SCCA-YOLO: a spatial and channel collaborative attention enhanced YOLO network for highway autonomous driving perception system

In the domain of autonomous driving perception systems, where extensive research has been conducted on urban environments, the investigation of rural scenarios has gained prominence due to the overarching objective of achieving comprehensive autonomous driving capabilities. The inherent complexity and unpredictability associated with rural road conditions present distinct challenges for autonomous driving technologies. Consequently, this study introduces a spatial channel collaborative attention YOLO network specifically designed for rural road contexts. This network incorporates an innovative attention mechanism that integrates spatial attention with shared semantics and channel self-attention in a sequential manner, thereby enhancing the accuracy of YOLOv8. Furthermore, the integration of the Ghost module is employed to facilitate the network’s lightweight characteristics. Our evaluations, conducted on both proprietary and publicly available datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our detection network’s performance.</p

OFVO: A Visual Odometry Designed for Motion Trajectory Estimation of Autonomous Vehicles

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Inventory management of perishable health products: a decision framework with non-financial measures

PurposeThis research proposes a decision framework for using non-financial measures to define a replenishment policy for perishable health products. These products are perishable and substitutable by nature and create complexities for managing inventory. Instead of a financial measure, numerous measures should be considered and balanced to meet business objectives and enhance inventory management.Design/methodology/approachThis research applies a multi-methodological approach and develops a framework that integrates discrete event simulation (DES), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to define the most favourable replenishment policy using non-financial measures.FindingsThe integration framework performs well as illustrated in the numerical example; outcomes from the framework are comparable to those generated using a traditional, financial measures-based, approach. This research demonstrates that it is feasible to adopt non-financial performance measures to define a replenishment policy and evaluate performance.Originality/valueThe framework, thus, prioritises non-financial measures and addresses issues of lacking information sharing and employee involvement to enhance hospitals' performance while minimising costs. The non-financial measures improve cross-functional communication while supporting simpler transformations from high-level strategies to daily operational targets.</p

Inventory management of perishable health products: a decision framework with non-financial measures

PurposeThis research proposes a decision framework for using non-financial measures to define a replenishment policy for perishable health products. These products are perishable and substitutable by nature and create complexities for managing inventory. Instead of a financial measure, numerous measures should be considered and balanced to meet business objectives and enhance inventory management.Design/methodology/approachThis research applies a multi-methodological approach and develops a framework that integrates discrete event simulation (DES), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to define the most favourable replenishment policy using non-financial measures.FindingsThe integration framework performs well as illustrated in the numerical example; outcomes from the framework are comparable to those generated using a traditional, financial measures-based, approach. This research demonstrates that it is feasible to adopt non-financial performance measures to define a replenishment policy and evaluate performance.Originality/valueThe framework, thus, prioritises non-financial measures and addresses issues of lacking information sharing and employee involvement to enhance hospitals' performance while minimising costs. The non-financial measures improve cross-functional communication while supporting simpler transformations from high-level strategies to daily operational targets.</p

A Design of Longitudinal and Lateral Controllers for Autonomous Driving System in Carla Simulator

Research on the design of autonomous vehicle controllers has always been the focus and difficulty in the field of autonomous driving. However, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology and the continuous revolutionary achievements in natural language processing and computer vision, more and more autonomous driving researchers have focused their research on the perception field of autonomous vehicles and ignored the research on controllers. Even if there are some studies on controllers, they only focus on lateral control or longitudinal control, and there are few comprehensive considerations of lateral and longitudinal vehicle controller designs. Our work makes up for this deficiency. First, we selected different controller designs for the vehicle’s lateral and longitudinal control, respectively, and conducted hundreds of simulation experiments under the same scenario, speed, and trajectory planning algorithm to obtain lateral and longitudinal controller design solutions suitable for specific scenarios; second, we compared different autonomous driving simulation platforms and finally chose Carla as our simulation platform.</p

Stretchable optical diffraction grating from poly(acrylic acid)/polyethylene oxide stereocomplex

Optical gratings are a key component in many spectroscopy, communications, and imaging systems. While initially static elements, advances in optical materials have enabled dynamically tunable gratings to be designed. One common tuning strategy is relying on mechanical deformation of the grating pitch to modify the diffraction pattern. To date, most mechanically adaptive optical gratings consist of a hybrid system where rigid moieties are patterned on an elastomeric substrate. In the present work, we demonstrate an all-polymer tunable grating that is fabricated using replica molding from the poly(acrylic acid) (PAA)/polyethylene oxide (PEO) polymer stereocomplex. PAA/PEO pristine films exhibit excellent optical transmittance at or above 80% from 500 nm to 1400 nm and stretchability over 800% strain. The experimental studies on the changes of diffraction mode distances with respect to the applied strains agree well with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) theoretical modeling

Human T2D associated gene IMP2/IGF2BP2 promotes the commitment of mesenchymal stem cells into adipogenic lineage

Excessive adiposity is the main cause of obesity and type two diabetes (T2D). Variants in human IMP2/IGF2BP2 gene are associated with increased risk of T2D. However, little is known about its role in adipogenesis and in insulin resistance. Here, we investigate the function of IMP2 during adipocyte development. Mice with IMP2 deletion in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are resistant to diet-induced obesity without affecting glucose and insulin tolerance. IMP2 is essential for the early commitment of adipocyte derived stem cells (ADSCs) into preadipocytes; but the deletion of IMP2 in MSCs is not required for the proliferation and terminal differentiation of committed preadipocytes. Mechanistically, IMP2 binds Wnt receptor FDZ8 mRNA and promotes its degradation by recruiting CCR4–NOT deadenylase complex in a mTOR dependent manner. Our data demonstrate that IMP2 is required for maintaining white adipose tissue (WAT) homeostasis by controlling mRNA stability in ADSCs. However, the contribution of IMP2 to insulin resistance, a main risk of T2D, is not evident.</p

Operating Strategy of Chemical Looping Systems with Varied Reducer and Combustor Pressures

In chemical looping technology when applied to gasification, reforming, and chemical syntheses, the operating pressure is an important factor that dictates the reactant conversion and product formation economics of the technology for the processes. Common consideration of the operating pressure for the chemical looping system that includes reducer/fuel reactor and combustor/air reactor operation is based on the condition in which the reducer and the combustor are operated under similar pressures. This study considers another operating condition, characterizing the Fan chemical looping system, where the reducer and the combustor are operated under different pressures while solids are continuously or discontinuously circulating through the loop system. As an example, the chemical looping natural gas conversion to syngas with the eventual production of liquid fuels is given in this study. This example illustrates the thermodynamic limits and their associated compression duty with chemical looping syngas production at pressures between 1 and 30 atm, with a goal of obtaining syngas suitable for cobalt based Fischer–Tropsch synthesis at 30 atm. The adaptation of thermodynamic operating conditions to maximize syngas yield and balance between the syngas compression and the air compression are discussed in this study over a range of operating pressures and temperatures. Further, a novel operating strategy characterized by differential operating pressures between the fuel reactor and the air reactor in a continuous solid flow system is presented. Such a strategy allows the fuel reactor to operate at elevated pressures, closer to the syngas requirements of downstream units, while the air reactor operates near the ambient pressure conditions. This strategy has broad implications for other process system applications such as reaction–regeneration and adsorption–desorption processes where pressure variations are a key part of the optimum operation considerations. Considering the cost of the key components of the system including the reactors, valves, and compressors, such a strategy is shown to reduce the capital cost for the chemical looping system by 29% compared to equal pressure chemical looping reforming