In general, production system often gets disrupted due to uncertainty and un-planned events, which also affect demands resulting in less abet-margin of a company. With disrupted production system, management would need to study the variation of demand pattern and disruption of system; we have attempted an effort to establish an exponential demand with the production system and solved analytically the problem to determine production time before and after disruptions. Exponentially demand pattern studied, and also we simulate for sensitivity analysis in order to find which parameter is getting significant change for the proposed model.

In this paper, we study no-wait flow shop problem where setup times depend on sequence of operations. The proposed problem considers sequence-independent removal times, release date with an additional assumption that there are some preliminary setup times. There are two objectives of weighted mean tardiness and makespan associated with the proposed model of this paper. We formulate the resulted problem as a mixed integer programming, where a two-phase fuzzy programming is implemented to solve the model. To examine the performance of the proposed model, we generate several sample data, randomly and compare the results with other methods. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed two-phase model of this paper performed relatively better than Zimmerman & apos; s single-phase fuzzy method.

This paper addresses the scheduling of machines, an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and two robots in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) formed in three loop layouts, with objectives to minimize the makespan, mean flow time and mean tardiness. The scheduling optimization is carried out using Sheep Flock Heredity Algorithm (SFHA) and Artificial Immune System (AIS) algorithm. AGV is used for carrying jobs between the Load/Unload station and the machines. The robots are used for loading and unloading the jobs in the machines, and also used for transferring jobs between the machines. The algorithms are applied for test problems taken from the literature and the results obtained using the two algorithms are compared. The results indicate that SFHA performs better than AIS for this problem.

To acquire the competitive advantages in order to survive in the global business scenario, modern companies are now facing the problems of selecting key supply chain strategies. Strategy selection becomes difficult as the number of alternatives and conflicting criteria increases. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methodologies help the supply chain managers take a lead in a complex industrial set-up. The present investigation applies fuzzy MCDM technique entailing multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) in selection of alternatives in a supply chain. The MOORA method is utilized to three suitable numerical examples for the selection of supply chain strategies (warehouse location selection and vendor/supplier selection). The results obtained by using current approach almost match with those of previous research works published in various open journals. The empirical study has demonstrated the simplicity and applicability of this method as a strategic decision making tool in a supply chain.

This paper considers an economic lot and delivery scheduling problem (ELDSP) in a fuzzy environment with the fuzzy shelf life for each product. This problem is formulated in a flexible job shop with unrelated parallel machines, when the planning horizon is finite and it determines lot sizing, scheduling and sequencing, simultaneously. The proposed model of this paper is based on the basic period (BP) approach. In this paper, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is presented and then it is changed into two models in the fuzzy shelf life. The main model is dependent to the multiple basic periods and it is difficult to solve the resulted proposed model for large-scale problems in reasonable amount of time; thus, an efficient heuristic method is proposed to solve the problem. The performance of the proposed model is demonstrated using some numerical examples.

The increase competition and decline economy has increased the relevant importance of having reliable supply chain. The primary objective of many supply chain problems is to reduce the cost of services and, at the same time, to increase the quality of services. In this paper, we present a multi-level supply chain network by considering multi products, single resource and deterministic cost and demand. The proposed model of this paper is formulated as a mixed integer programming and we present two metaheuristics namely MOPSO and NSGA-II to solve the resulted problems. The performance of the proposed models of this paper has been examined using some randomly generated numbers and the results are discussed. The preliminary results indicate that while MOPSO is able to generate more Pareto solutions in relatively less amount of time, NSGA-II is capable of providing better quality results.

In a previously published paper by Khan et al. (2011) [Khan, M., Jaber, M.Y., & Bonney M. (2011). An economic order quantity (EOQ) for items with imperfect quality and inspection errors, International Journal of Production Economics, 133, 113-118], we found that there is a contradiction between the cycle length and the holding cost per cycle. To obtain the cycle length, the authors assumed that the returned items from the market were replaced with good quality items. However, for the holding cost per cycle, the authors implicitly assumed that the returned items were not replaced by good quality items. In this note, we first point out the contradiction. Then we fix this flaw and develop a corrected EOQ.

In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to measure the effects of intellectual capital using Maxwell model [Maxwell, J. C. (2003). Thinking for a change: 11 ways highly successful people approach life and work. Faith Words]. The proposed model of this survey designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 64 managers in an Iranian switch organization called ABFA. The main hypothesis of this survey studies whether the managers have beautiful mind in their work or not. There are 11 sub-hypotheses in this survey based on Maxwell model and the results of this survey conclude that “Sharing the ideas” index maintains the highest rate of importance and “being detailed oriented” maintains the lowest rate of importance.

During the past few years, there have been extensive developments on Islamic Azad University, which has led on reduction of managerial flexibility. Therefore, these organizations concentrate on their strategic management via usage of the Balanced Model such as Balanced Score Card (BSC) to consider different organizational perspectives and it is important to have good description of organizational strategies and goals. The strategy map is a primary factor to assess the performance in different organizational activities. In this paper, the performance evaluation system of Islamic Azad University of Semnan is designed by the utilization of strategy map as a prominent part of BSC.

Information asymmetry arises when one of the parties to the contract or transaction, possesses more information than the other, provided that the former uses such information effectively when communicating with the latter. The main objective of this study was to examine the effects of information asymmetry on the value of companies. Two techniques i.e. standard deviations of returns (STDRET) and turnover (TURNOVER) were used to determine information asymmetry while the Tobin’s Q was employed to determine companies’ value. The population under study was all the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange, of which a total of 72 companies were chosen as the research sample and were studied over the period 2004-2009. Panel analysis technique was used in this study to analyze the collected data. The results of the study indicate information asymmetry affect the value of the companies.