Managing water resources is one of the most challenging problems in today’s world. There is an immense change in climate change, population growth, and environment, thereby increasing pressures on water resources. Due to future uncertainty and availability of resources, many priorities should be taken into account in the drinking-water system such as environmental impacts, distribution costs and fixed costs. This paper proposes a deterministic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for planning and designing a water supply chain network in order to optimize multi-objective problems. The model considers costs which include fixed and variable costs, in addition, it considers sustainability in terms of environmental viewpoint. The applicability of the model is appraised through a case study whose data gathered from related articles and water and waste company reports in Iran, which consists of five candidate reservoir nodes and four dam nodes besides eleven candidate locations for treatment plants. Thereafter, the proposed model has been coded in GAMS® optimization software. The model could be an expedient tool in order to manage urban water supply chains in a cost-effective and sustainable manner to satisfy water demand at every time period.

The term virtual organization is used to describe the organizations that are united with other organizations to benefit from the relative advantages of other organizations. These organizations are established based on different patterns to use information technology for building quick, cheap, and easy communications. Virtual organizations use effective and useful strategies to keep up with the rapid and fundamental changes in the new world. Information Technology (IT) is a facilitator that has made it possible to create virtual organizations. In these organizations, indicators such as the level of collaboration with partners, the rate of the implementation of IT and other issues such as how to work together based on mutual trust, how to choose partners and how to resolve disputes with partners are used to form the virtual teams to help determine the viability of the organizations. The virtual organization, as a fact, is the result of technological advancements and creativity in organizing firms to face with the turbulent environment and features of the post-industrial age. In today's world of business, virtual organizations are trying to benefit from knowledge-based employees, who have high flexibility and significant efficiency to respond to the needs of a turbulent market and to create significant competitive advantage. In order to benefit from such organizations, their managerial issues should be identified and organized in a good manner. This study examines the relationship between the degree of organization's virtualization and the organizational ability (employees). The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and, using Pearson correlation test, examines the hypotheses of the survey. The results indicate that there was a significant difference between the degree of virtualization of organization and organizational ability.

This study presents a new mathematical model for the design of reliable cellular manufacturing systems, which leads to reduced manufacturing costs, improved product quality and improved total reliability of the manufacturing system. This model is expected to provide a more noticeable improvement in time and solution quality in comparison with other existing models. Each part to be manufactured may select each of the predefined manufacturing routes, such that the total reliability of the system is increased. On the other hand, the model adopts to categorize the machines to determine the manufacturing cells (cell formation) and reduce the transportation costs. Thereby, both criteria of system reliability and manufacturing costs will be simultaneously improved. Due to the complexity of cell formation problems, a two-layer genetic algorithm is applied on the problem in order to achieve near optimal solutions. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed algorithm is shown for solving some computational experiments. Finally, the results of a practical study for designing a cellular manufacturing system as a case study in Iranian Diesel Engine Manufacturing Co., Tabriz, Iran are present.

This paper presents a new search methodology for different sizes of 0-1 Knapsack Problem (KP). The proposed methodology uses a modified scatter search as a meta-heuristic algorithm. Moreover, rough set theory is implemented to improve the initial features of scatter search. Thereby, the preliminary results of applying the proposed approach on some benchmark dataset appear that the proposed method was capable of providing better results in terms of time and quality of solutions.

Project management system (PMS) is broadly recognized as the effective management tool for several organizations. European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) model provides some advantages for companies to be successful in current competitive environment. This paper is based on the combination of EFQM and Quality function deployment (QFD) in order to eval-uate a PMS in an aviation organization. Although, an integration of these models increases the system complexity, the implementation of EFQM-QFD helps us identify all noteworthy success factors of PMS within the organization. In addition, the current status of PMS performance is evaluated based on these factors. This study attempts to find out how organizations ought to be managed to take full advantage of PMS tools. This study uses a comprehensive questionnaire to find all critical factors influencing on the success of the organization. The method of this paper is implemented in an organization in aviation industry with several management departments.