Naiming Xie

• PhD
• Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

The optimal bivariate spare part ordering and replacement policy for a single component system suffering from both performance deterioration and random shocks is taken into consideration in this paper. To be specific, a deteriorating complex system is simultaneously subject to external shocks, while the influence of shock damage can be removed by m...

The rapid development of the logistics industry and its cooperation with other production factors have an impact on the promotion of new-type urbanization (NTU), a more sustainable and inclusive model of urban growth. This article analyzes in-depth the impact mechanism of logistics industry agglomeration, a new way to promote innovation and improve...

In order to explore the influences of the strong Allee effect on population evolution in two-patch environments, this paper constructs a population model with discrete diffusion and analyzes its dynamics. Using the center manifold theorem, we discuss the codimension-one bifurcation, such as flip bifurcation, of the model. The qualitative structures...

This study aimed to identify and rank the barriers faced by disabled elderly in China while accessing eHealth primary care services. Primary data were collected from the disabled elderly based on technological, individual, relational, environmental, and organizational constructs. The Dynamic Grey Relational Analysis (DGRA) and Multiple-criteria Dec...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore a new grey relational analysis model to measure the coupling relationship between the indicators for the water environment status assessment. Meanwhile, the model deals with the problem that the changing of indicator order may result in the changing of the degree of grey relation. Design/methodology/...

Grey forecasting models, as a data-based mechanistic modeling method for time series analysis and forecasting, have been widely applied to address problems in various fields, including natural sciences, social sciences, and management sciences (Liu et al. 2017; Xie and Wang 2017).

Due to the limitation of people’s cognitive ability and the uncertainty of things, they can only understand part of the information of the system (For example, the value range of a system indicator). The grey number indicates that people only know the approximate range but do not know the exact value A form of uncertain information. In this chapter...

The traditional grey forecasting models mainly include two procedures, namely designing a sequence operator and fitting dynamical equations. The dynamical equations consists of continuous-time differential equations and discrete-time difference equations.

Nonlinear grey forecasting models, aimed at describing more complex systems, have broader applicability than linear models, having attracted considerable attention in the grey forecasting community. Up to now, most research has focused on improving the classical models and developing novel forms, which enrich nonlinear grey forecasting model famili...

Summarizing the continuous-time grey endogenous model outlined in Chapter 3, we can briefly describe the modeling process as follows: discrete (point observation)\(\rightarrow \) continuous (time-responsive) \(\rightarrow \) discrete (point prediction). The inevitable transition between continuous and discrete introduces errors. Deriving a direct m...

According to the classification in chapter 1, continuous-time grey endogenous model is a typical type of grey forecasting model. Since Professor Deng Julong’s original proposal of the continuous-time univariate first-order differential grey forecasting model GM(1,1) (Deng 1989), scholars have successively put forward continuous-time non-homogeneous...

Chapters 4 and 5 have focused on an overview of the discrete-time grey endogenous model and continuous-time grey exogenous models. In this chapter, we will explore the unified framework and solution method of discrete-time grey exogenous models. Our task will be deriving the explicit expression for discrete-time grey models by numerical approximati...

In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, we presented the continuous and discrete forms of grey endogenous models without considering the influence of external variables. This chapter will incorporate exogenous variables from the outside of the system and employ ordinary differential equations to describe dynamic systems affected by exogenous variables. We will...

The grey predator-prey model is widely applied in many fields for its effectiveness. While most of the research on the grey predator-prey model focuses on the different model forms, less attention has been paid to identifying parameters and initial value from noisy data. In this work, considering the measurement noise in practice, we propose a two-...

Grey forecasting models have found extensive applications across various domains, but the connection between their theory and practice has not yet been fully revealed. This paper seeks to discuss the modelling mechanism of grey forecasting models from the perspective of dynamic system modelling and illustrate how to establish grey forecasting model...

Grey forecasting models have found extensive applications across various domains, but the connection between their theory and practice has not yet been fully revealed. This paper seeks to discuss the modelling mechanism of grey forecasting models from the perspective of dynamic system modelling and illustrate how to establish grey forecasting model...

A bivariate order-replacement policy for a multi-state repairable system with imperfect repair is put forward in this paper, where the decisions on when to order a spare part and when to place a replacement are based on the number of failures. The geometric processes are generalized to depict the characteristics that the successive working times ar...

The medical devices, biotechnology, and healthcare industries are closely tied to innovation, with companies relying on research and development and new product introduction. However, innovation activities like research and development can be costly, and commercializing new products faces complexities. Having effective business models (BMs) aligned...

Seasonal demand forecasting is critical for effective supply chain management. However, conventional forecasting methods face difficulties in accurately estimating seasonal variations, owing to time-varying demand trends and limited data availability. In this paper, we propose a Fourier time-varying grey model (FTGM) to tackle this issue. The FTGM...

The nonlinear grey Bernoulli model is a powerful tool for modelling and forecasting time series exhibiting a rough inverted U-shape behavior. Traditionally, it is considered an indirect dynamical model, informed by empirical knowledge that the accumulation of the inverted U-shape series leads to a growth behavior, which is subsequently characterize...

Purpose Assembly line is a common production form and has been effectively used in many industries, but the imprecise processing time of each process makes production line balancing and capacity forecasting the most troublesome problems for production managers. In this paper, uncertain man-hours are represented as interval grey numbers, and the opt...

In this paper, we investigate the complex dynamics of a mapping derived from a differential equation with simple time-periodic delay. Firstly, we calculate the truncated normal form of 1:1 resonance of the mapping at a degenerate fixed point and obtain an approximating system of the mapping by using Picard iteration. By analyzing the approximate sy...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the grey scheduling, which is the combination of grey system theory and scheduling problems with uncertain processing time. Based on the interval grey number and its related definitions, properties, and theorems, the single machine scheduling with uncertain processing time and its general forms are studied as...

The Cusum (cumulative sum) operator is a fundamental prerequisite for the nonlinear grey Bernoulli model. Traditionally, it is believed to visually identify the underlying dynamic pattern of the original time series. This paper presents the misconceptions concerning the Cusum operation and the over-optimization of the initial condition in the class...

Purpose: China's population aging is gradually deepening and needs to be actively addressed. The purpose of this paper is to construct a novel model for analyzing the population aging. Design/methodology/approach: To analyze the aging status of a region, this study has considered three major indicators: total population, aged population and the pro...

In the era of Big Data, decision-making has become more complex and more uncertain. Faced with this situation, fuzzy linguistic approach may be an information representation model that is closer to natural language and people’s cognition habits than exact numerical models. Although Big Data has a large amount of data, the useful information is inco...

Continuous enhancement of sustainable development capacity is one of the goals of building a well-off society. In order to understand the development of each region, it is necessary to make a comprehensive evaluation of their sustainable development capacity. This paper presents a study of the 11 regions of Hebei Province, China. Considering the in...

Purpose The cumulative sum (Cusum) operator, also referred to as accumulating generation operator, is the fundamental of grey system models and proves to be successful in various real-world applications. This paper aims to uncover the advantages of the Cusum operator from a parameter estimation perspective, i.e. comparing integral matching with cla...

In 40 years since Deng’s seminal work on grey system theory, researches have consistently shown that grey system theory has developed as a scientific discipline which is consist of systems analysis, prediction, decision making, control, and optimization. In this section, framework and mechanism of grey system models will be further summarized. And...

Today’s challenges to sustainability are explored through a complex combination of interdisciplinary topics that explore various interactions between economic, social, and environmental systems that further contribute to existing uncertainties. Solving complex/dynamic sustainability constraints does not demand exclusively technical and practical me...

Regressing the vector field of a dynamical system from a finite number of observed states is a natural way to learn surrogate models for such systems. As shown in [27, 15, 36, 16, 39, 29, 48], a simple and interpretable way to learn a dynamical system from data is to interpolate its vector-field with a data-adapted kernel which can be learned by us...

To explore the process of online social network information interaction, in this paper, we analyze the dynamics of a discrete Lotka–Volterra information diffusion model. Using the center manifold theorem, the conditions for transcritical bifurcation and flip bifurcation are obtained. With the help of approximation by a flow and Picard iteration, we...

Every scientific or intellectual movement rests on central premises and assumptions that shape its philosophy. The purpose of this study is to review a brief account of the main philosophical bases of grey systems theory (GST) and the paradigm governing its principles. So, the recent studies on the philosophical foundations of GST have been reviewe...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to summarize the advances in grey system theory research and various application achievements in science and engineering. At the same time, it commemorates the 40th anniversary of the birth of grey system theory and the 10th anniversary of Grey Systems–Theory and Application. Design/methodology/approach Firstly...

Purpose The year 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the grey system theory (GST), which has been widely applied in the engineering field. This paper aims to systematically identify the achievements, hotspots, knowledge structure and emerging trends in this field. Design/methodology/approach A bibliometrics analysis was conduct...

This paper investigates a flexible job shop scheduling problem with uncertain processing time. The uncertainty of the processing time is characterized by a generalized grey number. We extract generalized grey numbers from limited information in real-world production, and then extend their operations for scheduling. With generalized grey numbers, th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to summarize progress of grey forecasting modelling, explain mechanism of grey forecasting modelling and classify exist grey forecasting models. Design/methodology/approach General modelling process and mechanism of grey forecasting modelling is summarized and classification of grey forecasting models is done a...

The PM2.5 in each city exhibits seasonal and trend variations, but its seasonal pattern differed regionally. Under the novel grey modelling framework, a flexible grey Fourier model is developed by introducing the Fourier series to approximate the seasonal forcing. An integral matching method is employed to estimate the structural parameters and ini...

GM(1,1) models have been widely used in various fields due to their high performance in time series prediction. However, some hypotheses of the existing GM(1, 1) model family may reduce their prediction performance in some cases. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a self-adaptive GM(1, 1) model, termed as SAGM(1, 1) model, which aims to sol...

Cloud-based additive manufacturing is one of the important forms of cloud manufacturing service platform, which can match manufacturing resources for multi-task requirements to further improve the utilization of idle resources and achieve cost reductions. This paper proposes a more realistic scenario of online scheduling rather than offline schedul...

Due to the randomness and time dependence of the factors affecting software reliability, most software reliability models are treated as stochastic processes, and the non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) is the most used one. However, the failure behavior of software does not follow the NHPP in a statistically rigorous manner, and the pure random...

Weibull distribution is widely used in engineering because of its flexibility to take on many different shapes. For different application fields, people put forward different estimation methods, including grey estimation method. The purpose of this paper is to improve the existing grey estimation method of Weibull distribution as its some serious s...

This paper investigates an online single batch machine scheduling problem for autoclave molding in composite materials manufacturing, in which the batches of jobs to be performed are modified by the new arrival jobs. The single batch machine and jobs are represented by rectangles, and jobs can be processed as a batch if the two-dimensional constrai...

Nonlinear grey system models, serving to time series forecasting, are extensively used in diverse areas of science and engineering. However, most research concerns improving classical models and developing novel models, relatively limited attention has been paid to the relationship among diverse models and the modelling mechanism. The current paper...

This paper proposes one centralized and three decentralized models (manufacturer-dominated, retailer-dominated, and collector-dominated) for a closed-loop supply chain with fuzzy demand and different quality levels for second-hand products. Optimal pricing, collection ratios, and profit allocations for each model are determined through a combinatio...

Objectives The prediction and early warning of infectious diseases is an important work in the field of public health. This study constructed the grey self-memory system model to predict the incidence trend of infectious diseases affected by many uncertain factors. Study design The design of this study is a combination of the prediction method and...

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery & pickup and real-time traffic information (VRPSDPTI) is a dynamic problem of combinatorial network optimisation in logistics and supply chain management. It is also a typical NP-hard problem that has plagued enterprises with reverse logistics operations for many years. The main objective of th...

Nonlinear grey system models, serving to time series forecasting, are extensively used in diverse areas of science and engineering. However, most research concerns improving classical models and developing novel models, relatively limited attention has been paid to the relationship among diverse models and the modelling mechanism. The current paper...

Since most of the research about grey forecasting models is focused on developing novel models and improving accuracy, relatively limited attention has been paid to the modelling mechanism and relationships among diverse kinds of models. This paper aims to unify and reconstruct continuous-time grey models, highlighting the differences and similarit...

while NGBM(1,1) model has been successfully used in various fields,there are still some limitations in NGBM(1,1) model: First, the existing NGBM(1,1) model family is all based on the assumption that some adjustable parameters are known, which reduced the prediction performance of the NGBM(1,1) model family. Then, the leap error from the differentia...

Scientific prediction and accurate grasp of the future trend of population change are conducive to the formulation of different population policies at different stages, so as to alleviate the adverse effects of the aging population on society and provide scientific theoretical reference for controlling the population size and making policy. Conside...

This study seeks to explicate the philosophical foundations and theoretical outlines of grey systems theory by focusing on human perception, cognition, and understanding processes and by considering their functions in the process of producing knowledge. Primarily, the study investigates the processes of perception, cognition, and understanding, as...

Purpose Accurate foreign tourist arrivals forecasting can help public and private sectors to formulate scientific tourism planning and improve the allocation efficiency of tourism resources. This paper aims to address the problem of low prediction accuracy of Chinese inbound tourism demand caused by the lack of valid historical data. Design/method...

Batch scheduling involves a machine that can process several jobs simultaneously. The existing literature mainly focuses on the batch-size-dependent setup time. However, setup time depends not only on the batch size but also on technological characteristics. This paper investigates a single batch scheduling problem with dual quantitative and techno...

In this paper we focus on an unrelated parallel workgroup scheduling problem where each workgroup is composed of a number of personnel with similar work skills which has eligibility and human resource constraints. The most difference from the general unrelated parallel machine scheduling with resource constraints is that one workgroup can process m...

Nonlinear grey Bernoulli model, abbreviated as NGBM model, has been validly used in real applications due to its high accuracy in nonlinear time series forecasting. However, there remain technical challenges to explain the mechanism of the accumulative sum operator in nonlinear grey modelling process and estimate structural parameters independent f...

Purpose The airline industry has been significantly hit by the occurrence of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, facing one of its worst crises in history. In this context, the present paper analyses one of the well-known boarding methods used in practice by the airlines before and during the coronavirus outbreak, namely back-to-front and suggests whic...

The study introduces the concept of risk-averse optimal position of the delivery window (RA-OPDW) into a cost-based delivery performance model. The penalty costs for early and late deliveries have attracted much attention in the background of supply delivery performance. However, minimizing the expected penalty has a critical disadvantage that it i...

In the cloud manufacturing environment, integrated cross-supplier order and logistic scheduling can benefit both suppliers and third-party logistics, significantly reduce their production and transport costs to improve the overall efficiency of the supply chain. This paper aims to construct a hybrid solution with both cross-supplier order assignmen...

Background: Due to its fast service and high utilization, day surgery is becoming more and more important in the medical system. As a result, an effective day surgery scheduling can reasonably release the supply and demand pressure. Objective: This paper aims to investigate the day surgery scheduling problem with patient preferences and limited...

Purpose This study examines the potential of contracts as one of the supply chain coordination mechanisms under competitive conditions. It also investigates a two-echelon supply chain model with two manufacturers and two retailers to develop a competitive structure in grey stochastic demand. Design/methodology/approach Supply chain demand is cons...

Grey system models can be viewed as a special class of dynamic data analysis tools, in which the continuous-time dynamics (differential equations or integral equations) are used to define the implicit regression formula. This communication investigates the parameter estimation of grey system models from noisy observations. Based on the state-space...

Purpose purpose of this paper is providing a solution for flexible flow shop scheduling problem with uncertain processing time in aeronautical composite lay-up workshop. Design/methodology/approach A flexible flow scheduling model and algorithm with interval grey processing time is established. First, according to actual needs of composite laminat...

Every scientific or intellectual movement is founded upon basic assumptions and hypotheses that shape its specifically formulated philosophy. This study seeks to explore and explicate the basic philosophical underpinnings of grey systems theory (GST), as well as the paradigm governing its postulates. The study, more specifically, scrutinizes the un...

CO2 emissions from the transportation sector occupy an increasingly important proportion in China’s carbon dioxide emissions. Measuring the accumulative impact of factors on carbon emissions over time is of great significance for formulating corresponding policies. This paper aims to propose a novel time-delay multivariate grey model to measure the...

Grey theory-based time series models are widely used in various fields and disciplines. While most of the research is focused on the development and improvement of novel discrete-time models, very limited attention has been paid to the relationships among diverse models. The current paper proposes a methodological and practical framework to unify t...

Human resources have played an important role in the production systems of manufacturing enterprises. At the same time, human resource allocation, as a scheduling problem, has attracted more and more attention from the industry and academia, with the increasing complexity of technology and the rising cost of workforce. However, the existing schedul...

Due that usage of composite material is increasing rapidly in aircrafts. To improve production efficiency is undoubtedly a useful strategy for solving contradiction of production and supply of composite materials. This paper aims to study on the autoclave molding scheduling problem so as to break through the bottleneck of composite material product...

In recent years, there have been international movements advocating more sustainable societies, and as a result of such movements, a remarkably important sub-branch has been shaped in systems studies called sustainability. It would be vital to propose methods that could deal with inherent complexities and uncertainties in such systems. Grey systems...