In this paper, a Blockchain-driven platform for supply chain finance, BCautoSCF (Zhi-lian-che-rong in Chinese), is introduced. It is successfully established as a reliable and efficient financing platform for the auto retail industry. Due to the Blockchain built-in trust mechanism, participants in the supply chain (SC) networks work extensively and transparently to run a reliable, convenient, and traceable business. Likewise, the traditional supply chain finance (SCF), partial automation of SCF workflows with fewer human errors and disruptions was achieved through smart contract in BCautoSCF. Such open and secure features suggest the feasibility of BCautoSCF in SCF. As the first Blockchain-driven SCF application for the auto retail industry in China, our contribution lies in studying these pain points existing in traditional SCF and proposing a novel Blockchain-driven design to reshape the business logic of SCF to develop an efficient and reliable financing platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the auto retail industry to decrease the cost of financing and speed up the cash flows. Currently, there are over 600 active enterprise users that adopt BCautoSCF to run their financing business. Up to October 2019, the BCautoSCF provides services to 449 online/offline auto retailors, three B2B asset exchange platforms, nine fund providers, and 78 logistic services across 21 provinces in China. There are 3296 financing transactions successfully completed in BCautoSCF, and the amount of financing is ¥566,784,802.18. In the future, we will work towards supporting a full automation of SCF workflow by smart contracts, so that the efficiency of transaction will be further improved.
Currently, the route planning functions in 2D/3D campus navigation systems in the market are unable to process indoor and outdoor localization information simultaneously, and the UI experiences are not optimal because they are limited by the service platforms. An ARCore-based augmented reality campus navigation system is designed in this paper in order to solve the relevant problems. Firstly, the proposed campus navigation system uses ARCore to enhance reality by presenting 3D information in real scenes. Secondly, a visual inertial ranging algorithm is proposed for real-time locating and map generating in mobile devices. Finally, rich Unity3D scripts are designed in order to enhance users’ autonomy and enjoyment during navigation experience. In this paper, indoor navigation and outdoor navigation experiments are carried out at the Lingang campus of Shanghai University of Electric Power. Compared with the AR outdoor navigation system of Gaode, the proposed AR system can achieve increased precise outdoor localization by deploying the visual inertia odometer on the mobile phone and realizes the augmented reality function of 3D information and real scene, thus enriching the user’s interactive experience. Furthermore, four groups of students have been selected for system testing and evaluation. Compared with traditional systems, such as Gaode map or Internet media, experimental results show that our system could facilitate the effectiveness and usability of learning on campus.
Photovoltaic (PV) panels are widely adopted and set up on residential rooftops and photovoltaic power plants. However, long-term exposure to ultraviolet rays, high temperature and humid environments accelerates the oxidation of PV panels, which finally results in functional failure. The traditional fault detection approach for photovoltaic panels mainly relies on manual inspection, which is inefficient. Lately, machine vision-based approaches for fault detection have emerged, but lack of negative samples usually results in low accuracy and hinders the wide adoption of machine vision-based approaches. To address this issue, we proposed a semi-supervised anomaly detection model based on the generative adversarial network. The proposed model uses the generator network to learn the data distribution of the normal PV panel dataset during training. When abnormal PV panel data are put into the model in the test phase, the reconstructed image generated by the model does not equal the input image. Since the abnormal PV panel data do not obey the data distribution learned by the generator, the difference between the original image and its reconstructed image exceeds the given threshold. So, the model can filter out the fault PV panel by checking the error value between the original image and its reconstructed image. The model adopts Gradient Centralization and SmoothL1 loss function to improve its generalization performance. Meanwhile, we use the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to make the model pay more attention to the defective area and greatly improve the performance of the model. In this paper, the photovoltaic panels dataset is collected from a PV power plant located in Zhejiang, China. We compare the proposed approach with state-of-the-art semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches (i.e., AnoGAN (Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks), Zhao’s method, GANomaly, and f-AnoGAN), and the result indicates that the Area Under Curve (AUC) increases by 0.06, 0.052, 0.041 and 0.035, respectively, significantly improving the accuracy of photovoltaic panel fault detection.
The vehicle information in used-car transactions is always asymmetric and disputes always happen in China. In order to reduce such disputes caused by the lack of transparency in a transaction, Blockchain technology is adopted to construct a trust mechanism for vehicle information storage and sharing in a transparent manner. In this work, a Blockchain-based vehicle history storing and tracking service, named BCVehis, is proposed. BCVehis allows vehicle owners, vehicle authority, mechanic workshops, insurance brokers and other related individuals/organizations to upload vehicle historical records via simple manners (i.e. mobile app or application programming interfaces). The system provides trustworthy vehicle history to used-car dealers, potential buyers, and other business-related parties. The design rationale and functional implementation of the BCVehis are introduced, and the increased deal volume in a local used-car dealer X is presented, which integrated BCVehis to its online dealing system.
In the era of paper-based contract, a lot of time, human labor and expenses are required to handle the process of contract drafting, contract signing, contract execution, and payment settlement. The emerging of electronic contract enhances the tedious signing process of paper-based contract and improves the efficiency of contract management. However, due to the centralized system architecture and the database-based storage schema, the stored contract data is at high risk of information leaking, data tampering and hacker attacks. In this study, we introduce Blockchain technology to the contract management, and develop a process-oriented contract management system (BEcontractor) for a Hangzhou-located power grid enterprise X, aiming to solve a series of security issues existing in the traditional electronic contract system. By deploying BEcontractor, procurement activities could be resumed online among X and its nation-widely commodity suppliers during COVID-19 epidemic. Up to September 2020, 6336 electronic contracts have been signed, with an accumulated amount of ¥ 6.5 billion. It is showed that the cost for accomplishing the contract signing process was significantly reduced, and the payment period was shortened from three months to around one month.
Recently, the deep learning technology has been adopted in the study of traditional village landscape. More precisely, it’s usually used to explore the representation of cultural heritage and the diversity of heritage information. In this study, we comprehensively reviewed these deep learning-related literatures for the evaluation of traditional village landscapes. E.g., the landscape image recognition led by the pixel-level semantic segmentation algorithm and image feature extraction technology enable user-centred exploration and make cultural heritage digitally and visually accessible. By suggesting a analytic framework using the pixel-level semantic segmentation algorithm and extracting image features, we attempted to identify the physical attributes and spatial characteristics of traditional village landscapes and further simulate the value perception thinking of experts and the public. Besides, we analysed the impact factors and correlation mechanism of spatial attributes to provide a scientific basis and technical support for the protection and utilization of traditional villages.