Capital structure is a controversial issue in the field of corporate finance. There are several studies to find a way to determine the optimal capital structure to minimize the cost of capital and maximize the corporate value. In fact, capital structure is a combination of firms’ liabilities and capital to meet long term assets. This paper investigates the role of the hierarchical theory in explaining the capital structure of the firms based on enterprise life cycle model on selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) using three methods of net equities, net liabilities and retained earnings. The study uses Park and Chen’s (2006) method [Park, Y., & Chen, K. H. (2006). The effect of accounting conservatism and life-cycle stages on firm valuation. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 22(3), 75-92.] to categorize the life cycle of 81 randomly selected firms from TSE over the period 2007-2012. The results indicate that the hierarchical theory represents the growing firms better than the matured firms do. The results also show that firms were more willing to reduce their dividend per share for financing their projects.

A green and efficient method for the synthesis of (4 or 5)-aryl-2-aryloyl-(1H)-imidazoles via self-condensation reaction of arylglyoxal hydrates in the presence of ammonium acetate using water as solvent under ultrasonic irradiation was reported. The reactions proceeded in high yields and very short reaction time. Introduced procedure is completely ecofriendly and don’t need any toxic organic solvent in all performing steps. In addition, we use computational chemistry for acquiring some information about the thermochemistry and geometrical structure of these imidazole derivatives.

These days, we see an increasing competition among different business owners and they strive for customer retention. Customer relationship management plays an important role to increase business performance and attracting new customers in an attempt to have more market shares. One primary concern is to find more about important factors influencing customers being satisfied with different services they may receive. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing customer relationship management (CRM) in information and communication firm is city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 27 variables. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.861, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing CRM learning performance attributes, enterprise resource planning, perception attributes, structure oriented, perception image and organizational resources.

The investigation of dynamic response of intervertebral disc is beneficial for the development of new synthetic and engineered tissues for treating diseased or injured disc. There are limited experimental studies on comparing the effect of loading mode and rate on global response of intervertebral disc. In this study, in-vitro experiments were performed using a total of 24 porcine motion segments. The harvested specimens were assigned to prolong and 2 different cyclic loadings. Both disc deformations and water contents were measured to investigate how the mode and rate of loading affect the response of intervertebral disc. In parallel, a backward FE poroelastic model combined with in-vitro experiments were used to find the material properties of intervertebral discs. The experimental result showed that the final disc height loss under creep loading was significantly greater than cyclic groups. Increasing the frequency of cyclic loading decreased the disc height loss. The water content decreased significantly in cyclic loading from those in prolong loading. The backward FE models showed that, the elastic modulus of anulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus were 2.43 (±0.48) MPa and 1.46 (±0.29) MPa, respectively. The hydraulic permeability was 2.08 (±0.42) ×10-16m4/Ns, and the Poisson’s ratio was 0.21 (±0.03). In conclusion, this study investigated how the loading mode and rate affect porcine intervertebral disc deformation. It is found that dynamic stiffness is greater at higher frequencies which resulted from interactions between the solid phase and fluid flow within the disc.

Procurement risks analysis is a crucial study in supply chain risk management. According to the phenomenon of snow ball effect, if a risk occurs at the primitive node between buyer and supplier, it will be strengthened and extended throughout the entire network. Hence, it can have more disruptive influences comparing with risks that happen in further nodes. In this paper, through a case study, the most important risk factors and its multi-dimensional consequences in procurement risk analysis is derived from the literature review and implementing a Delphi method that takes into account the nine risks factors and 39 preliminary variables as risk consequences. The nine risk factors are limits of global communication, packaging and transportation, procedures and standards, sanction, supply of equipment, price of equipment, Communication, management of technology and delivery mistakes.

During the past few years, operations research applications in health care operation management have grown quickly. On the other hand blood as a perishable, valuable and lifesaving product is one important asset of any healthcare center. Therefore, designing a blood supply network comes to importance. It also should be noted that a blood supply chain comprises specific modifications. This study intends to locate blood bank components in a network, and to determine the allocations among the network components. The supply chain components considered in this study are donation sites, testing and processing labs, blood banks, and demand points. It is known that demand centers such as hospitals and clinics highly depend on blood products and any deficiency in procurement can even result in a person’s death. Thus, in the last layer of the considered network a transshipment sub-network is considered between demand points. Most of the intricacies in problem formulation of blood supply chain are regarded in this study; cases such as blood wastage, blood product decomposition in lab facilities, and transshipments between demand points. Due to the fact that for such an important and lifesaving supply chain the aim would go beyond minimizing cost, another objective function is presented for the problem. Hence, to obtain a Pareto solution for both objective functions ?-constraint method is utilized. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the problem, the model is implemented on a number of problem sets.

During the past few years, there has been increasing interest in making online transaction. As people become more interested in using internet for their daily business activities such as regular communications, financial transactions, etc., there will be more concerns on security of available data. In fact, data security is the primary concern in today’s online activities. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing data security in Municipality is city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 29 variables, which were reduced to 22 questions after considering skewness statistics. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing feasibility study, organizational learning, management strategy, enterprise resource management, process approach and the acceptance.

The long term operation and planning of power plant depend upon an effective availability analysis and assessment of various systems in the plant concerned. The plant is expected to remain operational in a continual manner to achieve the desired production targets. Hence, the availability analysis of the boiler air circulation system plays an important role in this direction. For this purpose, the concerned system mathematical model based on Markov Birth-Death process has been developed. The system consists of four subsystems. The transition diagram represents reduced capacity, full working and failed state of the system. The differential equations associated with the transition diagram based on probabilistic approach have been solved recursively in order to develop the system steady state availability. Availability matrices represented measures the performance of the system concerned. In addition, different combinations of failures and repair rates provide various availability levels of the system. Maintenance decisions are taken based upon these values for improving availability of the power plant as well as the power supply. The result shows that the failure of the primary air fan affects the system availability at most, while failure of air heater affect it at least for different failures and repair rate combination of subsystems under study.

Transmission Network Expansion Planning (TNEP) is a basic part of power network planning that determines where, when and how many new transmission lines should be added to the network. So, the TNEP is an optimization problem in which the expansion purposes are optimized. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), Tabu Search (TS) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are methods used for solving the TNEP problem. Today, by using the hybridization models of AI tools, we can solve the TNEP problem for large-scale systems, which shows the effectiveness of utilizing such models. In this paper, a new approach to the hybridization model of Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) and Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) was used to solve the TNEP problem. Finally, by considering the uncertain role of the load based on a scenario technique, this proposed model was tested on the Garver’s 6-bus network.

Formulation and evaluation of strategy play important role in the strategy management. Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats (SWOT) is a famous approach to formulate strategy planning, which relies on external and internal factors. Identifying these factors precisely is very critical for any organization and manager. This study aims at providing a quantitative basis to analytically determine the ranking of the factors in SWOT analysis via Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach. This paper applies SWOT and Richard Rumelt & apos; s criteria to evaluate strategies in Evidential Reasoning approach. The ER approach has been developed to support MADA under uncertainty. It is based on Dempster’s rule for evidence combination and uses belief functions for dealing with probabilistic uncertainty and ignorance. This research is the first study in the ranking the factors of SWOT and Richard Rumelt approach. An illustrative example is also presented to show the efficiency of our model.