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Based on the Office for National Statistics' delineation of the scope of the digital economy industry, this paper selects indicators from five industrial dimensions: digital product manufacturing, digital product service, digital technology application, digital factor drive and digital efficiency improvement, and constructs an evaluation system to measure the development level of China's digital economy at the provincial level. It is found that there is a wide gap in the development of China's provincial digital economy, with the eastern coastal provinces and cities having a high level of digital economy development. The coupling and coordination model was then applied to examine the interrelationships between the five industrial dimensions of the digital economy, and it was found that most of the coupling and coordination relationships of the five industrial dimensions are at the stage of medium-high coupling and low coupling and coordination, and each province and city has different coupling and coordination characteristics. The numerical evaluation results provide an intuitive understanding of the differences and deficiencies in the development of the digital economy in different regions, and serve as a reference for the medium and long-term digital economy development planning of provinces and municipalities as well as the whole country. In the future, the state should invest more in the digital economy in the central and western regions, and each province should cultivate and develop the digital economy in accordance with its own local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: General practitioners are the main providers of primary care services. To better strengthen the important role of general practitioners in primary healthcare services, China is promoting the general practitioners' office system. There is a lack of well-accepted methods to measure the performance of general practitioner offices in China. We thus aim to develop a systematic and operable performance measurement system for evaluating the general practitioner's office.Methods: We establish an index pool of the performance measurement system of general practitioners' offices by a cross-sectional study and the literature research method and adopt the focus group method to establish the preliminary system. The Delphi method is then used to conduct three rounds of consultation to modify indices, which aims to form the final indicator system. We determine the weight of each index by the analytic hierarchy process method, which together with the final indicator system constitutes the final performance measurement system. Finally, we select three offices from three different cities in Sichuan Province, China, as case offices to conduct the case study, aiming to assess its credibility.Results: Our results show that the first office scored 958.5 points, the second scored 768.1 points, and the third scored 947.7 points, which corresponds to the reality of these three offices, meaning that the performance measurement system is effective and manoeuvrable.Conclusions: Our study provides support for standardizing the functions of China's general practitioner's office, improving the health service quality of generalists, and providing a theoretical basis for the standardization of the general practitioner's office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the performance estimation of technological innovation activities in the Chinese high-tech industry has been discussed continuously in prior literature, few studies analyze the imbalance development of subindustries and regional heterogeneity. Therefore, this study develops a parallel slack-based measure data envelopment analysis approach to estimate the innovation efficiency of the high-tech industry from regional and industrial perspectives. Compared with prior research, the proposed SBM-DEA model can be used to identify the inefficiencies caused by the subindustries via considering internal subindustries as parallel subunits. The proposed model is applied in the Chinese high-tech industry between 2011 and 2014. Empirical results reveal three critical findings. First, there exists an improving potential for innovation efficiency. Second, significant disparities in innovation efficiency are observed at the industrial level and regional level. Third, the inefficiency of the high-tech industry mainly stems from the low performance of the electronic equipment and communication equipment subindustry and computer and office equipment subindustry. Some suggestions for enhancing innovation efficiency are also proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Uncertainty-based multi-objective optimal design method of PVB system was proposed. • Three groups of influencing factors with uncertainty were identified and modeled. • Representative values of technical indicators (SCR and SSR) were defined. • Generic configuration indices of PV and battery capacities were proposed. • The proposed indices can be used directly as guide for PVB system design. In practice, the actual operation conditions are generally different from those assumed in the design stage, which causes uncertainties of actual building load and photovoltaic (PV) power generation. This study conducted an optimization design for PV-battery (PVB) system with consideration of these uncertainties. Three groups of factors with uncertainty, relating to outdoor conditions, building construction and indoor conditions, were discussed. An uncertainty-based multi-objective optimization design method was proposed for the PVB system based on the random simulations and weight sum method. Compared with conventional deterministic optimization method, the uncertainty-based optimization method is more likely to achieve the optimal configuration of PV and batteries in actual conditions. When the weight factors are the same, the impacts of self-consumption rate (SCR) on the PVB system configuration are larger than that of the self-sufficiency rate (SSR). The performance of the PVB system is much more sensitive to PV capacity than to battery capacity. In practice, on the premise of achieving the required SCR , the PV capacity should be maximized while the battery capacity be minimized. Representative values of technical indicators (SCR and SSR), of which a relative deviation of 5% covers more than 84% of all the results, were determined. Based on the representative values, the configuration indices of PV and battery capacities for office buildings in the hot-summer and cold-winter, and the IV solar resource zone of China, were proposed, and summarized in the form of table. The proposed configuration indices can be used directly as guide for PVB system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ceiling-sidewall composite air carrying energy radiant air-conditioning system (ACERS) is presented, and the heating performance of the ceiling-sidewall composite ACERS combined with air source heat pump is investigated by field experiment. The results show that the combined system can meet the heating requirement for office buildings in south-central China, and also have the energy-saving potential. Moreover, the indoor thermal environment under three different installation types, namely the ceiling, the sidewall, and the ceiling-sidewall composite type, is analyzed by using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation. The comparisons of three types indicate that all of them can meet the temperature requirement, but the temperature is more uniform and higher in the composite ACERS. Meanwhile, the temperature gradient in the ceiling ACERS is smaller than that of the sidewall ACERS due to the further heat transfer caused by air penetration. Both the experimental and CFD simulated temperature distribution demonstrates that the shelter of furniture has an impact on the indoor thermal environment, and it should not be ignored in practical engineering. This research shows the feasibility of winter heating by using the ACERS in office buildings, and is helpful for HVAC engineers to design and apply different ACERS types and realize the integration of air conditioning in winter and summer in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]