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Monitoring the real-time temperature, humidity, and physical position status of goods is vital in the cold chain. Diverse logistics technologies and systems have been adopted in the cold chain for monitoring perishable goods. However, these technologies and systems are independent from each other. Data and information in them are not integrated so that information control is not effective. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

By integrating Internet of Things and tracking technologies, this paper proposes an intelligent tracking system, which is designed to achieve effective and fast live monitoring of goods in the cold chain at the lowest cost and with the largest network capacity and simplest protocols.

Structure and information platform design mechanism are introduced. The key part of this system is a wireless sensor network built on Zigbee. Wireless sensors located in cold storages or refrigerated trucks are able to collect and transmit live data quickly and efficiently.

Users of the proposed system can easily monitor goods transported in cold chains. In addition, the system assigns specific servers to save historical data for inquiries.

In 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping proposed the concept of “One Belt and One Road” economic cooperation. “The Belt and Road Initiative (B&R)” is the short of “The Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st-century Maritime Silk Road,” which has got a series of remarkable achievements and worldwide attentions in past five years such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, B&R Forum for International Cooperation, etc. Especially, cross-border EC has greatly strengthened the trade links between countries along the way, which is a rare chance for Chinese Export-oriented Cross-border EC’s rapid growth. Thus, the authors take DHgate.com as a typical example to do a big data analysis. This chapter analyzes vast data from 2013 to 2017 about seven kinds of commodities including Fashion accessories, Jewelry, Sports & Outdoors, Security & Surveillances, Car accessories, Watches, and Hair & Styling by using data mining related software and algorithms. The authors do some monthly sale charts and find a few counter-intuitive but useful conclusions such as by taking association analysis, the study shows that sports products and jewelry products have strong association rules. In addition, for potential products (such as Fashion accessories and Jewelry), although their sales have a certain shock, the overall selling line keep rising. It is possible to put forward some practical suggestions for Chinese Export-oriented Cross-border EC that actively respond to the One Belt One Road Initiative based on these analysis results.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.

The silicone modifications of two-component epoxy resin coatings are commonly built on epoxy resins rather than on epoxy curing agents. The silicone-modified epoxy curing agent system is rarely reported yet. This study aims to prepare the polysiloxane (PS)-modified waterborne epoxy coatings based on aqueous curing agents technology.

Waterborne epoxy curing agents with different contents of terminal epoxy PS were synthesized by reacting with triethylenetetramine, followed by incorporating of epoxy resin (NPEL-128) and polyethylene glycol diglycidyl ether. The waterborne epoxy coatings were prepared with the above curing agents, and their performance was investigated through thermogravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscopy, mechanical characterization, gloss measurement, chemical resistance test and ultraviolet (UV) aging experiment.

The results showed that the epoxy coating prepared by silicon-modified curing agent has higher gloss, better chemical resistance and UV resistance than the coating from unmodified curing agent with terminal epoxy PS and commercially available waterborne epoxy curing agent (Aradur 3986), as well as the competitive mechanical properties and heat resistance. Reduced water absorption on fibrous paper was also obtained with the help of silicon-modified curing agent.

These findings will be valuable for resin researchers in addressing the modification issues about waterborne epoxy resin and curing agent.

Recognizing every worker's working status instead of only describing the existing construction activities in static images or videos as most computer vision-based approaches do; identifying workers and their activities simultaneously; establishing a connection between workers and their behaviors.

Taking a reinforcement processing area as a research case, a new method for recognizing each different worker's activity through the position relationship of objects detected by Faster R-CNN is proposed. Firstly, based on four workers and four kinds of high-frequency activities, a Faster R-CNN model is trained. Then, by inputting the video into the model, with the coordinate of the boxes at each moment, the status of each worker can be judged.

The Faster R-CNN detector shows a satisfying performance with an mAP of 0.9654; with the detected boxes, a connection between the workers and activities is established; Through this connection, the average accuracy of activity recognition reached 0.92; with the proposed method, the labor consumption of each worker can be viewed more intuitively on the visualization graphics.

With this proposed method, the visualization graphics generated will help managers to evaluate the labor consumption of each worker more intuitively. Furthermore, human resources can be allocated more efficiently according to the information obtained. It is especially suitable for some small construction scenarios, in which the recognition model can work for a long time after it is established. This is potentially beneficial for the healthy operation of the entire project, and can also have a positive indirect impact on structural health and safety.

User-generated content (UGC) refers to semantic and behavioral traces created by users on various social media platforms. While several waves of platforms have come and gone, the long-term sustainability of UGC activities has become a critical question that bears significance for theoretical understanding and social media practices.

Based on a large and lengthy dataset of both blogging and microblogging activities of the same set of users, a multistate survival analysis was applied to explore the patterns of users' staying, switching and multiplatforming behaviors, as well as the underlying driving factors.

UGC activities are generally unsustainable in the long run, and natural attrition is the primary reason, rather than competitive switching to new platforms. The availability of leisure time, expected gratification and previous experiences drive users' sustainability.

The authors adopted actual behavioral data from two generations of platforms instead of survey data on users' switching intentions. Four types of users are defined: loyal, switcher, multiplatformer and dropout. As measured by the transitions among the four states, the different sustainability behaviors are thereby studied via an integrated framework. These two originalities bridge gaps in the literature and offer new insights into exploring user sustainability in social media.

This paper aims to investigate a firm’s incentive to innovate its basic product to be socially responsible and its decision on the product line. By constructing a competition model, the paper examines the factors that affect the firm’s choice on its product line with the socially responsible innovation in the presence of altruistic consumers. Such factors include the proportion of the altruistic consumers, the firm’s coordination cost with the basic and innovative products, as well as the consumer’s transportation cost.

In a model of differentiated products with the competition, the author assumes that a portion of consumers has a strong preference for the socially responsible product (e.g. altruistic consumers). A firm is able to attract altruistic consumers with a socially responsible innovation but it may incur a coordination cost when both the basic and the innovated products are manufactured and sold. In a framework of a sequential game, the firms make a decision on the prices, innovation inputs, as well as the choice on its product line to achieve the expected profit maximization.

The firm has the incentive to engage in socially responsible innovation to better compete with its rivals. More importantly, the results of the paper explain why some firms wish to manufacture and sell the basic product even though the innovation is successful. The main factors that affect such a firm’s decision include the proportion of the altruistic consumers, the aggregate benefit to all the consumers who purchase the innovative product, the firm’s potential coordination cost and the consumer’s transportation cost.

The paper sheds light on a firm’s corporate social responsibility innovation and its product line determination. The results of this paper can be widely applied in the firm’s strategy of engaging in corporate social responsibility with eco-friendly elements that can attract altruistic consumers in the market. In addition, the findings of the paper can also contribute to policy formulation in terms of innovation. Such a result enables the policymakers to understand the factors that affect the firm’s motivation on innovation and helps them to better guide the firms efficiently participate in the research and development activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of continuous brand-customer relationship via company-hosted social networking sites (SNSs). Factors that influence fans to continue using fast-fashion brands’ Facebook fan pages and to maintain the brand-customer relationship are discussed first. Subsequently, the predictors of fans’ engagement and affective commitment to a fast-fashion brand are examined with the aim to explore the key elements that nurture the brand-customer relationship via brands’ SNSs.

A quantitative research was conducted and the structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses on a sample of 202 fast-fashion Facebook fan page users in Taiwan.

The results demonstrate that engagement, affective commitment and continued intention to use are predominantly influenced by, in turn, social interaction tie, content value and affective commitment.

The study is limited because it investigated the fast-fashion fan page users in an Asian country, so the findings cannot be generalised to other contexts.

The findings suggest that fan page managers’ initiation and involvement in conversations, frequent responses, listening to fans’ opinions and improving fans’ experiential value may facilitate them to engage in the brand’s activities at a higher level.

The findings of this integrated model suggest managerial guidelines for brand managers in this industry regarding how to maintain the brand-customer relationship through social media strategy and how they contribute to theory building in continuance intention of SNSs.

A brand community consists of relationships between a brand and consumers; community members’ identification with the brand community is a central characteristic of the community. This study aims to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate how and why such identification-based relationships yield firm- and member-level benefits to participants in the brand community.

This cross-sectional study analyzes data collected through a questionnaire survey of members from the brand community of VW-Golf Club members in Taiwan. The researchers attended the annual meeting of club members and handed out questionnaires directly to the members. The degree centrality of each member was calculated using UCINET 6 for Windows, a social network analysis software application. This study adopts the partial least squares program to evaluate the measurement properties and structural relationships specified in the research model.

The findings suggest that when customers’ identification with a brand community becomes salient, they strengthen their emotional attachment to the brand and improve their centrality in the network. Consequently, emotional attachment can serve as a guiding principle in decision-making and thus strengthen brand equity and assessment of brand extensions. Central members will also gain greater benefits, including collaborative opportunities and influence, through their advantageous position in the network.

This study makes four main contributions to the brand community literature. First, this is the first empirical study to simultaneously examine the relationships among community identification (customer to community), emotional attachment to the brand (customer to brand) and network centrality (customer to customer). Second, the empirical framework depicts dual value-creation routes that explain how identification-based relationships can yield firm- and member-level benefits. With respect to firm-level benefits, this is the first empirical study to examine the brand equity and assessment of brand extension in the brand community research. Third, this study applies the rarely adopted UCINET 6 software to scrutinize the network data from the brand community. Finally, this paper examines three actions that organizations can leverage to enhance consumer identification with a brand community.