Distributed ledger technology in supply chains: a transaction cost perspective

With the emergence of distributed ledger technology (DLT), numerous practitioners and researchers have proclaimed its beneficial impact on supply chain transactions in the future. However, the vast majority of DLT initiatives are discontinued after a short period. With the full potential of DLT laying far down the road, especially managers in supply chain management (SCM) seek for short-term cost-saving effects of DLT in order to achieve long-term benefits of DLT in the future. However, the extant research has bypassed grounding long-term as well as short-term effects of DLT on supply chain transaction with empirical data. We address this shortcoming, following an abductive research approach and combining empirical data from a multiple case study design with the corresponding literature. Our study reveals that the effects of DLT on supply chain transactions are two-sided. We found six effects of DLT solutions that have a cost-reducing or cost avoidance impact on supply chain transactions. In addition, we found two effects that change the power distribution between buyers and suppliers in transactions and a single effect that reduces the dependency of supply chain transactions on third parties. While cost-reducing and avoidance as well as dependency-reducing effects are positive effects, the change in power distribution might come with disadvantages. With these findings, the paper provides the first empirical evidence of the impact of DLT on supply chain transactions, which will enable managers to improve their assessment of DLT usage in supply chains.     

A stiffness parameter and truncation error criterion for adaptive path following in structural mechanics

We explore a truncation error criterion to steer adaptive step length refinement and coarsening in incremental-iterative path following procedures, applied to problems in large-deformation structural mechanics. Elaborating on ideas proposed by Bergan and collaborators in the 1970s, we first describe an easily computable scalar stiffness parameter whose sign and rate of change provide reliable information on the local behavior and complexity of the equilibrium path. We then derive a simple scaling law that adaptively adjusts the length of the next step based on the rate of change of the stiffness parameter at previous points on the path. We show that this scaling is equivalent to keeping a local truncation error constant in each step. We demonstrate with numerical examples that our adaptive method follows a path with a significantly reduced number of points compared to an analysis with uniform step length of the same fidelity level. A comparison with Abaqus illustrates that the truncation error criterion effectively concentrates points around the smallest-scale features of the path, which is generally not possible with automatic incrementation solely based on local convergence properties.     

Supramolecular Assembly of Aminoethylene‐Lipopeptide PMO Conjugates into RNA Splice‐Switching Nanomicelles

Phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PMOs) are oligonucleotide analogs that can be used for therapeutic modulation of pre‐mRNA splicing. Similar to other classes of nucleic acid‐based therapeutics, PMOs require delivery systems for efficient transport to the intracellular target sites. Here, artificial peptides based on the oligo(ethylenamino) acid succinyl‐tetraethylenpentamine (Stp), hydrophobic modifications, and an azide group are presented, which are used for strain‐promoted azide‐alkyne cycloaddition conjugation with splice‐switching PMOs. By systematically varying the lead structure and formulation, it is determined that the type of contained fatty acid and supramolecular assembly have a critical impact on the delivery efficacy. A compound containing linolenic acid with three cis double bonds exhibits the highest splice‐switching activity and significantly increases functional protein expression in pLuc/705 reporter cells in vitro and after local administration in vivo. Structural and mechanistic studies reveal that the lipopeptide PMO conjugates form nanoparticles, which accelerate cellular uptake and that the content of unsaturated fatty acids enhances endosomal escape. In an in vitro Duchenne muscular dystrophy exon skipping model using H2K‐mdx52 dystrophic skeletal myotubes, the highly potent PMO conjugates mediate significant splice‐switching at very low nanomolar concentrations. The presented aminoethylene‐lipopeptides are thus a promising platform for the generation of PMO‐therapeutics with a favorable activity/toxicity profile.     

Efficient allylation of cellulose in dimethyl sulfoxide/tetrabutylammonium fluoride trihydrate

The cellulose solvent dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO)/tetrabutylammonium fluoride trihydrate (TBAF) was successfully applied as reaction medium for the synthesis of allyl cellulose by conversion of the polymer with allyl chloride in the presence of solid NaOH. Samples with degree of substitution from 0.50 to 2.98 were accessible by varying the molar ratio anhydroglucose unit:allyl chloride:NaOH and reaction time. DMSO/TBAF was found to be an efficient reaction medium for the preparation of highly functionalized samples from spruce sulfite pulp with degree of polymerization of about 500 even in a scale of 50 g. The allyl cellulose samples were characterized by means of FTIR- and NMR spectroscopy. Size exclusion chromatography revealed negligible polymer degradation during synthesis and purification of the samples.     

Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects: Fuzzy-Based Active Vibration Damping Skill

Human can handle a deformable object and damp its vibration with recognized skill. However, for an industrial robot, handling a deformable object with acute vibration is often a difficult task. This paper addresses the problem of active damping skill for handling deformable linear objects (DLOs) by using a strategy inspired from human manipulation skills. The strategy is illustrated by several rules, which are explained by a fuzzy and a P controller. A proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is also employed to explain the rules as a comparison. The interpretations from controllers are translated into high level commands in a robotic language V+. A standard industrial robot with a force/torque sensor mounted on the wrist was employed to demonstrate the skill. Experimental results showed the fuzzy based damping skill is quite effective and stable even without any previous acknowledge of the deformable linear objects.Category (5)     

Whisker-contacted diode-multipliers as quasioptical SMMW-arrays

Starting from a SMMW-multiplier design with quasioptical output two different multiplier compounds are presented. These new multipliers consist of a quasioptical antenna array in the output circuit which acts as a tunable power combiner. The multipliers work as quadruplers with an output frequency of 600 GHz. In all constructions the pump energy is fed into the diodes by a screened waveguide network. Optimum configurations for all arrays concerning quasioptical power combining are calculated and a theoretical comparison between the different multiplying conceptions is made. Finally some characteristic measurements of the quasioptical quadruplers are illustrated.     

Dynamic Testing of Prestressed Concrete Bridges and Numerical Verification

This paper describes different dynamic tests carried out on three bridges, B14, B15, and B13, over highway E19, which connects Brussels and Antwerpen in Belgium. Different excitation types are considered: a drop weight, a heavy truck on the bridge, and ambient vibrations mainly due to the traffic under the bridge. Finite-element models are constructed to support and verify the dynamic measurements. The modal parameters are extracted from the response time series using the data dependent system approach. A vector autoregressive model is developed and successfully applied to the measured responses in time domain. Good correlation between the finite-element simulations and the experiments is obtained.     

A fast audio similarity retrieval method for millions of music tracks

We present a filter-and-refine method to speed up nearest neighbor searches with the Kullback–Leibler divergence for multivariate Gaussians. This combination of features and similarity estimation is of special interest in the field of automatic music recommendation as it is widely used to compute music similarity. However, the non-vectorial features and a non-metric divergence make using it with large corpora difficult, as standard indexing algorithms can not be used. This paper proposes a method for fast nearest neighbor retrieval in large databases which relies on the above approach. In its core the method rescales the divergence and uses a modified FastMap implementation to speed up nearest-neighbor queries. Overall the method accelerates the search for similar music pieces by a factor of 10–30 and yields high recall values of 95–99% compared to a standard linear search.     

A 2-D five-noded finite element to model power singularity

A 2-D five-noded finite element which contains a singularity is developed. The new element is compatible with cubic standard isoparametric elements. The main advantage of using cubic isoparametric elements over quadratic elements is to reduce the number of elements required to model a structure for results of comparable accuracy. The element is tested on two different examples. In the first example, an edge crack problem is analyzed using two different meshes. The second example is a crack perpendicular to the interface problem which is solved for two different specific composites. The results obtained using the proposed element are compared with those obtained using other existing elements in the literature. Those comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the present technique in using less number of elements and nodes to produce accurate results.