Laser forming is a modern metal forming method in which no mechanical force is needed. In this paper, numerical and experimental approaches to this phenomenon on were conducted. Numerical method comprised of couple heat-displacement. In it, heat flux distribution of laser beam was applied on the steel layer in Gaussian form and by using subroutine code writing procedure. Experimental tests were conducted by using Nd: YAG laser with maximum power of 300 watts and on a bi-layer Fe/Al work piece. The result of bending angle at different laser power ranges indicated that bending angle increases occur as this parameter is increased.

Measuring the relative performance of universities play important role on better educational planning. During the past few years, balanced scorecard (BSC) has become popular among researchers as a technique for measuring the performance of business units. This method studies a particular firm in terms of four different perspectives including internal processes, learning and growth, customer and financial figures. One primary concern on using such method is that this method does not consider the relative importance of these components. In this paper, we present a hybrid of BSC with analytical network process to measure the relative performance of an educational unit in Iran.

In this paper, an analytical method is proposed for calculation of natural frequencies of a delaminated composite beam from both free and constrained mode frequencies. In previous studies, the frequencies of a delaminated composite beam were computed with assumption of occurring open or close delamination during the vibration. According to this assumption, two separated modes, i.e., “free mode” and “constrained mode”, are occurred in vibration of the delaminated beam. In fact, a delamination may breathe (open and close) during the vibration and the assumptions of the free or constrained mode models are not completely correct in the whole of the vibration period. For this reason, a new formulation is proposed for calculation of natural frequencies based on the breathing of delamination. The obtained results are compared with various theoretical and experimental results available in the literature. Thus, the effects of location and size of delamination can be investigated on the natural frequencies of delaminated beams.

In this paper, a simplified method is proposed for deriving equilibrium equations in continuous systems. The new method is indeed the direct applying of Newton’s laws on free body diagram of point. First, by describing the concept of equilibrium equations and investigating the differences between concentrated masses and continuous systems, the physical basis of new method is introduced. It is shown that, using intensive properties simplifies the analysis of continuous systems. For verifying the new method, the governing equations in Cartesian, polar and spherical coordinates systems are derived. We have to consider nonlinear terms due to developing large slopes in system. Hence, nonlinear governing equations in Cartesian system are derived too. Finally by noting to the simplicity of new method and its independency from complicated differential and vector analysis in other methods such as Hamiltonian and classic methods, the interests of new method are emphasized. By knowing concept of physical point, a united process is accessible which is extendable to other governing equations of continuous systems.

The aim of this paper is to present a new genetic algorithm approach for large scale multiple resource-constrained project-scheduling problems (RCPSP). It also presents a heuristic approach to achieve proper solutions for large scale problems. This research area is very common in industry especially when a set of activities needs to be finished as soon as possible subject to two sets of constraints, precedence constraints and resource constraints. The emphasis in this research is on investigating the complexity of scheduling problems and developing a new GA approach to solve this problem in such a way that the advantages of GA are appropriately utilized by applying a novel method to reduce the complexity of the problem. Computational results are also reported for the most famous classical problems taken from the operational research literature.

Rotating discs work mostly at high angular velocity. High speed results in large centrifugal forces in discs and induces large stresses and deformations. Minimizing weight of such disks yields various benefits such as low dead weights and lower costs. In order to attain a certain and reliable analysis, disk with variable thickness and density is considered. Semi-analytical solutions for the elastic stress distribution in rotating annular disks with uniform and variable thicknesses and densities are obtained under plane stress assumption by authors in previous works. The optimum disk profile for minimum weight design is achieved by the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions. Inequality constrain equation is used in optimization to make sure that maximum von Mises stress is always less than yielding strength of the material of the disk.

In this paper, a single facility centre location problem with a line barrier, which is uniformly distributed on a given horizontal route in the plane is proposed. The rectilinear distance metric is considered. The objective function minimizes the maximum expected barrier distance from the new facility to all demand points in the plane. An algorithm to solve the desired problem is proposed where a mixed integer nonlinear programming needs to be solved. The proposed model of this paper is solved using some already existed benchmark problem in the literature and the results are compared with other available methods.

The paper discusses about the effect of outliers and trends on the response surface design fitted to the experiments results. The common way to analyze the response surface is to fit the polynomial regression to the response variable by ordinary least square method and to find the significant controllable variables by ANOVA. In this case, the outliers can have confusing effect on the regression model, which derives the experiment results and lead to wrong interpretation of the data. The proposed moving average iterative method (MAIW) of this paper is a robust approach to decrease the effect of these faulty points by considering the previous data to detect the outliers or detect the probable trends in residuals. The iterative weighting method is used to estimate the coefficients of the regression model and a numerical example illustrates the proposed approach.

One of the primary issues in line balancing problems is the uncertainty associated with the processing times. There are different reasons for having uncertain processing times such as task deterioration, failure in machines, etc. On the other hand, there are different objectives, such as cycle time, number of workstations in an assembly line balancing. In this paper, we present a multi-objective decision making assembly line balancing which minimizes different objectives such as cycle time and number of workstations. The resulted problem is formulated based on Lp-norm mixed integer programming and a meta-heuristic approach is also presented to solve the resulted model. The problem formulation is solved for some test examples and the results are discussed under different conditions.

There used to be an assumption that any conflict has negative and destructive influences and we must remove it from the system. However, recent studies indicate that conflict is the result of interaction with different people having various personalities, social and cultural behaviors and this is an unavoidable issue. The existence of conflict is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, there are many evidences, which show that organizations with no conflict may fail. In other words, people who work for business units with no conflict are most likely so disparate that they cannot fit themselves to environmental conditions. In this paper, we discuss how to handle a conflict in any organization and lead the business units to organizations that are more productive.