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This chapter reviews the effects of air transport liberalization, and investigates the roles played by airport-airline vertical arrangements in liberalizing markets. Our investigation concludes that liberalization has led to substantial economic and traffic growth. Such positive outcomes are mainly due to increased competition and efficiency gains in the airline industry, and positive externalities to the overall economy. Liberalization allows airlines to optimize their networks, and thus may introduce substantial demand and financial uncertainty to airports. Vertical arrangements between airlines and airports may offer a wide range of benefits to the parties involved, yet such arrangements could also lead to airline entry barriers which reduce the effects of liberalization. Three approaches have been developed to model the effects of liberalization in complex market conditions, which include the analytical, econometric and computational network methods. These approaches should be selectively utilized in policy studies on liberalization.

This chapter reviews the key results obtained in previous studies of airline mergers. It is found that the effect of mergers on airfares is dependent on the network configurations of merging airlines. Fare increases are frequently observed on overlapped routes. However, if the networks of two merging airlines are complementary, the expanded network after the merger leads to cost savings, increase in travel options, and improvement in service quality. Therefore, in a deregulated market, with few entry barriers, relaxing merger regulations is likely to improve welfare. However, most welfare evaluations do not incorporate quality changes or dynamic competition effects. Empirical investigations are primarily ex post analysis of mergers that have already passed antitrust reviews. The relationship between market concentration and welfare might be nonlinear and market specific. Therefore, airline mergers and alliances should be reviewed case by case. Methodological improvements are needed in future studies to control for the effects of complicating factors inherent in ex post evaluations.

The purpose of this paper is to study the realization of turn‐over‐wok movement for a cooking robot.

First, the authors introduce the cooking robot's movement mechanism and its realization methods and then analyze the movement geometric of the movement mechanism. The authors conduct the force analysis of the material in the wok motion and suppose the moving situation of mass point m when turning over the wok and shaking the wok.

The problem of the cooking robot simulating the special cooking motion made by a chef is solved.

The robot is applicable to being a cooking robot for Chinese dishes.

The paper shows how to optimize the effect of material moving track and satisfies the requirements of wok motion of cooking robot.

The aim of this paper is to provide a new wafer prealigning robot for the photo‐etching facility during the manufacturing of IC products.

The shape center is measured by a reflection‐style laser sensor in the wafer's radial direction, and the position is measured by a penetration‐style laser sensor. A dynamic error compensation is applied to eliminate the radial runout and wobble of the rotary stage, which have effects on the measurement of the wafer's shape center.

It is found that the new wafer prealigning robot can satisfy the accuracy requirement.

The robot requires that the shape center can be accurately calculated.

The robot is applicable to wafer prealigning for the photo‐etching facility.

A wafer prealigning robot based on the shape center calculation method has been developed and is described in the paper.

The proposed DHHFLOWLAD is used to design a recommendation system, which aims to provide the most appropriate treatment to the patient under a double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment.

Based on the ordered weighted distance measure and logarithmic aggregation, we first propose a double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted logarithmic averaging distance (DHHFLOWLAD) measure in this paper.

A case study is presented to illustrate the practicability and efficiency of the proposed approach. The results show that the recommendation system can prioritize TCM treatment plans effectively. Moreover, it can cope with pattern recognition problems efficiently under uncertain information environments.

An expert system is proposed to combat COVID-19 that is an emerging infectious disease causing disruptions globally. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been proved to relieve symptoms, improve the cure rate, and reduce the death rate in clinical cases of COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper is to present a serial produced industrial robot for thin‐type space solar cells (SSC), which is applied to perform the bonding process of SSC.

An optimized process of adhesive coating and bonding for SSC is designed, based on an analysis of hydromechanics model. In order to perform the process, a novel robot is developed, which mainly consists of a three‐axis Cartesian coordinates' motion platform, coating‐and‐bonding device, solar cell and glass cover orientation plate, control system, pneumatic system, constant temperature module, and industrial personal computer software. The coating and bonding operation is based on the three‐axis Cartesian coordinates' motion and the help of pneumatic system.

Compared with the experimental prototype and handwork, the robot is more effective and reliable for the bonding process of the thin‐type solar cells.

The robot is very useful to realize automatic production of SSC.

This paper aims to present a robust design approach to realize disturbance attenuation for a yaw – pitch gimballed system subject to actuator saturation and disturbances.

To minimize the impacts of disturbances in the presence of saturation nonlinearity and acquire desired response performance, the control approach is of double closed-loop configuration. State feedback controllers are synthesized via convex optimization and used to stabilize the inner loops; robust controllers are synthesized via mixed H _∞ optimization and used to stabilize the outer loops.

It is shown through performance simulations that the proposed control scheme is effective in terms of command following, stability and disturbance attenuation.

The presented robust control approach provides a theoretical method to facilitate designing a stable servo control loop for a yaw – pitch gimballed seeker.

This paper supplies an effective way of addressing stabilization problem induced from actuator saturation and system uncertainties.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new auto‐cooking industrial system for the Chinese food industry.

First, the paper introduces a robotic system with the redundant control functions based on the embedded RISC fieldbus control system IP core. Second, the data acquisition of the advanced cooks' operation procedure is used to get the teaching knowledge in the different cooking actions for the typical Chinese dishes. Finally, according to the teaching‐playback method, the auto‐cooking procedure for the complex Chinese dishes is completed well.

It is found that the new auto‐cooking system can cook many Chinese traditional dishes with high quality.

The robot is applicable to cooking automatically for the Chinese food industry.

The auto‐cooking industrial system has been developed with the programming method for the cooking actions.

Recently, service robots have been widely used in various fields. The purpose of this paper is to design a restaurant service robot which could be applicable to provide basic service, such as ordering, fetching and sending food, settlement and so on, for the customers in the robot restaurant.

Based on characteristics of wheeled mobile robots, the service robot with two manipulators is designed. Constrained by the DOF, the final positioning accuracy within ±3 cm must be guaranteed to successfully grasp the plate. Segmented positioning method is applied considering the positioning costs and accuracy requirement in the different stages, and the shape‐based matching tracking method is adopted to navigate the robot to the object.

Experiments indicate that the service robot could successfully grasp the plate, from wherever is its initial position; and the proposed algorithms could estimate the robot pose well and accurately evaluate the localization performance.

At present, the service robot could only work in an indoor environment where there is steady illumination.

The service robot is applicable to provide basic service for the customers in the robot restaurant.

The paper gives us a concept of a restaurant service robot and its localization and navigation algorithms. The service robot could provide its real‐time coordinates and arrive at the object with ±2 cm positioning precision, from wherever is its initial position.