Hub covering problem is one of the most popular areas of research due to wide ranges of applications in different service or manufacturing industries. This paper considers a multi-objective hub covering location problem under congestion. The proposed study of this paper considers two objectives where the first one minimizes total transportation cost and the second one minimizes total waiting time for all hobs. The resulted multi-objective decision making problem is formulated as mixed integer programming. Simulated annealing is used to solve the resulted model and the performance of the proposed model is compared against two other alternative methods, particle sward optimization and NSGA-II. The results are compared in terms of four criteria including quality metric, mean ideal distance, diversification metric and spacing metric. The results indicate that the proposed model could perform better than the other two alternative methods in terms of quality metric but the results are somehow mix in terms of other three criteria.

Fuzzy logic has created suitable mathematics for making decisions in uncertain environments including professional judgments. One of the situations is to assess auditee risks. During recent years, risk based audit (RBA) has been regarded as one of the main tools to fight against fraud. The main issue in RBA is to determine the overall audit risk an auditor accepts, which impact the efficiency of an audit. The primary objective of this research is to redesign the audit risk model (ARM) proposed by auditing standards. The proposed model of this paper uses fuzzy inference systems (FIS) based on the judgments of audit experts. The implementation of proposed fuzzy technique uses triangular fuzzy numbers to express the inputs and Mamdani method along with center of gravity are incorporated for defuzzification. The proposed model uses three FISs for audit, inherent and control risks, and there are five levels of linguistic variables for outputs. FISs include 25, 25 and 81 rules of if-then respectively and officials of Iranian audit experts confirm all the rules.

In this paper, we present an empirical study on measuring the effects of training programs on efficiency of university employee. The proposed model of this paper uses Kirkpatrick four level models based on some questionnaire. The questions are divided into four different groups of reflection, leaning, behavior and efficiency and the feedback are collected using Likert scales. We perform some statistical tests to analyze the results and conclude that staff training has relatively positive impact on all four items. In addition, the effects of different personal characteristics such as age, gender and marriage conditions are investigated on all four levels of Kirkpatrick & apos; s model. The results indicate that the Kirkpatrick could be implemented for measuring the effects of training programs, efficiently.

One of the most important objectives of any modern organization is to gain competitive advantage of customers & apos; data. In order to find hidden patterns or models from data, application of modern and steady methodologies is a necessity. Banking industry is not exceptional from this trend and they may often wish to make more profit by providing appropriate services to potential customers. Analyzing databases to manage customer behaviors seems difficult since databases are multi-dimensional, comprised of monthly account records and daily transactional records. Therefore, to analyze databases, we propose a methodology by considering human factors and building an integrated data utilization system. Moreover, self-organizing neural network map is used to identify groups of customers based on repayment behavior, recency, frequency, and monetary behavioral scoring predicators. We also perform more analysis using Apriori association rule to make marketing strategies for services used by banks.

An increase competition on today & apos; s economy has created motivation for many organizations to look for different alternatives on better serving the customers. There are always some budget limitations on any customer relationship method, which leads us to prioritize different alternatives. In this paper, we present an empirical method based on an integrated Kano and fuzzy analytical hierarchy procedure to rank suitable alternatives. The proposed model of this paper uses a questionnaire survey to gather customer & apos; s opinions and implements the method for a real-world case study of transportation planning. The questionnaire includes 37 questions distributed among 976 passengers for two trips in Iran. The results indicate that driver & apos; s physical and mental health, buss equipments with GPS functionality and familiarity of drivers with road and road & apos; s conditions play important role on choosing a transportation company.

Traditional assembly lines are still attractive means of mass and large-scale series production. Previous research works mainly dealt with the minimization of balancing loss, subject to precedence constraints. Very recently the focus of attention shifted towards system loss. However, these losses are not the proper indicators of the stability of the system since the efficiency of the assembly line increases normally when the stability of the system increases. In this paper, we introduce a new type of assembly line, which is totally different form the existing types of assembly line studied in the literature. In this work, we define the stability of the system in terms of reliability of the assembly line. The objective is to design an assembly line with a desired level of working stability measured through this reliability measure. This special type of assembly line, where production rate can be increased by minimizing the cycle time subject to a given level of reliability and precedence constraints, extends the decision-making framework available in the literature on assembly line balancing problem and indirectly takes care of both balancing loss and system loss.

During the past two decades, there have been significant numbers of studies focusing on supply chain management for evaluating important factors on the success of a supply chain program. In this paper, we present a method to prioritize the locations of distribution centers in a supply chain. The proposed model of this paper uses balanced scorecard (BSC) to categorize the most important attributes affecting the location of distribution centers and the attributes are ranked based on decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method. The implementation of the proposed model of this paper is also applied for a real-world case study of oil company and the results are analyzed under different scenarios.

Concurrent engineering (CE) is one of the widest known techniques for simultaneous planning of product and process design. In concurrent engineering, design processes are often complicated with multiple conflicting criteria and discrete sets of feasible alternatives. Thus multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques are integrated into CE to perform concurrent design. This paper proposes a design framework governed by MCDM technique, which are in conflict in the sense of competing for common resources to achieve variously different performance objectives such as financial, functional, environmental, etc. The Pareto MCDM model is applied to polyethylene pipe concurrent design governed by four criteria to determine the best alternative design to Pareto-compromise design.

In this paper, we propose a method to measure the relative efficiency of different units of a publicly traded bank using data envelopment analysis. The study also measures the productivity of different banks using Malmquist index and the results are compared with relative efficiency of banks. The proposed model uses nine financial factors reported by the bank officials for both studies where five items are used for efficiency measurement and the other four items are used for productivity measurement. The results indicate that different banks perform inefficient in terms of efficiency but they have attempted to increase their productivity. We also analyze the results and give guidelines on how inefficient units could increase their efficiency by reducing their inputs or increasing their outputs

There is a growing awareness of the pivotal role of technology in securing and maximizing competitive positions. This study based on primary data from two banks in Nigeria examines the relationship between technology policy and strategy dimensions. Differentiation and futurity strategy dimensions were found to be marginally dominant in the managerial practices of these firms. In addition, the study found new evidence of relationship between the strategy dimensions; and the pattern of relationship between technology policy and strategic orientations indicate the use technology to foster defensive behaviours rather than securing competitive edge. Futurity orientation was also found not to be significantly related with most of the technology policy dimensions investigated. These results are expected to provide management and management theorists with valuable practical insight into the relationship between pattern of strategic orientation and technology policy.