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The sustainable development goals (SDGs) suggest sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11) as inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable human settlements. However, existing efforts in urban sustainability have mainly focused on ecological and environmental sustainability, with little attention paid to development, economic, and cultural sustainability. Moreover, a lack of adaptability is a barrier to cross-nation or cross-region implementation of many urban sustainability frameworks due to diverse urban contexts. Furthermore, most studies have developed sustainability frameworks and guides only for one-time assessments and the progress of urban sustainability has been neglected. Improving urban sustainability by considering multiple dimensions and local adaptability through dynamic assessment remains a question. Therefore, this study aims to develop an urban environment examination system (UEES) framework that includes construction, economy and industry, environment and resource, municipal and cultural facilities, and development potential dimensions. The UEES framework consists of 31 indicators associated with critical information (i.e., reported by the statistical yearbooks) from different levels of government in China. An annual update of statistical data ensures the availability of dynamic data, allowing urban managers and decision makers to regularly track urban sustainability. Furthermore, the UEES framework was applied to Qingdao, an urbanizing city in China, to examine the feasibility of the UEES framework. The results indicate that well-urbanized districts could perform better in terms of overall sustainability (e.g., Shinan, Shibei, Laoshan, Chengyang), while districts in suburban and outer suburban areas had lower urban sustainability levels. However, well-urbanized districts could not perform better in all dimensions than suburban and outer suburban districts. Moreover, the transition from less-urbanized to well-urbanized districts could lead to environmental deterioration and economy deceleration (if industries are not well upgraded), but culture and development sustainability can be improved. Overall, this study provides a methodological framework that prioritizes comprehensiveness and local adaptability to perform regular urban environment examinations for urban sustainability in China and provides a reference for urban sustainability improvement by identifying aspects with low scores in Qingdao, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In e-market environment, the participants are usually bilateral such as in Consumer-to-Business or Customer-to-Customer business models. The participant on each side prefers the counterpart from which the concerned issues or profits can be pursued. Hence, the effective matching from a global point of view and the stable matching from an individual point of view become the critical function of the business models. In this paper, a systematic model of Stable Multilateral Automated Negotiation ( SMAN ) is proposed to facilitate the involved parties’ matching process in two-sided e-market, where confidential mediator agent as well as party agents communicate and make decisions on behalf of their principal parties. To make the matching effective and stable, two optimization models are designed. One is matching points model which makes an effective balance among the proposal value of issues for each possible pair of matching, such that the joint weighted profit measure is optimized with feature rescaling. The other one is matching scheme model which optimizes Social Welfare ( SW ) subject to the stable constraints, and ensures the engaged individual party satisfies the matching result from its viewpoint. And the optimality of stable matching is proved by mathematical deduction. Finally, numerical experiments are illustrated and show that the designed systematic models can generate effective matchings with individually stable advantages over the traditional Multilateral Automated Negotiation of Two Sides ( MANTS) . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]