George Q. Huang

• BEng PhD FASME FCILT FHKIE FIET FIISE
• Chair Professor of Smart Manufacturing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Physical Internet (PI) has emerged as an open global logistics system in which physical, digital and operative interconnectivity are combined by units, interfaces and protocols. The PI initiatives have revolutionized the logistics industry, which significantly promotes logistics sustainability, digitalization and the interconnection of logistic ser...

In high-risk industrial environments like nuclear power plants, precise defect identification and localization are essential for maintaining production stability and safety. However, the complexity of such a harsh environment leads to significant variations in the shape and size of the defects. To address this challenge, we propose the multivariate...

Logistics and supply chain management are the key means for promoting economic development (Lim et al., 2024). The Physical Internet (PI) is a paradigm-shifting vision that aims to create a universal interconnection of logistics services and networks that exploits a Digital Internet inspired metaphor (Ballot et al., 2021; Montreuil, 2011). However,...

Blockchain technology is increasingly used to ensure the authenticity of product information in supply chains. As digital transparency becomes a key factor in modern commerce, the evaluation of blockchain’s value becomes important. In this paper, we model a supply chain with a manufacturer and an online retailer to study the role of blockchain in t...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has revolutionized the production landscape by enabling on-demand customized manufacturing. However, the efficient management of dynamic AM orders poses significant challenges for production planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the dynamic scheduling problem considering batch processing, random order arrival and...

Physical Internet (PI) is an revolutionary and rapidly advancing paradigm in the field of global logistics and supply chain management. Initially, PI was conceptualised as a framework that emulates the data packet transmission model of the digital internet, applying it to freight transport and logistics over the physical systems. Over time, the PI...

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, characterized by its low energy consumption, cost-effectiveness, and scalability, has gained prominence as a viable solution for indoor localization within industrial contexts. However, the dynamic nature of industrial environments poses considerable challenges to the accuracy of BLE-based indoor positioning s...

To promote the sharing of medical data assets (MDAs) in a more secure and sustainable manner, this article presents a blockchain-based MDA sharing framework. The contributions of this article are threefold. First, we designed a layered-architecture to decouple the privacy-preserving responsibilities among technologies considering the incentive rewa...

The rapid development of convolutional neural networks (CNN) has significantly contributed to the progress of intelligent fault diagnosis of mechanical transmission systems. Nevertheless, a significant number of prevailing CNN-based diagnostic models may suffer from two notable constraints. First, the existing models often employ fixed temporal poo...

Since the implementation of China’s mandatory waste sorting policy, the recycling of kitchen waste has become one of the core tasks of waste classification. The problem of designing the locations and the optimization configuration strategy for kitchen waste transfer stations faces great challenges in reconstructing the municipal solid waste collect...

To adapt to the dynamic, diverse, and personalised needs of customers, manufacturing enterprises face the challenge of continuously adjusting their resource structure. This has led manufacturers to shift towards a smart cloud manufacturing mode in order to build highly flexible production logistics (PL) systems. In these systems, the optimal config...

Urban regions confront a wide array of safety and management challenges, including natural disasters and the pressing demand for real-time incidents response. Information technology supports to collect massive multi-dimension data to form a digital twin-based urban system. However, as urban environments become increasingly complex and dynamic, trad...

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure has drawn much attention from listed companies, investors, and regulators. In response to the increasing demand of investors and regulators for non‐financial information, listed companies have paid attention to publishing ESG reports consisting of environmental, social, and governance informati...

The interplay between inbound order picking and outbound delivery operations is imperative. Nevertheless, these two operations are generally studied in a separate manner, and most existing studies on inbound order picking do not consider the influence of picking operations on downstream delivery operations. This paper addresses the order picking pr...

Information and automation technologies play a pivotal role in achieving cyber-physical integration within Construction 4.0. In this transformed landscape, the evolution of the construction management paradigm carefully considers the enhancement of business models and organizational structures to prioritize stakeholders’ well-being, environmental s...

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed significant challenges to end-to-end global supply chain visibility and transparency, with city lockdowns, factory shutdowns, flight cancellations, cross-border closures, and other uncertainties, disruptions, and disturbances. To address these challenges, reliable and accurate spatial-temporal information of physical...

Purpose Workload contribution calculation approaches in the existing literature overestimate or underestimate indirect workload, which increases both workload fluctuation and shop floor throughput performance. This study optimizes a Corrected Aggregate Workload (CAW) approach to control the workload contribution of workstations and Work In Progress...

Investors are increasingly relying on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) indexes to obtain a third-party assessment of corporate sustainability performance. Various ESG indexes are, therefore, released by prominent rating agencies, including MSCI, Sustainalytics, Refinitiv, etc. However, existing ESG indexes overvalue the usage of massive...

Fit-out operations in modular construction exhibit unique features, such as limited room space and diversely distributed operations in the building. These features pose significant challenges to planning, scheduling, and execution (PSE) of fit-out activities due to operational parallelism, distributional diversity, and narrower constrained time win...

Purpose This research explores mitigating carbon emissions and integrating sustainability in e-commerce logistics by optimizing the multi-depot pollution routing problem with time windows (MDPRPTW). A proposed model contrasts non-collaborative and collaborative decision-making for order assignment among logistics service providers (LSPs), incorpora...

Accurate gearbox fault identification is paramount for industrial production. In practice, gearboxes typically operate under normal conditions (rarely under faulty conditions), resulting in a long-tailed distribution of monitoring data. However, the majority of current algorithms are crafted based on the assumption of balanced sample distributions,...

Gait recognition aims to identify a person at a distance, serving as a promising solution for long-distance and less-cooperation pedestrian recognition. Recently, significant advances in gait recognition have achieved inspiring success in many challenging scenarios by utilizing deep learning techniques. Against the backdrop that deep gait recogniti...

Collaborative management of logistics and assembly processes plays a significant role in fit-out construction projects, where the many operations, materials, and stakeholders are involved forming a complex environment for synchronization. Facilitated by Internet-of-Things, multi-dimensional information is updated to generate the corresponding digit...

In the quest for sustainable production, manufacturers are increasingly adopting mixed-flow production modes to meet diverse product demands, enabling small-batch production and ensuring swift delivery. A key aspect in this shift is optimizing material distribution scheduling to maintain smooth operations. However, traditional methods frequently en...

This study aims to address a novel production and intralogistics synchronization (PiLSync) problem in multiresource-constrained assembly systems (MRCASs). PiLSync is highly complex due to the presence of multiple resources (operators, workstations, and materials) and the dynamic interactions between the resources and decisions. Moreover, various un...

As e-commerce has become more prevalent, the required logistics operations are challenged by the greater demand for and higher complexity of order picking in warehouses. While goods-to-person (G2P) picking systems, such as robotic mobile fulfillment systems, are becoming popular, there are still challenges in G2P systems, including the unstable per...

The lack of digitalization basis of social manufacturing resources has brought barriers to perform efficient production coordination in social manufacturing network. Digital twin can be a promising carrier for bridging this gap. However, the complexity of digital twin makes small and medium enterprises, and individual resource owners in social manu...

. Manufacturers are increasingly adopting mixed-flow manufacturing models to meet the growing customized, diverse, and dynamic customer demand. In such an environment, material distribution scheduling optimization is vital for smooth operations and is integral to production management. However, manufacturers frequently encounter problems like disor...