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This study aims investigate the status of applying technology in car parking facilities. It also examines the factors affecting the deployment of these technologies as they improve the efficiency and convenience of car parking facilities amidst changing transport needs in Asian smart cities.

A comprehensive literature review informs the relationships between car park provisions and the traffic congestion problem. A typology covering different technological solutions is then formulated. The factors affecting the use of two such common technologies (i.e. mechanical car parks and intelligent information systems) are examined in two emerging smart cities in Asia with the aid of a desk-top study for Singapore and a survey covering over 600 samples (including users and non-users, as both groups are important to derive influencing factors) in Hong Kong.

The extent to which mechanical car parks may help relieve the space shortage problem depends on their relative costs and the facility management performance. For real-time vacancy information systems, their wide spread use depends on drivers’ age and past parking experience.

Due to geographical constraints, only two Asian cities (Singapore and Hong Kong), where the use of smart technologies is flourishing, are included in the study. The survey on car parking apps is preliminary due to their relative short deployment in Asia. It is expected that the phenomena will quickly spread in the region as more smart cities are developed.

By expounding on the development of modern parking technologies in smart cities, the important influence of car parks as a strategic facility toward solving traffic congestion and environmental problems is brought to the attention of policy makers, in particular the influencing factors affecting strategies to promote the use of parking apps.

As smart cities flourish amidst rapid urbanization and information and communication technology development, the demand for building more and more data centers is rising. This paper aims to examine the principal issues and considerations of data center facilities from the cost and benefit dimensions, with an aim to illustrate the approaches for maximizing the net benefits and remain “green.”

A comprehensive literature review informs the costs and benefits of data center facilities, and through a case study of a developer in Hong Kong, the significance of real estate costs is demonstrated.

Major corporations, establishments and governments need data centers as a mission critical facility to enable countless electronic transactions to take place any minute of the day. Their functional importance ranges from health, transport, payment, etc., all the way to entertainment activities. Some enterprises own them, whilst others use data center services on a co-location basis, in which case data centers are regarded as an investment asset. Real estate costs affect their success to a great extent, as in the case of a metropolitan where land cost forms a substantial part of the overall development cost for data centers.

As the financial information of data center projects are highly sensitive due to the competitive status of the industry, a full set of numerical data is not available. Instead, the principles for a typical framework are established.

Data centers are very energy intensive, and their construction is usually fast tracked costing much to build, not to mention the high-value equipment contents housed therein. Their site locations need careful selection due to stability and security concerns. As an essential business continuity tool, the return on investment is a complex consideration, but certainly the potential loss caused by any disruption would be a huge amount. The life cycle cost and benefit considerations are revealed for this type of mission-critical facilities. Externalities are expounded, with emphasis on sustainable issues. The impact of land shortage for data center development is also demonstrated through the case of Hong Kong.

Three types of PbTe samples, e.g. nanoparticles, nanowires and bulk ingots, have been prepared. The investigation of the Seebeck coefficient of PbTe nanoparticles and nanowires clearly shows the sign change in the temperature range of 575~650 K, which is not observed for bulk ingots. Unfortunately, this temperature range is within the proposed operation temperature range for thermoelectric devices using PbTe and hence, such a change will affect their proper performance. The observed sign change of Seebeck coefficient is not simply caused by the composition variation at high temperature. It is mainly attributed to the extrinsic-to-intrinsic-semiconductor transition for PbTe nanocrystals due to the competing factors between quantum size effect increasing band gap and self-purification process decreasing their charge carrier concentration, which shift the transition point of nanocrystals to lower range as compare to that of bulk samples. Thus, such phenomenon should be considered carefully in the design of thermoelectric devices using semiconductor nanocrystals, which have attracted much attention recently.

Governmental institutions must cooperate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This paper aims to address the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms.

Following the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations.

Discussions in the project’s focus groups add evidence to the researchers’ expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance.

This paper includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project’s stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings.

The method developed in this paper allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level.

The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.

Currently, there is a lack of fast and highly accurate on analytical solution of Reynolds equation for evaluating the characteristics of surface textured bearing. This paper aims to develop such an analytical solution of Reynolds equation for an effective analysis of the characteristics of surface textured bearings.

By using the separation of variables method and mean eigenvalue method, the analytical solution is constructed. The CFD simulations and experimental results are used to validate the correctness of the analytical solution.

The analytical solution can accurately evaluate the characteristics of textured bearings. It is found that the larger the eccentricity ratio and aspect ratio, the greater the oil film force. It also found that the smaller the eccentricity ratio, the larger the Sommerfeld number S. When eccentricity ratio e = 0.65, the attitude angles of different oil boundaries are same. The effect of different aspect ratios on dynamic stiffness and damping coefficient generally follows a same trend. It is numerically shown that the critical speed of rotor-bearing is 3500 rpm.

The analytical solution provides a simple yet effective way to study the characteristics of surface textured bearings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of round pits arrangement patterns on tribological properties of journal bearing. In this paper, the tribological behaviors of journal bearing with different arrangement patterns under lubrication condition were studied based on M-2000 friction and wear tester.

The friction and wear of journal bearing contact surface were simulated by ANSYS. The wear mechanism of bearing contact surfaces was investigated by the means of energy dispersive spectrum analysis on the surface morphology and friction and wear status of the journal bearing specimens by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS). Besides, the wearing capacity of the textured bearing was predicted by using the GM (1,1) and Grey–Markov model.

As the loads increase, the friction coefficient of journal bearing specimens decrease first and then increase slowly. The higher rotation speed, the lower friction coefficient and the faster temperature build-up. The main friction method of the bearing sample is three-body friction. The existence of texture can effectively reduce friction and wear. In many arrangement patterns, the best is 4# bearing with round pits cross-arrangement pattern. Its texturing diameters are 60 µm and 125 µm, and the spacing and depth are 200 µm and 25 µm, respectively. In addition, the Grey–Markov model prediction result is more accurate and fit the experimental value better.

The friction and wear mechanism is helpful for scientific research and engineers to understand the tribological behaviors and engineering applications of textured bearing. The wear capacity of textured bearing is predicted by using the Grey–Markov model, which provides technical help and theoretical guidance for the service life and reliability of textured bearing.

Existing literature demonstrates the important role of information transparency in enterprise development and market surveillance. However, little empirical research has examined the information transparency effect in supply chain management. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the significant role of information transparency on supply chain financing and its mechanism, taking trade credit as the starting point.

From the data set comprising 3,880 Chinese firms with A-shares listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2020, we obtain the basic picture of information transparency and trade credit. Panel fixed effects regression is used to test the hypotheses concerning the antecedents to trade credit.

The empirical results show that: first, information transparency can significantly support corporate access to trade credit and is found to facilitate financing by mitigating perceived risk. Second, among companies with higher levels of financing constraints, weaker market power and more concentration of suppliers, information transparency promotes trade credit more markedly. Third, the outbreak of COVID-19 causes a substantial increase in uncertainty and risk in external circumstances and then the effect of information transparency is weakened. Fourth, the contribution to trade credit is likely to be stronger for disclosures containing management transparency elements compared to single financial transparency.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the positive role of information transparency to supply chain financing, which to a certain extent makes up for the lack of information transparency research in the supply chain. It provides new ideas for enterprises to obtain trade credit financing and promote the improvement of supervision departments’ disclosure policies.

Influencer marketing mediated by social media is prevalent in social commerce. Micro-, meso- and macro-influencers all play an irreplaceable role in marketing. The purpose of this paper is to explore how companies with limited budgets choose influencers according to products' various levels of brand familiarity.

This study constructs an evolutionary game model of influencer marketing based on evolutionary game theory on complex networks. This model initiates various networks to demonstrate how influencers disseminate information and constructs update mechanisms to depict how individuals react to this information based on individuals' information utility and friends' strategies.

Simulation results suggest that companies should invest more in macro-influencers than in meso-influencers, however investing all in macro-influencers is not a good choice. The investment in meso-influencers will increase as brand familiarity decreases, whereas it will not exceed investment in macro-influencers. Furthermore, the accumulation of micro-influencers can accelerate the marketing process.

This study examines the combined effects of micro-influencers, meso-influencers and macro-influencers in marketing by simulating the marketing process initiated by influencers on social media.

In high-speed processing, the influence on the machining accuracy of a machine tool is greatly caused by the thermal deformation of the motorized spindle; a further study on the thermal characteristics of the spindle is given in this paper. This study aims to reduce the thermal error and improve the performance of the machine tool by discussing the relationships between the temperature distributions and rotating accuracy caused by the thermal deformations of the spindle.

The paper opted for a method combining the theoretical analysis and the experimental study to study the thermal stability of the high-speed motorized spindle. First of all, a finite element model of the spindle was built with ANSYS, whereby temperature distributions and the thermal deformations were successively obtained at different speeds. And then, both the temperature field and the rotating accuracy of the motorized spindle were measured simultaneously by the thermal stability experiment. Finally, the experimental and theoretical results were compared and validated.

The thermal stability of the motorized spindle was studied in this paper, and some findings from the study were as follows: the spindle’s rotating accuracy maintained good in X direction but bad in Y and Z directions in terms of the deformations; the higher front-end temperature of the spindle which can significantly affect the rotating accuracy is needed to be controlled mainly; the recovery speed of the spindle deformation lagged behind the temperature’s fallback speed; the vibration graph about radial rotating sensitivity synthesized by X1 and X2 presented a trifoliate shape.

Based on a built test-bed which can synchronously measure the motorized spindle’s temperature distribution and rotating accuracy with five-point method, the coupling effects of the thermal deformation and temperature are embodied, and not only the vibration graph but also the thermal tilt angles can be gained. Therefore, considering the influence of the thermal deformation on the heat generated by the bearings, the paper fulfilled a study by which it was obtained that the front-end temperature of the spindle, which was higher and could significantly affect the rotating accuracy, needed to be controlled mainly.

The mobile medical consultation (MMC) service is growing rapidly, but not all consumers are always willing to actively engage with it. To address this issue, based on IT identity theory, this study explores the underlying mechanism of how two types of platform-related consumer experience influence MMC platform identity, in turn, result in consumer negatively-valenced engagement in MMC.

The data was collected from 400 consumers with the experience of MMC and analyzed by the partial least square (PLS) method.

The findings unfold that these two distinct consumer experience, servicescape experience (i.e. perceived telepresence and perceived platform surveillance) and service search experience (i.e. perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity), are associated with MMC platform identity and consumer negatively valenced engagement with MMC.

Research on consumer negatively-valenced engagement in the field of MMC is still in a nascent stage. The study identifies consumer experience in accordance with the unique context of the MMC platform and fills the research gap on the role of IT identity in consumer negatively valenced engagement.