Search results

The liquid lithium-lead breeding blanket in the international thermonuclear experimental reactor is one of the major international concerns and one of the potential conceptual designs for the fusion reactor.

Reduced activation ferritic-martensitic steels are being considered for application in future fusion technology as the relevant structural material, which will be in contact with the lithium-lead breeding material.

According to the test results, comprehensive evaluations of these findings have been performed to determine the wastage rates and mechanisms for the conceptual design of the fusion reactor.

From micro to macro, systematic cross-scale models are needed for the understanding of corrosion/wastage mechanisms in fusion reactor engineering applications.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the implementation of edge computing can enhance the progress of the circular economy within supply chains and to address the challenges and best practices associated with this emerging technology.

This study utilized a streamlined evaluation technique that employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation modeling for thorough content analysis. Extensive searches were conducted among prominent publishers, including IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, MDPI and Hindawi, utilizing pertinent keywords associated with edge computing, circular economy, sustainability and supply chain. The search process yielded a total of 103 articles, with the keywords being searched specifically within the titles or abstracts of these articles.

There has been a notable rise in the volume of scholarly articles dedicated to edge computing in the circular economy and supply chain management. After conducting a thorough examination of the published papers, three main research themes were identified, focused on technology, optimization and circular economy and sustainability. Edge computing adoption in supply chains results in a more responsive, efficient and agile supply chain, leading to enhanced decision-making capabilities and improved customer satisfaction. However, the adoption also poses challenges, such as data integration, security concerns, device management, connectivity and cost.

This paper offers valuable insights into the research trends of edge computing in the circular economy and supply chains, highlighting its significant role in optimizing supply chain operations and advancing the circular economy by processing and analyzing real time data generated by the internet of Things, sensors and other state-of-the-art tools and devices.

In this paper, a new method to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization is proposed.

This paper introduces hypothesis testing to determine whether the particles trap into the local minimum or not, then special re-initialization was proposed, finally, some famous benchmarks and constrained engineering optimization problems were used to test the efficiency of the proposed method. In the revised manuscript, the content was revised and more information was added.

The proposed method can be easily applied to PSO or its varieties. Simulation results show that the proposed method effectively enhances the searching quality.

This paper proposes an adaptive particle swarm optimization method (APSO). A technique is applied to improve the global optimization performance based on the hypothesis testing. The proposed method uses hypothesis testing to determine whether the particles are trapped into local minimum or not. This research shows that the proposed method can effectively enhance the searching quality and stability of PSO.

This paper aims to present a fast, economical and practical attitude control design approach for flight vehicles operating within wide envelopes.

Based on a linear disturbance observer, an enhanced proportional-derivative (PD) control scheme is proposed. Utilizing the data from the onboard gyro, the observer can treat the entire response of the system, with the exception of the control term, as a disturbance, and use the estimation of the disturbance to cancel out this response and thereby to effectively simplify the control channel. Using the stability margin tester, the explicit graphical tuning rules are given in a consistent way for the longitudinal dynamics based on the induction method. Mathematical simulations are performed for a highly maneuverable flight vehicle to test the proposed method, which are compared with the traditional PD and H8 control algorithms.

The proposed strategy for attitude control can be reformulated as a static-dynamic control algorithm and the robust synthesis method can be employed to determine the control parameters according to a specific performance configuration. The remarkable control performance robustness can be achieved as shown in the comparative simulations.

There is a sole parameter, steady gain, needed to be scheduled and it can be estimated with a high accuracy.

This paper applies the linear active disturbance rejection control scheme to flight control scenario. The proposed method can reduce the design and implementation complexity of attitude control for flight vehicles operating within a wide envelope, which originates from diverse time-varying flight dynamics. The new method converts the attitude control problem to a sole parameter gain scheduling problem, and there is no complicated and time-consuming multi-dimension interpolation needed for the control parameters.

This paper aims to investigate the effect that ownership structure (public vs private) has on the demand for high-quality auditors, specifically in the US banking industry.

The authors predict that public banks are more likely to hire a high-quality auditor than private banks and pay a higher audit fee premium for that high-quality auditor (due to higher agency costs, more demand for financial information and higher litigation risk). The authors analyze 2008–2014 banking data from the Federal Reserve using probit and OLS regression analysis to examine if there is a higher probability that public banks choose higher quality auditors and pay higher audit fees when they do so.

The results show that private banks are less likely to hire Big 4 auditors and industry-expert auditors than public banks. The authors also find that both private and public banks pay higher audit fees for Big 4 and industry-expert auditors, and that public banks pay a higher premium for Big 4 auditors and industry experts than private banks.

The findings may not be fully generalizable to other types of firms, as banking is a heavily regulated and complex industry. However, inferences from this study may be generalizable to other similar industries such as insurance or health care.

The results of this paper imply that public and private banks have differing priorities when hiring their financial statement auditor. This may be of interest to investors and auditing regulators.

The findings of this paper underscore the value of hiring an industry-expert auditor in an industry that is highly complex and regulated. This may be of interest to managers and policymakers.

Due to data restrictions, the emphasis of prior literature on the banking industry has been on public banks. This study is the first to analyze the differences between public and private banks’ demand for audit services.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the concentration of a specific customer type – governmental customer, affects the pricing of audit services in the USA.

This paper applies a standard audit pricing model by regressing audit fees on governmental customer concentration and other common determinants of audit fees. This paper also adopts an instrumental variable approach and performs propensity-score matched sample analyzes to mitigate the potential endogeneity problem.

Using data from major customer disclosures of US publicly listed firms from 2000 to 2014, this paper finds that governmental customer concentration is positively associated with audit fees, suggesting that a higher level of governmental customer concentration increases a firm’s audit risks and audit effort. In addition, this paper performs cross-sectional analyzes and show that the association between governmental customer concentration and audit fees is more pronounced for firms with weak internal governance, weak external monitoring and high financial risks.

This paper furthers the understanding of the interactive relationships in supply chain systems and adds new evidence to the literature on customer concentration. Prior studies on customer concentration typically treat all customer types in a uniform manner. To the knowledge, this is the first study that separates governmental customers from other types of customers in an audit pricing setting. The findings highlight the importance of examining governmental customer concentration when assessing a firm’s audit risks and audit fees.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how audit fees change in responding to the financial crisis of 2008. It also examines auditors’ perceived risk and how they priced the risk in the financial crisis.

Using a sample of 20,930 firm-year observations, this paper examines the change of audit fees before, during and after the financial crisis, as well as the relationship between audit fees and restatements. Furthermore, this study investigates whether this relationship between audit fees and restatements strengthened during the financial crisis.

The paper finds that audit fees increase as a result of the macro-systemic risks from the crisis. It also finds that there is a significantly positive relationship between audit fees and restatements, which is a proxy of risk factors related to poor financial reporting quality and poor audit quality. However, the results show that there is no significant change of the fees–restatements relationship in the financial crisis period.

The main limitation of this study is that no definite answer can be provided for the question that whether auditors believe that poor audit quality and audit failures are leading up to the financial crisis. The test rejects the alternative hypothesis. However, it does not necessarily prove the null hypothesis is true.

This paper contributes to the current literature by analyzing not only the impact of the financial crisis on audit fees, but also how the accounting profession views its own role in the financial crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to provide benefits for companies or organizations, which deal with fewer input-outputs and wanted to control their industrial processes remotely with a robust control strategy.

In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy is used for the two tank level process plant and it is remotely monitored with the industrial internet of things technology. The disturbances in a primary and secondary loop of the cascade process, which are affecting the overall settling time (ts) of the process, are eliminated by using the proposed, ADRC-ADRC structure in the cascade loop. The stability of the proposed controller is presented with Hurwitz’s stability criteria for selecting gains of observers. The results of the proposed controller are compared with the existing active disturbance rejection control-proportional (ADRC-P) and proportional-integral derivative-proportional (PID-P)-based controller by experimental validation.

It is observed that the settling time (ts) in the case of the proposed controller is improved by 60% and 55% in comparison to PID-P and ADRC-P, respectively. The level process is interfaced with an industrial controller and real-time data acquired in matrix laboratory (MATLAB), which acted as a remote monitoring platform for the cascade process.

The proposed controller is designed to provide robustness against disturbance and parameter uncertainty. This paper provides an alternate way for researchers who are using MATLAB and ThingSpeak cloud server as a tool for the implementation.