Supply chain management in oil and gas industry plays an important role for the success of these companies in most countries. A reliable supply chain helps on time delivery of goods and services and leads to better performance of the firms and yields higher profitability. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of different oil distribution companies in Iran. The proposed study uses a five-stage Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) technique to measure the relative efficiencies of 40 distribution oil companies. The study designs a questionnaire based on four balanced scorecard perspectives and distributes it among various experts who were familiar with supply chain issues. The results indicate that the network performed relatively efficient since the study did not detect any unit with low performance and most of them maintained relatively high scores.

In this paper, an exploration investigation is presented to determine entrepreneurial marketing factors influencing on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are active in Iranian food industry. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 27 questions in Likert scale and distributes it among 249 experts who were involved in in food industry. KMO Bartlett test Sphericity and Cronbach alpha are 0.811 and 0.892, respectively. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined five factors including innovative approach, flexible marketing, customer, product strategy and resources, which are influencing the most on entrepreneurial marketing factors.

In this paper, a supply chain inventory model is developed in inflationary environment by incorporating some realistic features such as ramp type demand, deterioration, partial backlogging, inflation, and trade credit. Here, rate of deterioration is linear and partial backlogging rate is variable and dependent on the waiting time for the next replenishment. Depending on the trade credit period, three different situations arise. For each model the optimal replenishment policy is determined. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed inventory model and sensitivity analyses of optimal solutions are given for each case of trapezoidal demand function.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of retail brand on organizational competitiveness. The study has accomplished among 247 randomly selected retail stores located in city of Tehran, Iran. We have designed a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributed the questionnaires among some managers of retail stores. Bartlett KMO and Cronbach alpha have been calculated as 0.7 and 0.863, respectively, which are within the desirable levels. Using principal component analysis, the study has detected five factors influencing on organizational competitiveness including effective brand, distribution management, customer strategy, retail location and competitive tools. The highest value belongs to retail location (B = 1.196) followed by distribution management (B = 0.825), effective brand (B = 0.47) and competitive tools (B = 0.470).

In the past, different methods for asset depreciation have been defined but most of these procedures deal with certain parameters and inputs. The availability of certain parameters in many real world situations is difficult and sometimes impossible. The primary objective of this paper is to obtain methods for calculating depreciation where some of the defined parameters are under uncertainty. Hence, by using the fuzzy science basics, extension principle and ?-cut technique, we rewrite some classic methods for calculating depreciation in fuzzy form. Then, for comparing the methods of fuzzy depreciation under uncertain conditions by using the formula of calculating the Fuzzy Present worth (FPW), the Present worth of Tax saving (PWTS) of any aforementioned methods has been obtained. Finally, since the amount of tax savings achieved for each of the methods is a fuzzy number, one of the fuzzy prioritization methods is used in order to select the best depreciation technique.

Over time, the number of unexpected earthy, oceanic and atmospheric events is rising each year. Hence, disaster management is considered as one of the most important scientific and practical issues in developed and developing countries. Therefore, in this study, we review and develop the problem of locating the emergency units with constraints including the number of available ambulances, limited budget for deployment of ambulances and the minimum acceptable level of covering. The proposed model improves the spatial queuing model (SQM) and Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP) by considering the cost of the deployment of the emergency units, which makes it closer to real-world conditions. Because the proposed model is NP-hard, the model is solved using three heuristics including Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a hybrid of both. The preliminary results indicate that the hybrid method had better performance to achieve the optimal or close to optimal solution.

Selection of suitable weapon for armed forces is one of the most complex decisions, which must be taken by martial administrators. The procedure of decision making on weapon selection is integrated with various criteria, which are often in conflict. This paper presents a multi criteria decision making problem based on the implementation of ELECTRE III technique. The proposed model compares all acceptable choices based on a systematic and sophisticated procedure and provides some efficient solutions. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated for an infantry rifle selection. The proposed model, first, determines acceptable choices and criteria through Simos method and then it uses ELECTRE III to rank various alternatives. The result of the application of the proposed model for a real-world case study of choosing an infantry rifle indicates its effectiveness.

Product mix problem is one of the most important decisions made in production systems. Several algorithms have been developed to determine the product mix. Most of the previous works assume that all resources can perform, simultaneously and independently, which may lead to infeasibility of the schedule. In this paper, product mix problem and scheduling are considered, simultaneously. A new mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to formulate this problem. The proposed model differentiates between process batch size and transfer batch size. Therefore, it is possible to have overlapped operations. The numerical example is used to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed model. In addition, the proposed model is examined using some instances previously cited in the literature. The preliminary computational results show that the proposed model can generate higher performance than conventional product mix model.

Reviewing the evolutionary trend of the models used in design and development of mechatronic products reveals the necessity for integration of the design characteristics and requirements in various engineering fields. Such products should agilely embrace rapid, persistent and complex requirements in competitive environments. This research aims to develop an integrated model for designing and developing mechatronic products within the context of agile production system. The study tries to eliminate unnecessary stages of design and simulation of products and increase the number of tested ideas. This suggests a distinction between product innovation and product improvement cycles and thus makes employing a pre-active approach to responding possible. Since the term “mechatronic products” is often used interchangeably with “robots”, one of the most commonly used types of them, i.e. tracer robot is considered as the statistical population for the proposed study. By choosing experimental (laboratory) research method, two categories of tracer robots are created: the tracer robots based on the V-model as the only integrated existing model and the robots based on the W-model as the model proposed by this study with a sample size of 35 sets in each group. The results indicate that both method provide acceptable validity although one model seems to perform better than the other one.