Interactive bundle pricing strategy for online pharmacies

Online retail pharmacies usually price their products differently from traditional drugstores. Based on real-time consumer behaviors, this paper proposes a dynamic bundle pricing strategy to maximize the pharmacy's profit. Given free shipping thresholds and consumer budgets, we propose a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model and a heuristic to sequentially price customized bundles. We further conduct a numerical study using the data from a leading e-pharmacy in China. Our computational results indicate that the proposed model not only improves the e-pharmacy's profit by attracting more customers but noticeably contributes to consumer surplus. Through sensitivity analysis, our model is proved to be robust under various scenarios.</p

Freight transportation planning in platform service supply chain considering carbon emissions

The online-to-offline (O2O) platform is becoming increasingly popular in today's market. This study investigates the decision-making problem of an O2O freight platform facing uncertain demand and carbon emission constraints to achieve sustainable development and establish an environment-friendly image. By receiving customer orders online and then delivering them offline, the platform chooses the optimal dispatching time and pricing level to maximize its profit under a limited carbon cap. We consider a stochastic model with two kinds of demand functions, i.e., additive and multiplicative cases, and solve the optimization problems. By adopting a data set from a leading O2O freight platform in China, we find that the proposed model can effectively increase the revenue of the platform by more than 20 % if the platform increases the price appropriately. The results further show that market parameters such as potential market size and price elasticity have a more significant influence on the price decision than logistics parameters such as the fixed shipping cost and holding cost per unit volume per unit time, while logistics parameters affect the dispatching time decision more significantly than market parameters. With respect to the profit, as the carbon cap increases, the profit of the platform first climbs up to a peak point and then decreases with the further increase of the cap due to rising inventory holding costs. Furthermore, the O2O platform can benefit from a large-scale market and thus might suffer a loss at its start-up stage. Our study contributes to the literature on the O2O platform and the freight transportation planning with the consideration of sustainable development

Electrical bearing failures in electric vehicles

In modern electric equipment, especially electric vehicles, inverter control systems can lead to complex shaft voltages and bearing currents. Within an electric motor, many parts have electrical failure problems, and among which bearings are the most sensitive and vulnerable components. In recent years, electrical failures in bearing have been frequently reported in electric vehicles, and the electrical failure of bearings has become a key issue that restricts the lifetime of all-electric motor-based power systems in a broader sense. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the bearing premature failure in the mechanical systems exposed in an electrical environment represented by electric vehicles. The electrical environments in which bearing works including the different components and the origins of the shaft voltages and bearing currents, as well as the typical modes of electrical bearing failure including various topographical damages and lubrication failures, have been discussed. The fundamental influence mechanisms of voltage/current on the friction/lubrication properties have been summarized and analyzed, and corresponding countermeasures have been proposed. Finally, a brief introduction to the key technical flaws in the current researches will be made and the future outlook of frontier directions will be discussed. Document type: Articl

New Construction of Identity-based Proxy Re-encryption

A proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme involves three parties: Alice, Bob, and a proxy. PRE allows the proxy to translate a ciphertext encrypted under Alice\u27s public key into one that can be decrypted by Bob\u27s secret key. We present a general method to construct an identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme from an existing identity-based encryption scheme. The transformed scheme satisfies the properties of PRE, such as unidirectionality, non-interactivity and multi-use. Moreover, the proposed scheme has master key security, allows the encryptor to decide whether the ciphertext can be re-encrypted