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(Jan Olhager), ou.tang@liu.se (Ou Tang) A B S T R A C T The perspectives on the manufacturing footprint of global firms are widening from the economic aspects to also include the environmental and social aspects. Thus, sustainability is becoming an important issue for the location of manufacturing facilities. It is therefore timely to review the relevant aspects and dimensions in the extant literature to investigate the relationship between sustainability and facility location. In this paper, we aim to understand how sustainability aspects are included in decision-making concerning manufacturing facility locations and the role of location in evaluating manufacturing sustainability. We examine the literature streams on sustainability and facility location. A comprehensive search includes peer-reviewed literature from 1990 to 2011. We propose a literature classification scheme with respect to focal area and research methodology. The content analysis identifies the environmental, social and economic perspectives and factors affecting location decisions. We synthesize the findings into a framework for taking sustainability aspects into account in manufacturing facility location decision-making. We also propose a research agenda for further research on sustainable locations. Keywords:Corporate social responsibility (CSR), Environment, Facility location, Manufacturing, Sustainability 2 IntroductionThe facility location problem has been around for a long time. In general, it concerns the geographical positioning of facilities for a specific organizational entity, such as a company.As such, it is a strategic decision related to the configuration of the manufacturing network.As competition becomes global and the complexity of the environment in which companies operate is increasing, managing an integrated international network has become an increasingly important task for managers (Ferdows, 1997(Ferdows, , 2009). Traditionally, the objective has been to derive a cost-optimal distribution of facilities with respect to the location of markets (customers) and raw materials (suppliers). More recently, access to skills and knowledge has been added as a major strategic factor that affects location decisions (Ferdows 1997, Vereecke et al. 2006, and Feldmann and Olhager 2013. Manufacturing companies that have more than one plant can gain insights on markets, products, and processes by managing a group of plants as a manufacturing network. In practice, this can lead to a complete reconfiguration of the manufacturing network such as in the cases of Digital (Arntzen et al. Camm et al. 1997). In other cases, the changes to the manufacturing network may be more incremental such as opening up of a new facility or closing down an existing one. There may be different strategic reasons for the location decisions for different manufacturing facilities, such as access to low-cost manufacturing, proximity to market, and access to skills and knowledge (Ferdows, 1997). Thus, deciding on the "optimal" set and location of manufacturing faciliti...

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Displacement estimation is a key step in the evaluation of tissue elasticity by quasistatic strain imaging. An efficient approach may incorporate a tracking strategy whereby each estimate is initially obtained from its neighbours’ displacements and then refined through a localized search. This increases the accuracy and reduces the computational expense compared with exhaustive search. However, simple tracking strategies fail when the target displacement map exhibits complex structure. For example, there may be discontinuities and regions of indeterminate displacement caused by decorrelation between the pre- and post-deformation radio frequency (RF) echo signals. This paper introduces a novel displacement tracking algorithm, with a search strategy guided by a data quality indicator. Comparisons with existing methods show that the proposed algorithm is more robust when the displacement distribution is challenging.

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Cross-border e-commerce is becoming increasingly popular around the world. With the development of technology, competition has gradually shifted from commodity-based attributes, such as cost and quality, to a supply chain's service capacity for e-commerce. Within this context, the present paper delineates how cross-border e-commerce firms can generate supply chain service capabilities that yield improvements in supply chain relationship quality to e-tailors and other platform users. Insights are derived through data collected via a multiple case study approach based on four Chinese cross-border e-commerce enterprises (OSell, Zongteng, BizArk and Linca); data were collected from 41 semi-structured interviews, field visits and secondary data. Relying on the service dominant logic as the theoretical foundation, we identify three supply chain resources (flows related to information, logistics and finance) and their interplay as being critical for the development of supply chain service capabilities, which in turn lead to an improvement in the quality of supply chain relationships (assessed by the dimensions of trust improvement/commitment, risk mitigation, and customer satisfaction). The results offer important insights into how to best manage relationships by cross-border ecommerce firms in order to foster relationship quality, an attribute that has become so critical today for competitive differentiation.