C. K. M. Lee

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

The selection of an optimal fourth-party logistics (4PL) platform is a critical yet complex multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) task in cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) operations. Existing studies often rely on subjective judgments from industry experts, failing to fully capture the psychological states of key stakeholders involved in such a knowl...

Fault diagnosis plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability and efficiency of industrial machinery. While various machine/deep learning algorithms have been employed extensively for diagnosing faults in bearings and gears, the scarcity of data and the limited availability of labels have become a major bottleneck in developing data-driven diagn...

In the realm of robotic palletisation, the quest for optimal space utilization remains vital but also presents a critical challenge, particularly due to the constraints of decision complexity and the need for real-time decision-making without complete prior information. The widely adopted rule-based heuristics approaches were ease to use, but faile...

In the context of sustainable development, while the benefits of incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into supplier management have been widely discussed in recent years, a significant gap in the literature remains. Specifically, there is a lack of a standardized decision analytics framework for ESG-oriented supp...

In natural disasters, the emergency rescue system is of utmost importance for the smart city development, but the search and rescue (SAR) leveraging unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is under-explored. This study has established an Internet of UAVs architecture motivated by search and rescue activities, focusing on the path planning problem of UAV in...

Despite the ongoing success of artificial intelligence applications, the deployment of deep learning models on end devices remains challenging due to the limited onboard computational resources. A way to tackle this challenge is model compression through network pruning, which removes unnecessary parameters to reduce model size without significantl...

The rapid development of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) has led to an exponential growth in the deployment of industrial applications on user-owned smart devices, which poses significant challenges in identity management (IDM) concerning both privacy and quantity. The advent of blockchain technology can fulfill some of these requirements....

The integration of human-robot collaboration yields substantial benefits, particularly in terms of enhancing flexibility and efficiency within a range of mass-personalized manufacturing tasks, for example, small-batch customized product inspection and assembly/disassembly. Meanwhile, as human-robot collaboration lands broader in manufacturing, the...

With the advent of intelligent manufacturing era, higher requirements are put forward for the fault diagnosis technology of machinery. The existing data‐driven approaches either rely on specialized empirical knowledge for feature analysis, or adopt single deep neural network topology structure for automatic feature extraction with compromise of cer...

The importance of multi-criteria group decision-making techniques in today’s complex decision-making environment is undeniable. In complex decision problems, the determination of criteria weights is often subject to both DM-related uncertainty and external event-related uncertainty. The Fuzzy Best-Worst Method (FBWM), as a widely applied MCDM techn...

The autonomous remote inspection method based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has potential benefits in solving the safety inspection problem of large-scale industrial facilities. However, the low coverage rate caused by unsatisfactory trajectory quality is the main challenge of autonomous inspection operations. Therefore, in order to effectively...

Modern consumption patterns lead to massive waste, which poses challenges in storage and highlights the urgent need for more sustainable product development. Customer feedback on products plays a crucial role in product design, yet previous studies overlooked these invaluable insights. In response, this study introduces a novel systematic methodolo...

Due to the new normal caused by the pandemic, consumer behaviour has now shifted to online shopping not only for general commodities but also for food and other perishable products. Therefore, e-commerce fulfilment is now integrated with cold chain capabilities to satisfy stringent requirements on time-criticality and product quality, leading to th...

Abstract The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionise the pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative stages of orthopaedic surgery. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the role and effectiveness of AI in Orthopedic surgery. We compare the outcomes of AI-assisted and convention...

In today’s competitive and volatile e-commerce markets, effective supply chain performance measurement (SCPM) gradually becomes essential for investigating pitfalls and loopholes in strategic vendor management and business development. Surrounding the atmosphere of Industry 5.0, sustainability and resilience are two primary pillars, which should be...

The emergence of blockchain technology has seen applications increasingly hybridise cloud storage and distributed ledger technology in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems, complicating data management in decentralised applications (DApps). Because it is inefficient for blockchain technology to handle large amounts of data, effec...

Logistics drones are theoretically advantageous in automating last-mile delivery activities, but practically challenging in urban environments, including public concerns about risk of crashes and privacy. In view of the above concerns existing in the trajectory planning of logistics drones, this paper presents a parallel automatic delivery model fo...

The growing demand for cold chain e-fulfilment services has created challenges for implementing low-carbon practices due to the use of extensive energy and insulation materials required to maintain the desired service quality throughout the supply chain. This study applies the Fuzzy Best Worst Method with group decision-making capabilities to ident...

In the landscape of Industry 4.0, enhancing data traceability across the supply chain is imperative. With the development of quantum computers, blockchains traditionally used for traceability struggle to guarantee the authenticity of data. Furthermore, only chained blocks have been used in previous traceability systems, which has resulted in a full...

The Capacitated and Time-Constrained Vehicle Routing Problem (CTCVRP) is regarded as a complex but essential, optimization mission in logistics and transportation systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to use deep reinforcement learning to solve the CTCVRP in an e-fulfilment center environment. Our approach aims to deal with both capac...

Pallet loading operations support palletisation and truckload optimisation for e-fulfilment processes. Currently, the pallet loading problem is optimised offline using available cargo information, which is advantageous compared to typical freight operations but results in inefficiency when handling fragmented e-commerce orders. This research develo...

Industry 4.0 is reshaping the manufacturing landscape, bringing about revolutionary changes in both product manufacturing and collaborative interactions among value chain constituents. Within the manufacturing value chain process, sustainable and resilient supplier management is recognized as a strategic endeavor that drives value creation such as...

This study aims to determine the optimal deployment plan for EV fast charging stations in a transportation network with a limited budget. The objective of the deployment problem is to maximize the quality of service (QoS) with respect to both waiting time and range anxiety from the perspective of EV customers. With the rapid growth of the electric...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has been identified as a highly promising paradigm for human-centric smart manufacturing in the context of Industry 5.0. In order to enhance both human well-being and robotic flexibility within HRC, numerous research efforts have been dedicated to the exploration of human body perception, but many of these studies ha...

Effective fault diagnosis maximizes economic benefits by ensuring the stability of machinery systems. Detecting the faults of the key components in machinery, such as rolling bearings, at an early stage, helps to avoid accidents to optimize the maintenance efficiency. It is well known that faulty bearings always deliver a message through their abno...

Assembly lines of large-size products usually allow multiple workers to process tasks simultaneously on the same product. Meanwhile, due to the increasing demand of customized products, a diverse product mix with more product models and optional features is necessary. Although line balancing and model sequencing are interwoven, only the balancing p...

Solder paste printing (SPP) is one of the critical processes for the printed circuit board assembly to reliably apply the solder paste on raw PCBs for the component placement through surface mount technology. Although computerised SPP machines have been developed in the past few years, the reliance on domain experts cannot be neglected to fine-tune...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has been considered as a promising paradigm towards futuristic human-centric smart manufacturing, to meet the thriving needs of mass personalization. In this context, existing robotic systems normally adopt a single-granularity semantic segmentation scheme for environment perception, which lacks the flexibility to be...

Developing a sustainable community is mainly contingent upon energy infrastructure driven by energy alternatives. It has been attempted to accomplish energy sustainability by just ranking energy alternatives. In the current work, an integrated decision support tool (IDST) and multi-level hierarchical structure (MLHS) are developed to instigate new...

Hydrothermal gasification (HTG) at supercritical water has been used to convert poultry litter into value‐added products. In this research study, a process simulation model of HTG for syngas from poultry litter has been developed using Aspen Plus software, and it has been validated at four distinct temperature levels. The effects of the three param...

Sitting posture recognition is essential in preventing work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). WMSDs are of huge concern for office workers whose working process is averagely 81.8% sedentary. Prevailing studies have utilized cameras, wearables, and pressure sensors to recognize sitting postures. The cameras and wearables can achieve accurat...

Caused by a cognitive bias, consumers tend to be overconfident and are overprecise in the valuation of products, which directly affects product demand and price. Many manufacturers nowadays sell products to consumers through retailers as well as the Internet, forming dual-channel supply chains. Determining the optimal wholesale, direct, and retail...

With the development of technology and manufacturing, the conflicts between environment protection, economic interest and social benefit have been awared and paid more attention to in recent years. The sustainability performance has been considered by increasing number of decision makers. In the real-life practice, it will strongly affect the prior...

The objective of this study is to analyze four different poultry litter conversion technologies including fast pyrolysis (FP), slow pyrolysis (SP), anaerobic digestion (AND), and aerobic digestion (AD) in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis has been used to analyze these technologies comprehens...

Achieving the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) in China largely depends on the transition of cities towards sustainable development. However, significant knowledge gaps exist in evaluating the SDG index at the city scale and in understanding how to simulate pathways to achieve the 17 SDGs for Chinese cities by 2030. This study...

The development of renewable energy (RE) has been recognized as a promising way for solving the energy security problems in future. However, there are various barriers that hinder the development of RE. The awareness of the decision-makers about these barriers can lead to designing the appropriate strategies for overcoming them using the focused in...

In the era of industry 4.0, artificial intelligence (AI) may potentially be used to provide reasoning and decision support on engineering and technical challenges. The role of AI in industrial design, which is the practice of improving the function, value and aesthetics of products to optimise customer satisfaction, has not yet been extensively exp...

In this paper, we intend to address the value creation of utilizing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-driven resource synchronization and sharing-based robotic mobile fulfillment system (RMFS) to enhance the overall operational effectiveness and efficiencies during information transfer and synchronization of resources. With the advent of IIo...

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is of great importance to improve the reliability and availability of machinery. Traditional rolling bearing RUL prediction methods ignore the impact of bearing degradation states recognition on accurate the RUL prediction. A novel deep learning-based two-stage RUL prognostic approach is presented in this pape...

Alleviating energy poverty is a significant issue in many countries, for which effective energy poverty measurement is the prerequisite. This paper seeks to make a comprehensive and systematic assessment of the energy poverty performance of 30 provinces in China for 11-year period (2007–2017) by emphasizing their spatial-temporal changes. The paper...

Data-driven remaining useful life (RUL) prediction approaches, especially those based on deep learning (DL), have been increasingly applied to mechanical equipment. However, two reasons limit their prognostic performance under variable operating conditions. The first one is that the existing DL-based prognostic models usually ignore the utilization...

The teleoperation and coordination of multiple industrial robots play an important role in today's industrial internet-based collaborative manufacturing systems. The user-friendly teleoperation approach allows operators from different manufacturing domains to reduce redundant learning costs and intuitively control the robot in advance. Nevertheless...

The advancement of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence contribute to the prevailing development of smart office, which is capable of understanding employees’ context and adapting to their demands. The smart office brings numerous opportunities for delivering prevention and control measures of health issues associated with office wo...

Successfully developing new products has always been a challenging mission to every business organisation, but critical to the business competitiveness and survival. In recent years, the emergence of advanced technologies, such as blockchain and 5G, creates a number of possibilities to enhance products’ functionalities and quality with promising pr...

Dynamic pricing, which aims to dynamically adjust the charging price in a timely fashion to unlock the flexibility of electric vehicle (EV) customers, has been extensively studied with the rapid development of charging technologies. Many existing works on dynamic pricing focus on maximizing the social welfare of charging service providers and EV cu...

The use of hand gestures is one of the commonly used communication approaches in human daily life, especially for the deaf and dumb. Hand gesture recognition can be adopted in human-computer interaction for converting hand gestures into words or sentences. Unfortunately, the same gesture may have diverse meanings in different countries. With the ai...

In the era of Industry 4.0, various technologies have been great assisting tools for different industries to improve their work efficiency and enhance customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. This paper discusses the issue of shipment delay and sales prediction by understanding how various attributes, based on data from the retail industry, will impact...

With the rapid growth of the global digital economy, supply chain finance has entered the stage of platform development in view of the history, policy environment, market status and other factors. Supply chain finance relies on multiple supply chain stakeholders to carry out financial business, which needs to solve a variety of financial risk contr...

Electric vehicles (EVs) have received considerable attention in dealing with severe environmental and energy crises. The capacity planning of public charging stations has been a major factor in facilitating the wide market penetration of EVs. In this paper, we present an optimization model for charging station capacity planning to maximize the fuzz...

With the rapid development and implementation of ICT, academics and industrial practitioners are widely applying robotic process automation (RPA) to enhance their business processes and operational efficiencies. This paper intends to address the value creation of utilizing RPA under the cloud-based Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in Robotic Mobile Ful...

Life cycle sustainability of energy systems has received more and more attentions recently. In order to make an accurate comparison of the sustainability performance of different energy systems and promote the decision-making process, various prioritization methods of energy systems were developed. However, the lack of enough data for decision-maki...

Pallet management as a backbone of logistics and supply chain activities is essential to supply chain parties, while a number of regulations, standards and operational constraints are considered in daily operations. In recent years, pallet pooling has been unconventionally advocated to manage pallets in a closed-loop system to enhance the sustainab...

Due to fierce competition in the global market, success in product innovation has always been challenging for most enterprises to be able to stand out in business values and product novelty. Typically, available technological features in the market are taken into consideration in the innovation process for differentiation from existing products. In...

In order to achieve the sustainable separation design of azeotropic mixtures, this study proposed a systematic framework for distillation process optimization and intensification based on a composite sustainability index. Binary minimum azeotropic mixture ethanol-ethyl propionate was studied as an illustrative example. Specifically, three extractiv...

The increasing availability of immersive virtual reality (VR) systems offers new opportunities and challenges in teaching and learning with the sensory experience of sight, touch, and interaction. To enrich learning experience and student interest in learning, an effective instructional design is crucial in converting the real environment into the...

The estimation of 6D pose of industrial parts is a fundamental problem in smart manufacturing. Traditional approaches mainly focus on matching corresponding key point pairs between observed 2D images and 3D object models via hand-crafted feature descriptors. However, key points are hard to discover from images when the parts are piled up in disorde...

The variety of the energy storage materials and technologies leads to the selection difficulty. To evaluate the overall performance of energy storage technologies, this study proposes sustainability efficiency and sustainability super-efficiency indices. The proposed indices illustrate the integrated performance of energy storages in economic, envi...

Balancing the workloads of workstations is key to the efficiency of an assembly line. However, the initial balance can be broken by the changing processing abilities of machines because of machine degradation, and at some point, re-balancing of the line is inevitable. Nevertheless, the impacts of unexpected events on assembly line re-balancing are...

Purpose In the cold supply chain (SC), effective risk management is regarded as an essential component to address the risky and uncertain SC environment in handling time- and temperature-sensitive products. However, existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches greatly rely on expert opinions for pairwise comparisons. Despite the fact t...

Though American sign language (ASL) has gained recognition from the American society, few ASL applications have been developed with educational purposes. Those designed with real-time sign recognition systems are also lacking. Leap motion controller facilitates the real-time and accurate recognition of ASL signs. It allows an opportunity for design...

In previous studies, customer survey data were commonly adopted to perform the modelling of customer satisfaction (CS). However, it could be time-consuming to conduct surveys and obtain their data. On the other hand, respondents’ responses are quite often confined by preset questions. Nowadays, a huge number of customer online reviews on products c...

New product development to enhance companies’ competitiveness and reputation is one of the leading activities in manufacturing. At present, achieving successful product design has become more difficult, even for companies with extensive capabilities in the market, because of disorganisation in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of the innovation process. Tr...

The robust traffic flow modelling approach offers a perspicacious and holistic surveillance for flight activities in a nearby terminal manoeuvring area. The real time flight information expedites the streaming control of terminal operations using computational intelligence. Hence, in order to reduce the adverse effect of severe uncertainty and the...

Nowadays, Hong Kong International Airport faces the issues of saturation and overload. The difficulties of selecting taxiways and reducing the lead time at the runway holding position are the severe consequences that appeared from increasing the number of passengers and increased cargo movement to Hong Kong International Airport but without constru...

The occurrence of unplanned aircraft shortages and disruption of flight schedules during the day-today operations of airlines is inevitable. When equipment failure causes unsafe flight, the aircraft will be grounded or temporarily delayed when the weather shuts down the airport or the required flight crew is unavailable. Real-time decisions must be...

Ordering picking is the most time-and cost-consuming operation in the Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System (RMFS) and affects the entire supply chain operation efficiency and effectiveness. With the aid of digital operations, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) provide a nearly real-time control and response in the virtualized environment, thereby conducting...

With the recent developments in robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), academics and industrial practitioners are now pursuing robust and adaptive decision making (DM) in real-life engineering applications and automated business workflows and processes to accommodate context awareness, adaptation to environment and custo...

The rapid growth of the airline industry has caused an enormous demand in the context of air transport and air traffic congestion in several hub airports. In order to alleviate this situation and resolve the imbalance between the arrival and departure rate, efficient runway usage in airport capacity management is an immediate and feasible solution...