This paper fills the gap in the study of the impact of Chinese companies' environmental performance (EP) on greenwashing based on the listed companies in China from 2010 to 2018. The relationship between EP and greenwashing is analyzed based on legitimacy theory and signal theory. From the empirical analysis, it is found that there exists a negative correlation between EP and greenwashing which supports the signal theory. Based on resource-based theory analysis, the impacts of environmental subsidies and political connections on the relationship between environmental performance and greenwashing are also analyzed. EP of enterprises receiving environmental protection subsidy has a greater inhibition effect on greenwashing. The negative effect of EP on greenwashing of state-owned enterprises is bigger than that of non-state-owned enterprises. This study can provide reference for government departments in deepening the reform of government environmental subsidies and environmental governance of state-owned enterprises.

Automation in an assembly line can be achieved using robots. In robotic U-shaped assembly line balancing (RUALB), robots are assigned to workstations to perform the assembly tasks on a U-shaped assembly line. The robots are expected to perform multiple tasks, because of their capabilities. U-shaped assembly line problems are derived from traditional assembly line problems and are relatively new. Tasks are assigned to the workstations when either all of their predecessors or all of their successors have already been assigned to workstations. The objective function considered in this article is to maximize the cycle time of the assembly line, which in turn helps to maximize the production rate of the assembly line. RUALB aims at the optimal assignment of tasks to the workstations and selection of the best fit robot to the workstations in a manner such that the cycle time is minimized. To solve this problem, a particle swarm optimization algorithm embedded with a heuristic allocation (consecutive) procedure is proposed. The consecutive heuristic is used to allocate the tasks to the workstation and to assign a best fit robot to that workstation. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using a wide variety of data sets. The results indicate that robotic U-shaped assembly lines perform better than robotic straight assembly lines in terms of cycle time.