar framework's instantiation – an information technology enabled engagement platform (called iEngagement) – that can demonstrate how to empower the central companies together with their eco-stakeholders to holistically perform customer engagement utilizing new media toward fruitful customer engagement.

This exploratory study is among the first that addresses the theory and practice of customer engagement within multiple new media and broader business ecosystem. This paper presents a customer engagement framework and an exemplified engagement platform that holistically integrate the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, for stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations.

To support achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), we integrated science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and extended reality technologies into an artificial intelligence (AI) learning activity. We developed Feature City to facilitate students' learning of AI concepts. This study aimed to explore students' learning outcomes and behaviors when using Feature City.

Junior high school students were the subjects who used Feature City in an AI learning activity. The learning activity consisted of 90-min sessions once per week for five weeks. Before the learning activity, the teacher clarified the learning objectives and administered a pretest. The teacher then instructed the students on the features, supervised learning and unsupervised learning units. After the learning activity, the teacher conducted a posttest. We analyzed the students' prior knowledge and learning performance by evaluating their pretest and posttest results and observing their learning behaviors in the AI learning activity.

(1) Students used Feature City to learn AI concepts to improve their learning outcomes. (2) Female students learned more effectively with Feature City than male students. (3) Male students were more likely than female students to complete the learning tasks in Feature City the first time they used it.

Within SDGs, this study used STEM and extended reality technologies to develop Feature City to engage students in learning about AI. The study examined how much Feature City improved students' learning outcomes and explored the differences in their learning outcomes and behaviors. The results showed that students' use of Feature City helped to improve their learning outcomes. Female students achieved better learning outcomes than their male counterparts. Male students initially exhibited a behavioral pattern of seeking clarification and error analysis when learning AI education, more so than their female counterparts. The findings can help teachers adjust AI education appropriately to match the tutorial content with students' AI learning needs.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and predict the housing prices in Petaling district, Malaysia and its six sub-regions with a set of housing attributes using functional relationship model.

A new multiple unreplicated linear functional relationship model with both the response and explanatory variables are subject to errors is proposed. A total of 41,750 housing transacted records from November 2008 to February 2016 were used in this study. These data were divided into 70% training and 30% testing sets for each of the selected sub-regions. Individual housing price was regressed on nine housing attributes.

The results showed the proposed model has better fitting ability and prediction accuracy as compared to the hedonic model or multiple linear regression. The proposed model achieved at least 20% and 40% of predictions that have less than 5% and 10% deviations from the actual transacted housing prices, respectively. House buyers in these sub-regions showed similar preferences on most of the housing attributes, except for residents in Shah Alam who preferred to stay far away from shopping malls, and leasehold houses in Sri Kembangan are more valuable. From the h-nearest houses indicator, it is concluded that the housing market in Sungai Buloh is the most volatile in Petaling District.

As the data used are the actual housing transaction records in Petaling District, it represents only a segment of Malaysian urban population. The result will not be generalized to the entire Malaysian population.

This study is expected to provide insights to policymakers, property developers and investors to understand the volatility of the housing market and the influence of determinants in different sub-regions. The potential house buyers could also use the model to determine if a house is overpriced.

This study introduces measurement errors into the housing attributes to provide a more reliable analysis tool for the housing market. This study is the first housing research in Malaysia that used a large number of actual housing transaction records. Previous studies relied on small survey samples.

This study employs survey methods to statistically examine the internationalization of quality assurance (IQA) in Taiwanese higher education. The data collected were analyzed to assess the associations between administrators' opinions of the importance of IQA and their evaluations of its implementation, as well as the relationship between implementation and opinions on seven measures of international quality. The study also explores the mediating effect of implementation assessments on the relationship between opinions of the importance of IQA and opinions of international quality.

This study targeted higher education administrators from universities in Taiwan, including presidents, vice presidents, deans, section chiefs, directors, and heads of schools in various departments. Using systematic sampling methods, 80 universities were selected from a population of 159 higher education institutions in Taiwan, with 17-40 potential participants each in 2015. A total of 2,377 questionnaires were distributed to all the administrators of those institutions, and ultimately, 65 institutions and 337 valid questionnaires were analyzed.

The importance of IQA directly and positively influenced implementation of it on higher education institutions. The implementation directly and positively influenced the level of international quality of the institutions and the importance of IQA had an indirect positive influence on international quality through implementation. The aggregated institution-level results were similar to but much stronger than the individual-level results.

This study examined the IQA of higher education in Taiwan, which is increasingly important to institutions' competitiveness in the global higher education market. The data were analyzed using multilevel structural equation modeling at the individual-level and the aggregate-level. The analysis revealed direct and indirect associations between opinions about IQA and institutional quality. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because it clarifies the role of administrators (individually and collectively) regarding their institutions' educational quality, and it provides useful information that institutions could apply to improve their international competitiveness.

Based on laser-range-finder (LRF) sensing, the control design of location and orientation stabilization for the mobile robot is investigated. However, the practical limitation of the LRF sensing is usually ignored in the control design, which leads to incorrect localization and unexpected control results. The purpose of this study is to design the fuzzy controller subject to the practical limitation on the LRF-based localization for a differentially driven wheeled mobile robot.

First, the Takagi–Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is derived from the polar kinematic model of a differentially driven mobile robot. Then, the fuzzy controller is designed to the derived T-S fuzzy kinematic model in accordance with the Lyapunov stabilization theorem. The derived Lyapunov stabilization conditions for the fuzzy control design are expressed as the linear matrix inequality (LMI) form and effectively solved by LMI tools. The practical limitation on the LRF-based localization is also expressed as the LMI form and simultaneously solved with the control design.

The location and posture stabilization experiments are carried out on a mobile robot with LRF-based localization to prove the effectiveness of the proposed T-S fuzzy model-based control design. Furthermore, the ground truth experiment evaluates the accuracy of LRF-based localization.

The contribution of this study is to develop the fuzzy control law for a differentially driven wheeled mobile robot under the practical limitation on LRF-based localization. The proposed control design can be applied to other robots with practical limitations on the sensors.

The purpose of this paper is to test the 5GP concept with measurement of the performance of Busan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai ports, employing a hybrid method of consistent fuzzy preference relation (CFPR), VIsekriterijumska Optimizacija i KOmpromisno Resenje (VIKOR) and PROMETHEE.

The authors developed the concept of the fifth generation ports (5GPs), and apply CFPR, VIKOR and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) to evaluate the 5GPs.

The performance of the ports of Hong Kong and Singapore is close to meet the definition of 5GP criteria. On the contrary, ports of Busan and Shanghai are still behind the 5GP stage in light of the majority of the evaluation criteria’s performance.

This paper studies four ports. More empirical tests are needed to verify the applicability of the 5GP concept toward other ports.

The findings provided port managers with the insight of how to improve their port to meet the criteria of 5GP.

New criteria and higher expectations of existing requirements present challenges to port managers for a need to raise the bar of service standards and develop new competencies.

The authors developed the concept of the 5GPs. Newly developed 5GP contributes to expanding the concepts of first to fourth generation ports developed by UNCTAD.

This paper aims to present an augmented reality (AR) application to aid the elderly in library reference search. The application supports the elderly in searching books and videos in a large library when librarians have insufficient time to meet their needs. The elderly searching in a large library could be difficult for them due to the vast area, complicated online library catalogs and their physical deterioration, such as failing eyesight, tendinitis and memory problems. Our system, SearchAR, fully supports the 3D images of object content based on books and videos in Ling Tung University (LTU) library catalogs. Using the latest AR technology, users can use mobile phone to scan the quick response (QR) code in front of the LTU library, and then the elderly can experience LTU library map labeled by different colors in real-time and understand the locations of the video areas and book shelves areas. Later, they can use SearchAR to scan the QR codes on bookshelves, books or videos to view the 3D graphics without reading complicated catalogs and content. The results show that among the images, the elderly recognition of the “3 D images” was the highest, and the experimental group using AR technology as a searching aid shows a higher searching effectiveness than the control group; 60 per cent of the elderly felt they saved more time for searching books and videos with the help of SearchAR, and it was easy to arouse their association; the elderly indicated that combined image of the library map and the labels with different colors are clear and simple; the content of books and videos are easy associated with the 3D images; the elderly mentioned that using SearchAR is a great experience without any reading complicated online catalogs. Finally, this study concludes that AR technology does enhance the elderly searching ability in LTU large library.

The SearchAR application was an integrating library catalog, which provides AR and 3D graphics. The elderly can also use SearchAR to see a library map and every library element via 3D graphics before they start searching in a wide area.

This makes it easier for elderly to navigate a library without using complicated online catalogs, and it reduces time spent on reading and searching.

AR has been used for a variety of guiding and educational purposes. However, AR has been rarely applied to supplement traditional library services for elderly.