Smart supply chain management in Industry 4.0

The emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) related to Industry 4.0 play a critical role to enhance supply chain performance. Employing the smart technologies has led to so-called smart supply chains. Understanding how Industry 4.0 and related ICT affect smart supply chains and how smart supply chains evolve with the support of the advanced technologies are vital to practical and academic communities. Existing review works on smart supply chains with ICT mainly rely on the academic literature alone. This paper presents an integrated approach to explore the effects of Industry 4.0 and related ICT on smart supply chains, by combining introduction of the current national strategies in North America, the research status analysis on ICT assisted supply chains from the major North American national research councils, and a systematic literature review of the subject. Besides, we introduce a smart supply chain hierarchical framework with multi-level intelligence. Furthermore, the challenges faced by supply chains under Industry 4.0 and future research directions are discussed as well

Development of Fiber Laser

In recent years, fiber lasers have been focused as research topic in the field of laser. It is widely applicable in the field of modern optical communication, optical sensing, materials technology, life sciences and precision mechanics, national defence science ,etc. Fiber laser is typical representative of the third generation lasers. Fiber lasers have great ad-vantages compare to any other lasers, such as long lifetime, small size, high efficiency, compact structure, etc. This report begins by introducing the basic knowledge of lasers. Then the overview the is given on operating principle and research status of fiber laser, some typical fiber lasers. In the end the application and future prospects of fiber lasers are introduced

Multi-product budget-constrained acquistion and pricing with uncertain demand and supplier quantity discounts

We consider the joint acquisition and pricing problem where the retailer sells multiple products with uncertain demands and the suppliers provide all unit quantity discounts.The problem is to determine the optimal acquisition quantities and selling prices so as to maximize the retailer’s expected profit, subject to a budget constraint. This is the first extension to consider supplier discounts in the constrained multi-product newsvendor pricing problem. We establish a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to formulate the problem, and developaLagrangian based solution approach.Computational results for the test problems involving up to thousand products are reported, which show that the Lagrangian based approach can obtain high-quality solutions in a very short time