Coordination improves the profit of all the members in a supply chain. In this paper, a novel coordination mechanism is introduced in a retailer-manufacturer supply chain in which the retailer can adopt either an American option mechanism or a wholesale mechanism to satisfy the market demand throughout a multi-period horizon. The manufacturer follows a make-to-order production policy. This mechanism gives the retailer the right to select the more beneficial mechanism in each period. The retailer as the leader of the chain decides how many options should be purchased at the beginning of the horizon through a mixed-integer mathematical model. This model addresses the uncertainties in the market demand and the market price, simultaneously. A scenario planning approach is used to treat the random variables within the model. Also, an optimal scenario reduction model is adapted to reduce the computational complexity of the problem. Finally, a numerical experiment is designed to validate the performance of the model. The results demonstrate a remarkable improvement in the profit of both members. Moreover, a number of experiments are performed to show how the option price, the exercise price and the interest rate affect the performance of the contract.

In the competitive business world, applying a reliable and powerful mechanism to support decision makers in manufacturing companies and helping them save time by considering varieties of effective factors is an inevitable issue. Advanced Available-to-Promise is a perfect tool to design and perform such a mechanism. In this study, this mechanism which is compatible with the Make-to-Forecast production systems is presented. The ability to distinguish between batch mode and real-time mode advanced available-to-promise is one of the unique superiorities of the proposed model. We also try to strengthen this mechanism by integrating the inventory allocation and job shop scheduling by considering due dates and weighted earliness/tardiness cost that leads to more precise decisions. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a heuristic algorithm according to its disability to solve large size problems are presented. The designed experiments and the obtained results have proved the efficiency of the proposed heuristic method.

Performance of mines can be affected by different factors such as safety and economic factors. This study aims to analyze the influence of safety and economic factors on mines’ performance. To this purpose, a framework is proposed based on a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Ro-bust Data Envelopment Analysis (RDEA) and common weight Robust Data Envelopment Anal-ysis (CWRDEA) to determine the factors affecting on performance of mines. In this study, for the first time, integrated economic and safety factors are considered for evaluation of mines per-formance. To analyze safety and economic factors, this research gathers real data from a mine with 56 sites in south of Iran. Based on different DEA models, different sites become the best site among other sites, but RDEA is much closer to real situation than basic DEA and CWRDEA is the most efficient approach in real situation.

There are many researches on project selection field, but few of them have considered environmental criteria in their studies. Moreover, there are many articles in evaluating risk but there is no article that considers value at risk concept to evaluate the amount of risk in multi project selection. We propose a multi objective mathematical model to address a situation in which several projects are candidate to be invested completely or partially. Three objective functions are considered in this paper. The first objective maximizes sum of the net present value of pure cash flow obtained from selected projects. In this objective, we consider the factor of time and its impact on value of money. In addition, we use the concept of value at risk (VAR) as the present value for the first time in project selection problems. Although green projects are more interesting, there are few articles, which address environmental issues. Hence, we consider the objective, which are related to environmental issues as the final criterion. Multi-Objective Differential Evolution algorithm (MODE) algorithm is applied to solve a problem, which is known as robust and efficient algorithm. Then computational results are compared with solutions obtained by NSGA-II algorithm which is well-known algorithm in this field with respect to seven comparison metrics.

The Health Care system is changing from the hospitalization to the home care, and the World Health Organization has announced that the rate of care-dependent elderly people in Europe will considerably increase within the next decades. Thus, scientific planning for this area is an essential factor to improve the community health. This paper aims to develop a mathematical modeling for Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem and to solve it by means of Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm considering real condition (staff vehicle traveling, conditions of patients and so forth). We permit interdependent services for patients in which they can order as many services as they want with any relation between them (Multiple Services) and supposed time window for each service. The mathematical formulation of the problem is coded in GMAS software, which is a well-known commercial software for solving optimization problems. In addition, for large-scale problems where GAMS is unable to solve, SA algorithm is applied to tackle the problems. Finally, sensitivity analysis on the most important parameters (number of services and number of patients with interdependent Multiple services) are conducted. The results reveal that when each patient can order infinite services with any relation between them, complexity of the problem increases, but SA algorithm can solve large instances with reasonable solution in the less computational time. Thus, SA algorithm shows a rational performance for large instances. Moreover, the most important factors that affect the objective value and the run time of the problems are number of patients, and number of patients with interdependent multiple services.

Inventory planning for the pre- and post-disaster phases of disaster relief lifecycle is a challenging problem associated with the humanitarian relief supply chains. In this work, two mathematical models are presented encompassing the whole disaster relief lifecycle. By accounting for holding costs of perishable supplies, a two-stage stochastic programming model is first developed by which the inventory prepositioning locations, inventory levels, and short-term distribution quantities are determined. For the recovery phase, this research adapts the well-known continuous review (Q, r) inventory model for relief warehouses while accounting for the inherent epistemic uncertainty in the required data by using the fuzzy programming. A case study of Iranian Red Cross is also provided to illustrate the applicability of the first model and to demonstrate how it supports the two first phases of disaster lifecycle. Additionally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the (Q, r) model for the recovery phase. Lastly, the impact of penalty costs on the solutions is discussed.