The Use of Service Robots in Service Delivery : A Review of the Literature

Service robots as emerging service providers, in combination with novel technologies like artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance service outcomes and customer experience and may already be transforming the service delivery process. At present, the study focused on service robots has matured sufficiently to warrant an overview of the research on the ways in which service robots have been employed. This study conducts a systematic literature review of the academic corpus focused on service robots (N = 28). We report the research methods, application contexts and robot types of service robot research to understand how service robots participate in service delivery, what technological characteristics of service robots are commonly analyzed, and the potential service outcomes of service robot use. This review shows that overall, service robots have a high potential to delivery services in service contexts, and will be widely used and bring more rich service experience to people.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Quality Assurance Competition Strategy under B2C Platform

This paper examines the platform competition strategy in offering quality assurance policy based on two-sided B2C markets with buyers and sellers who trade through the B2C platform. We model this as a strategy decision whether control rights of quality assurance level are better held by the seller or by the platform. Whether the seller or the platform that provides quality assurance policy is preferred depends on their influence on network effects. We show that the seller and the platform have no strong intention to improve the quality assurance level in the monopoly markets. When all buyers multihome and all sellers single-home, sellers who hold the control rights of quality assurance are better than platforms. However, platforms that hold quality assurance drive more profits than sellers in the B2C markets where all buyers and all sellers multihome. Our findings connect platform competitive strategies to market and microfoundation of quality, which applies directly to managerial decisions in the B2C two-sided platform

Method of Desulfurization Process Selection Based on Improved Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation: A Case Study of Papermaking Desulfurization in China

With the increasingly prominent global energy and environmental problems, more and more enterprises have been required to desulfurize the exhausted gases. Different enterprises have different demands for the desulfurization process, thus the choice of desulfurization process methods has become a focus of attention. Since the evaluation of the desulfurization process involves many factors, this paper proposes an improved fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to evaluate the selection of desulfurization process when the traditional evaluation method is not applicable. Firstly, an evaluation system with two rating indicators was constructed, which considers the subjective and objective weights comprehensively. Secondly using the two hierarchical indicators, an effective desulfurization process method was obtained according to the principle of maximum membership degree. Finally, we took a real papermaking factory as an example to illustrate the detailed implementation processes of this method. The result shows that the model could be used as a comprehensive evaluation tool to select desulfurization scheme or optimize the desulfurization process

The Use of Service Robots in Service Delivery: A Review of the Literature

Service robots as emerging service providers, in combination with novel technologies like artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance service outcomes and customer experience and may already be transforming the service delivery process. At present, the study focused on service robots has matured sufficiently to warrant an overview of the research on the ways in which service robots have been employed. This study conducts a systematic literature review of the academic corpus focused on service robots (N = 28). We report the research methods, application contexts and robot types of service robot research to understand how service robots participate in service delivery, what technological characteristics of service robots are commonly analyzed, and the potential service outcomes of service robot use. This review shows that overall, service robots have a high potential to delivery services in service contexts, and will be widely used and bring more rich service experience to people

Fuzzy Evidential Reasoning Approach for LCMS Competitiveness Evaluation under Incomplete Information

In order to evaluate scientifically low carbon manufacturing system (LCMS) competitiveness under incomplete information, this paper, using fuzzy mathematics theory and evidential reasoning approach, proposes an evaluation method. Firstly, through fuzzy evaluation the influence factors of LCMS competitiveness are characterized by a set of evaluation grades. Secondly, the analytical evidential theory algorithms are used to aggregate the evaluation grades of multiple influence factors, and the assessed values of LCMS competitiveness are obtained under each evaluation index and the system overall goal. According to the evaluation value, the key influence factors of LCMS competitiveness, which need to be improved and enhanced, are found. Lastly, a numerical example is provided

Automatic Unsupervised Fabric Defect Detection Based on Self-Feature Comparison

Due to the huge demand for textile production in China, fabric defect detection is particularly attractive. At present, an increasing number of supervised deep-learning methods are being applied in surface defect detection. However, the annotation of datasets in industrial settings often depends on professional inspectors. Moreover, the methods based on supervised learning require a lot of annotation, which consumes a great deal of time and costs. In this paper, an approach based on self-feature comparison (SFC) was employed that accurately located and segmented fabric texture images to find anomalies with unsupervised learning. The SFC architecture contained the self-feature reconstruction module and the self-feature distillation. Accurate fiber anomaly location and segmentation were generated based on these two modules. Compared with the traditional methods that operate in image space, the comparison of feature space can better locate the anomalies of fiber texture surfaces. Evaluations were performed on the three publicly available databases. The results indicated that our method performed well compared with other methods, and had excellent defect detection ability in the collected textile images. In addition, the visual results showed that our results can be used as a pixel-level candidate label

Fully Bio-Based Adhesive from Tannin and Sucrose for Plywood Manufacturing with High Performances

Fully bio-based adhesives are beneficial to reduce the dependence of the wood adhesive industry on synthetic resins based on petrochemical resources and enhance the market competitiveness of adhesives. A fully bio-based wood adhesive composed of tannin and sucrose was developed and successfully used in the preparation of plywood. Effects of the preparation technology on the bonding strength and water resistance of plywood were investigated, and the properties of the adhesive were analyzed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetry (TG) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) in this study. The results showed that: (1) Compared with other biomass adhesives, tannin–sucrose adhesive had the characteristics of high-solid content and low viscosity, which had the potential to prepare particleboard and fiberboard. (2) A proper mass ratio of tannin to sucrose was key to obtaining a tannin–sucrose adhesive with better properties. (3) The optimum preparation process of tannin–sucrose adhesive for plywood was as follows: hot-pressing temperature of 210 °C, hot-pressing time of 1.2 min/mm, m(tannin):m(sucrose) of 60:40 and adhesive loading of 160 g/m2. Under these conditions, the water-resistant bonding strength of the plywood was 0.89 MPa, which met the strength requirements of the Type II standard of plywood in GB/T 17657-2013. (4) The hot-pressing temperature played a decisive role in the tannin–sucrose adhesive, and the good performance of the plywood was maintained when the temperature was 210 °C or above. Thus, the prepared tannin–sucrose adhesive had high-bonding strength, good water resistance and thermal stability