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Publications - 6674

Weed species composition of small-scale farmlands bears a strong crop-related and environmental signature

Publication Name: Weed Research

Publication Date: 2018-02-01

Volume: 58

Issue: 1

Page Range: 46-56

Description:

Weed species loss due to intensive agricultural land use has raised the need to understand how traditional cropland management has sustained a diverse weed flora. We evaluated to what extent cultivation practices and environmental conditions affect the weed species composition of a small-scale farmland mosaic in Central Transylvania (Romania). We recorded the abundance of weed species and 28 environmental, management and site context variables in 299 fields of maize, cereal and stubble. Using redundancy analysis, we revealed 22 variables with significant net effects, which explained 19.2% of the total variation in species composition. Cropland type had the most pronounced effect on weed composition with a clear distinction between cereal crops, cereal stubble and maize crops. Beyond these differences, the environmental context of croplands was a major driver of weed composition, with significant effects of geographic position, altitude, soil parameters (soil pH, texture, salt and humus content, CaCO3, P2O5, K2O, Na and Mg), as well as plot location (edge vs. core position) and surrounding habitat types (arable field, road margin, meadow, fallow, ditch). Performing a variation partitioning for the cropland types one by one, the environmental variables explained most of the variance compared with crop management. In contrast, when all sites were combined across different cropland types, the crop-specific factors were more important in explaining variance in weed community composition.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1111/wre.12281

Enhancing cognitive metrics in supply chain management through information and knowledge exchange

Publication Name: International Journal of Logistics Management

Publication Date: 2025-01-01

Volume: 36

Issue: 7

Page Range: 200-221

Description:

Purpose: This research primarily aims to investigate the impact of organizational implants on knowledge transmission, process innovation and security integration in intricate supply chains. Design/methodology/approach: The research utilizes a mixed-method approach, employing a stratified sampling strategy to get a representative sample of 1,284 enterprises from various sectors within the logistics industry within the European Union. Data were gathered by computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI) and analysed utilizing structural equation modelling (SEM) to evaluate hypotheses concerning cognitive congruence, process diffusion and security integration. Findings: The results indicate that while task interdependence clearly improves face-to-face communication, excessive cognitive congruence can hinder process innovation, resulting in what the article terms “cognitive rigidity.” The study suggests that achieving a balance between cognitive congruence and cognitive flexibility is crucial to improving the safety diffusion and integration process. Originality/value: This study presents an innovative conceptual framework that synthesizes cognitive congruence, cognitive flexibility and cognitive rigidity to examine their combined influence on knowledge transfer and process dissemination throughout supply chains. It presents cognitive stiffness as a boundary condition, contesting the conventional belief that more cognitive congruence is invariably advantageous.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1108/IJLM-04-2024-0243

Impact of Big Four Audit Firms on Environmental Disclosure in China: Critical Role of Governance and Ownership Structure

Publication Name: Politicka Ekonomie

Publication Date: 2025-01-01

Volume: 73

Issue: 5

Page Range: 810-838

Description:

As the corporate world has recently been increasingly held accountable for its non-green behaviour, corporate environmental disclosures (CED) are crucial in informing the relevant stakeholders. Among the factors influencing CED, firm auditors play a pivotal role. Our research investigates the impact of Big Four audit firms on corporate environmental disclosure in China. With unique institutional factors and the most significant carbon emissions globally, China provides an exciting and compelling ground for studying this relationship. For this purpose, we use annual firm-level data of A-listed shares on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges and employ the Poisson and negative binomial regression models for empirical analyses. Contrary to the common belief that Big Four audit firms lead to improved disclosure quality, we find that they negatively affect environmental disclosure in China. We also investigate the moderating role of corporate governance and ownership structure in this relationship. A high ratio of state ownership, male directors on the board and institutional investor holding worsen the disclosure quality. However, a high ratio of independent directors mitigates this issue. These findings open new avenues for further research and can guide future policy decisions regarding environmental disclosure in Chinese firms. The Big Four audit firms should be more stringent in their operations and supervise public firms regarding environmental disclosures.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1482

Fuzzy approach to utility of time factor

Publication Name: Isciii 09 4th International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics Proceedings

Publication Date: 2009-12-28

Volume: Unknown

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 23-29

Description:

The paper deals with the investigation of the critical factor of the supply chain concerning time factor. The literature review can give a background to understand and handle the reasons and consequences of the growing importance of time. By using utility functions to represent the value of various delivery-times for the different participants in the supply chain, including the final customers, it proves through the Kano-model, that the choices, behaviour and willingness of payment of time-sensitive and non time-sensitive consumers are different for varying lead times, so for optimization soft computing techniques must be applied. As the functions are not linear and significant uncertainty must be handled as well, the use of fuzzy numbers is necessary. The features of fuzzy power functions are investigated, and a parametric approaches is presented that can be an efficient approximation of the values calculated on the basis of extension principle. © 2009 IEEE.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1109/ISCIII.2009.5342282

Identification of Engine Damages of Vintage Vehicles with Tribological Examination

Publication Name: Fme Transactions

Publication Date: 2021-01-01

Volume: 49

Issue: 3

Page Range: 608-614

Description:

Nowadays, keeping vintage vehicles in operation is becoming more and more popular, however, the reparation of occurring engine malfunctions, and the supply of particulate engine parts mean severe expenses to the owners. In case of older engines, the failure detection is not performed with the help of computerized diagnostics. In several cases the detection of failure is only possible with the disassembly of the engine. A cost-effective solution may be the application of tribological examinations, with which, the malfunctions may be revealed without the needless disassembly of the engine. The purpose of our research is to represent through the tribological examination of a VAZ-2101 (also known as Lada) engine type the practical application of the method, data analysis, evaluation of results and the steps of failure detection.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.5937/fme2103608P

Effect of the initial population construction on the DBMEA algorithm searching for the optimal solution of the traveling salesman problem

Publication Name: Infocommunications Journal

Publication Date: 2022-09-01

Volume: 14

Issue: 3

Page Range: 72-78

Description:

There are many factors that affect the performance of the evolutionary and memetic algorithms. One of these factors is the proper selection of the initial population, as it represents a very important criterion contributing to the convergence speed. Selecting a conveniently preprocessed initial population definitely increases the convergence speed and thus accelerates the probability of steering the search towards better regions in the search space, hence, avoiding premature convergence towards a local optimum. In this paper, we propose a new method for generating the initial individual candidate solution called Circle Group Heuristic (CGH) for Discrete Bacterial Memetic Evolutionary Algorithm (DBMEA), which is built with aid of a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA). CGH has been tested for several benchmark reference data of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The practical results show that CGH gives better tours compared with other well-known heuristic tour construction methods.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.9

Bacterial Memetic Algorithms for Order Picking Routing Problem with Loading Constraints

Publication Name: Expert Systems with Applications

Publication Date: 2018-09-01

Volume: 105

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 196-220

Description:

Order picking is the most labour and capital intensive warehousing operation whose primary development field is routing optimisation due to its time consuming nature. The Order Picking Routing Problem is a special case of the vehicle routing problem with loading constraints, when the operator visits picking positions and collects items to build transport unit. Where the stacking and stability challenges are relevant during the picking of ordered items and exact routing algorithms are not available, the order picking operators have huge challenges to sequence the order picking list. They should take into consideration several factors by themselves, such as product properties, order picking list characteristics, and order picking system properties. The goal of the proposed research is to support the order picking operators in order to make more objective decisions in decreasing the order picking lead time, building stable transport units, and avoiding product damages, when industrially relevant, but rarely discussed, order picking sequencing based on stacking property is necessary. The paper defines the Order Picking Routing Problem based on Pallet Loading Feature (OPRP-PLF) and presents Bacterial Memetic Algorithm (BMA) based solutions for it, which is compared to Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms. BMA has already been applied for Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) but never used for the defined OPRP-PLF. The paper describes several BMA operators, most of them have an alternative which can be completed with SA based decisions. Using the BMA operators with SA methodology is a novelty of the proposed algorithms, which might support a quicker approximation to the global optimum. The possible combination of BMA operators will be evaluated with shorter and longer order picking lists and compared to SA algorithms on the same basis. The simulation results highlight, that allowing unit load reconstruction could decrease the order picking lead time and the developed BMA algorithms are more effective for OPRP-PLF than the SA algorithms. The paper concludes that the SA combined BMA operators are more effective than the SA-less operators in the case of shorter (less than about 20 records) order picking lists. While the shorter lists are the most commonly occurring order picking lists of warehouses, the SA combined BMA operators can increase the effectiveness of the OPRP-PLF optimisation.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2018.03.043

Necessary and sufficient conditions for the equality of interactive and non-interactive extensions of continuous functions

Publication Name: Fuzzy Sets and Systems

Publication Date: 2018-01-15

Volume: 331

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 116-130

Description:

In this contribution we find the class of n-dimensional joint possibility distributions with the property that the interactive extension principle coincides with the non-interactive extension principle as long as the interactive operations are determined by continuous functions strictly increasing in each argument. This result completes recent studies by the authors, where the particular case of interactive additions and multiplications versus non-interactive additions and multiplications were investigated. In addition, this time we propose results that also cover the cases when we know the fuzzy numbers only from their membership functions. It means that we eliminated the limitations that appear when we cannot pass from membership function representation to parametric representation of fuzzy numbers. As important new applications, we mention the study on the completely correlated fuzzy numbers. Also of note is that we propose two simple methods to extend bidimensional joint possibility distributions to n-dimensional joint possibility distributions. One method is based on an inductive construction while the other one is based on a pairwise construction.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.fss.2017.07.023

New energy management of capacitive energy storage in metro railcar by simulation

Publication Name: 5th IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference Vppc 09

Publication Date: 2009-12-23

Volume: Unknown

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 181-187

Description:

This paper focuses on the use of modeling and simulation of a renewable energy. The capacitive energy storages contribute to the rapid energy recovery associated with regenerative braking in electric vehicles. This power system allows the acceleration and deceleration of the vehicle with a lower loss of energy. Short-distance passenger traffic on electrified lines is a domain where brake energy recuperation might reduce the total energy consumption significantly. In this paper the results of simulation models by Matlab-Simulink for an urban-metro railcar and some methods for reducing the needed value of capacitance are presented. The aim of the new management of the energy storage system for decreasing the needed value of capacitance and improving the system performance is presented. © 2009 IEEE.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1109/VPPC.2009.5289852