To compete in the marketplace, manufacturers have been seeking for expansion of their product lines by providing product families. One difficulty for product family positioning is that diverse customer needs can no longer be satisfied by a mass marketing approach. Realizing the importance of customer purchase behaviours for product family positioning, this paper proposes a fuzzy clustering-based market segmentation approach. With a focus on engineering characteristics, the fuzzy clusteringbased market segmentation helps plan the right products to target segments effectively and efficiently. An application of the proposed methodology in a consumer electronics company producing vibration motors is reported. The evaluation of the proposed methodology is also discussed.

This paper Put forward a glass crack detection algorithm based on digital image processing technology, obtain identification information of glass surface crack image by making use of pre-processing, image segmentation, feature extraction on the glass crack image, calculate the target area and perimeter of the roundness index to judge whether this image with a crack. make use of Visual Basic6.0 programming language to impolder the crack detection system, achieve the function of each part in crack detection process.

The detailed topology of renewable resource bases may have the impact on the optimal power flow (OPF) of the voltage source converter (VSC)-based high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission network. To address this issue, this study develops an OPF with the hybrid VSC-HVDC transmission and active distribution networks to optimally schedule the generation output and voltage regulation of both networks, which leads to a non-convex programming model. Furthermore, the non-convex power flow equations are based on the second-order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation approach. Thus, the proposed model can be relaxed to an SOCP that can be tractably solved. Numerical results on a three-bus VSC-HVDC network and the European system verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and suggest that the proposed model can guarantee the voltage magnitudes of both networks within the allowable ranges.

As photovoltaic (PV) integration increases in distribution systems, to investigate the maximum allowable PV integration capacity for a district distribution system becomes necessary in the planning phase, an optimisation model is thus proposed to evaluate the maximum PV integration capacity while guaranteeing the entire system operating constraints (e.g. network voltage magnitude) within reasonable ranges in this study. Meanwhile, optimal inverter dispatch is employed to further improve the PV integration by ensuring the optimal set‐points of both active power and reactive power for the PV inverters. However, the intermittency of solar PV energy (e.g. due to passing clouds) may affect the PV generation in the district distribution network. To address this issue, the voltage magnitude constraints under the cloud shading conditions should be taken into account in the optimisation model, which can be formulated as a mixed integer non‐linear non‐convex programming. Furthermore, a sequential interior‐point method is utilised to solve this problem. Case studies on the IEEE 33‐bus, 69‐bus distribution networks and two practical distribution networks in China demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This study examines factors that influence a public firm’s decision to early adopt blockchain technology. Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt how firms collect, process, and maintain information about a wide range of firm activities including transactions and supply chain interactions. We examine several determinants of early adopt blockchain including patented technology, agency costs, complexity, and external monitoring. Our results suggest that blockchain early adoption involves opportunistic managerial behavior. Further, firms with greater technology innovations, proxied by number of patents, are more likely to disclose early adoption, possibly to overcome productivity concerns or attract inter-firm opportunities. We also examine the consequences of early adoption using a market-based approach. Our results suggest that blockchain adoption could be a lengthy and costly process. Our study provides evidence on why firms adopt this disruptive technology and informs regulators and policy makers on how managers can influence the blockchain early adoption decision.