“…Many previous studies have dealt with plate problems with different combinations of boundary conditions, load patterns and material properties by using various approximate or numerical methods. Besides the classical methods such as the finite difference method [1], finite element method (FEM) [2] and boundary element method [3], which are still popular in handling plate problems, some recently developed effective approaches have shown important progresses in the field, including the meshless method [4], isogeometric collocation method [5], boundary particle method [6], finite volume method [7], virtual element method [8], discrete singular convolution method [9], simple hp cloud method [10], finite-layer method [11], etc. In comparison with the numerical methods, analytic methods are sparse, which is attributed to the difficulty in seeking analytic solutions to the complex boundary value problems (BVPs) of higher-order partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe the plate problems.…”