We report ammonium metavanadate catalyzed one-pot synthesis of 3,4-dihydropyrano[3,2-c]chromenes, from aldehydes, active methylene compounds malononitrile and 4-hydroxycoumarin in water:ethanol(1:1) under reflux. The attractive features of this process are mild reaction conditions, short reaction times, easy isolation of products, and excellent yields.

A convenient, highly efficient and time economic method has been described for the chemo- and regioselective synthesis of 5-aryloyl-1,3,7,9-tetraalkyl-2,8-dithioxo-2,3,8,9-tetrahydro-1H-pyrano[2,3-d:6,5-dˊ]dipyrimidine-4,6(5H,7H)-diones derivatives by one-pot two-component reaction of 1,3-diethyl-2-thiobarbituric acid or 1,3-dimethyl-2-thiobarbituric acid with substituted arylglyoxalmonohydrates using commercially available zirconium (IV) oxydichloride octahydrate (ZrOCl2.8H2O) as green Lewis acid catalyst. This method is associated with some attractive characteristics such as good selectivity, very short reaction time, high yield of products, cleaner reaction profile, no harmful by-product, cheap and environmental benign catalyst, simple experimental and work-up procedure. This procedure does not require solvent separation and purification steps such as column chromatography.

This paper summarizes the reaction of DABCO with the enol tosylate derivatives made from (L-Ser-L-Ser) and (L-Phe-L-Ser) diketopiperazines (DKP’s). The reaction between DABCO and EE-di-tosylate (L-Ser-L-Ser) DKP (2), results in the isomerization of the serine di-tosylate from EE-2 to ZZ-2. This is the first direct example of the utility of DABCO as a reagent demonstrating the successful isomerization in a DKP derivative. The E-enol tosylate of (L-Phe-L-Ser) DKP (4) upon reaction with DABCO provided a unique bis-ylidiene product (5).

A four-component reaction of phenylhydrazines, ethyl acetoacetate, aldehydes and β-naphthol has been achieved in the presence of FeCl3/SiO2 nanoparticles as a highly effective heterogeneous catalyst to produce 2-aryl-5-methyl-2,3-dihydro-1H-3-pyrazolones in good to excellent yields, short reaction times, mild reaction conditions and the employment of a cost-effective catalyst.

Pirochromite (MgCr2O4) nanoparticles were successfully prepared in this study. During synthesis of the pirochromite nanoparticles, a sol-gel was prepared by using magnesium acetate and potassium dichromate as magnesium and chromium sources and by using stearic acid as the network. Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) were used for the elemental analysis, and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) were used in order to identify, provide a fuzzy diagnosis, and determine the size and morphology of the particles, as well as to analyze the optical and magnetic properties of the particles. The particle size of MgCr2O4 nanoparticles was observed to fall within a range of 39 nm–71 nm.

This paper seeks to identify the priority of factors affecting the quality of banking services in Bank Saderat Iran for better allocation of resources to enhance the quality of its banking services. The study develops a fuzzy method to handle uncertainty associated with the data and using analytical network process (ANP) ranks different factors influencing on service quality. The results have indicated that the quality of e-services (ESQ) is the most important factor followed by the quality of banking services agility (ASQ), the service system quality (SSQ), and the behavioral service qualities (BSQ). Moreover, the employees’ competence and skills, the reliability of the electronic system and the reliability of the service system, an impeccability banking system integrity and accountability instruments are among other effective factors influencing on the quality of banking services.

he VIKOR (Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje which means multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution, in Serbian) method has already become a quite popular multi-criteria decision making tool for its computational simplicity and solution accuracy. This method focuses on selecting and ranking from a set of feasible alternatives, and determines compromise solution for a problem with conflicting criteria to help the decision maker in reaching a final course of action. It determines the compromise ranking list based on the particular measure of closeness to the ideal solution. Depending upon the type of decision problem and necessity of the decision maker, apart from VIKOR method, different variants of it, like comprehensive VIKOR, fuzzy VIKOR, regret theory-based VIKOR, modified VIKOR and interval VIKOR methods have also been subsequently developed. In this paper, the ranking performance of original VIKOR method and its five variants is analyzed based on two demonstrative examples. It is observed that interval VIKOR method performs unsatisfactorily and when the information in a decision problem is imprecise, fuzzy VIKOR method should always be preferred. But, for any decision problem, original VIKOR is the best method for solution without unnecessarily complicating the related mathematical computations.

A key indicator to evaluate the success of an organization is the degree of meeting specific civil project goals based on a predetermined schedule. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of governmental administration agencies based on realization of civil project goals. In this paper, the information published by the President Deputy of Strategic Planning and Control, that publishes an annual report of evaluation indicators for national civil development projects, are used to evaluate and prioritize the major and non-major governmental agencies. Also, the Gray Relational Analysis (GRA) and the TOPSIS method are employed to analyze the data. The results indicate that using the GRA method, Supreme Council of Seminary and using the TOPSIS method, The Ministry of Labor and Social Affaires have gained the highest ranking.

The issue of resource over-allocating is a big concern for project engineers in the process of scheduling project activities. Resource over-allocating is frequently seen after initial scheduling of a project in practice and causes significant amount of efforts to modify the initial schedules. In this research, a new method is developed for modifying over-allocated schedules in a multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problems (MRCPSPs) with positive cash flows (MRCPSP-PCF). The aim is to maximize profit of the MRCPSPs or logically minimizing costs. The proposed method can be used as a macro in Microsoft Office Project® Software to modify resource over-allocated days after scheduling a project. This research considers progress payment method and preemptive resources. The proposed approach maximizes profit by scheduling activities through the resource calendar respecting to the available level of preemptive resources and activity numbers. To examine the performance of the proposed method a number of experiments derived from the literature are solved. The results are then compared with the circumstances where resource constraints are relaxed. The outcomes show that in all studied cases, the proposed algorithm can provide modified schedules with no over-allocated days. Afterward the method is applied to modify a manufacturing project in practice.

In this paper, a robust bi-level model is proposed to optimize decisions related to distribution and evacuation aid after earthquake. Usually in disastrous situation foreign countries help the affected country by sending relief commodities. In this problem, the foreign countries try to minimize their shipping costs and the affected country seeks to minimize its total costs which include inventory, operation, and transportation expenses. This situation is a game between different decision makers after a catastrophic disaster. To deal with this situation, a bi-level model is proposed in which the affected country is the leader and suppliers are the followers. To validate the proposed robust model, we consider Tehran probable earthquake in region 1 as a case study. Then the advantages of using bi-level modeling against considering just one player's point of view is provided. The sensitivity analysis of the experiments are presented to explore the effects of various parameters to show managerial insights that can guide DMs under a variety of conditions.