In an environment where markets go through a volatile process, and rapid fundamental changes occur due to technological advances, it is important to ensure and maintain a good performance measurement. Organizations, in their performance evaluation, should consider different types of financial and non-financial indicators. In systems like direct sales stores in which decision units have multiple inputs and outputs, all criteria influencing on performance must be combined and examined in a system, simultaneously. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of different products through direct sales of a firm named Shirin Asal with a combination of Balanced Scorecard, fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS so that the weaknesses of subjectivity and selective consideration of evaluators in evaluating the performance indicators are reduced and evaluation integration is provided by considering the contribution of each indicator and each indicator group of balanced scorecard. The research method of this case study is applied. The data collection method is a questionnaire from the previous studies, the use of experts' opinions and the study of documents in the organization. MATLAB and SPSS were used to analyze the data. During this study, the customer and financial perspectives are of the utmost importance to assess the company branches. Among the sub-criteria, the rate of new customer acquisition in the customer dimension and the net income to sales ratio in financial dimension are of the utmost importance.

This research aims to offer a fuzzy approach for calculating Tehran & apos; s air pollution index. The method is based on fuzzy analysis model, and uses the information about air quality index (AQI), included on the website of Tehran’s Air Quality Monitoring And Supervision Bureau. The contrived fuzzy logic is considered a powerful tool for demonstrating the information associated with uncertainty. In the end, several graphs visualize this inferential system in various levels of pollution.

After financial crisis in 2008, the effect of crisis spread in the world. Many countries were affected quickly and others slowed in a particular mechanism. Using data of TEPIX from Tehran Stock Exchange and DJI from New York stock Exchange as the main indexes of these two markets, this paper reported strong evidence of TEPIX’s dependency on DJI after the crisis in a four-week delay. The index level series were non-stationary; therefore, we employed cointegration analysis and error correction vector autoregressions (VAR) techniques to model the interdependencies. To find the best lag time we used a heuristic method and the results surprisingly were the same as the result of applying a VAR model. The results support the hypothesis that financial stress was transmitted from the U.S to Iran primarily through trade and price channels.

In the present paper, a novel intuitionistic fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) is proposed for modelling and solving analytical hierarchy process (AHP) problems with small amount of relationship among various criteria. Assigning a membership degree, fuzzy sets can model some uncertainty to the decision space. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets model the uncertainty more accurately associated with both membership and non-membership degree. Based on advantages of Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, this paper first uses IF-AHP to evaluate the weighting for each criterion and then develops an intuitionistic fuzzy DEMATEL method to establish contextual relationships among those criteria. Finally, an integrated IF-DEMATEL-AHP method is proposed and used for a case study for selecting managers in the automobile industry in Iran.

Transportation of hazardous materials play an essential role on keeping a friendly environment. Every day, a substantial amount of hazardous materials (hazmats), such as flammable liquids and poisonous gases, need to be transferred prior to consumption or disposal. Such transportation may result in unsuitable events for people and environment. Emergency response network is designed for this reason where specialist responding teams resolve any issue as quickly as possible. This study proposes a new multi-objective model to locate emergency response centers for transporting the hazardous materials. Since many real-world applications are faced with uncertainty in input parameters, the proposed model of this paper also assumes that reference and demand to such centre is subject to uncertainty, where demand is fuzzy random. The resulted problem formulation is modelled as nonlinear non-convex mixed integer programming and we used NSGAII method to solve the resulted problem. The performance of the proposed model is examined with several examples using various probability distribution and they are compared with the performance of other existing method.

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.

Supply chain coordination as an effective tool plays an important role in improving supply chain performance. In this article, a two-level supply chain with one manufacturer and two retailers is considered. The order quantity that retailers are faced with depends on the amount of advertisements and both retailers compete with each other on advertising. The Stackelberg game is established between manufacturer and retailers such that the manufacturer and the retailers play the leader and the follower roles, respectively. First, the manufacturer determines the wholesale prices for retailers and instead, the retailers determine the order quantity and advertising level, simultaneously. The manufacturer produces one kind of product and delivers it to retailers before the beginning of selling season. Retailers can affect the order quantity regarding the demand dependency on advertising level through the incurred costs from the advertising. In this paper, we show that we can achieve the desirable supply chain coordination through using combined quantity discount and advertising cost sharing contracts. We also consider the win-win situation for all the members of the supply chain.

One of the primary concerns with data envelopment analysis arises when the number of inputs and outputs increases. In such a case, required computations will become time consuming and there is a concern on developing some hybrid methods to increase the capability of this method. In this paper, a combination of data envelopment analysis and multi-layer neural network is proposed, in a case study, for predicting the performance of Alborz insurance subsidiaries in large cities in Automobile insurance firms. This research can be used in the future databases for performance prediction. On the other side, these results can aid Alborz insurance in its future investments as well as the performance index usage.

Portfolio selection is one of the important problems encountered by any investor. The purpose of this paper is to solve a real stock portfolio selection problem in Iran. According to the uncertain environments in which financial decisions are made, most of the recent works in this field use fuzzy sets theory in order to incorporate these uncertainties into their analysis. The problem is to determine how to allocate a limited fund among the stocks of some pharmaceutical companies in Tehran stock exchange. For this purpose we apply two fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) methods to this problem. Finally, the results obtained from the two methods are compared in terms of the solution quality.

Uncertainty plays an important role on many engineering problems and there is a growing interest in having reliable solutions especially for problems with sensitive parameters. The paper presents a robust optimization (RO) model for multi-objective operation of capacitated P-hub location problems (MCpHLP) under uncertainty set. There are, at least, two parameters in any P-hub problems, which are under uncertainty. The first one is associated with demand and the second one is the amount of time required to process commodities. We present a scenario based robust optimization technique, where these two items are considered under various scenario and a RO is implemented to find reliable solutions. The implementation of the proposed RO model is demonstrated for an example using weighting method.