Personnel selection is one of the most important problems that organizations have to deal with. Competent personnel is one of the key factors for the success of organizations. Project manager selection due to special requirements is significantly important. A project manager must have the ability of managing costs, time and resources through the optimistic way. Furthermore he/she has to own general management skills and benefit from adequate information about the project context. Project managers in petroleum industry carry very important duties than other project managers. In this research, we try to develop a model in order to select a project manager for pe-troleum industry. The proposed model is based on multi criteria decision making and a statistical method named principle component analysis (PCA). The methodology considers all of the im-portant criteria and benefit from an experienced expert panel in order to extract the weights of the criteria. Also a numerical example demonstrates the function of the model and is verified by VI-KOR method.

In this paper, a differential quadrature element method (DQEM) is developed for free transverse vibration analysis of a non-uniform cantilever Timoshenko beam with multiple concentrated masses. Governing equations, compatibility and boundary conditions are formulated according to the differential quadrature rules. The compatibility conditions at the position of each concentrated mass are assumed as the continuity in the vertical displacement, rotation and bending moment and discontinuity in the transverse force due to acceleration of the concentrated mass. The effects of number, magnitude and position of the masses on the value of the natural frequencies are investigated. The accuracy, convergence and efficiency of the proposed method are confirmed by comparing the obtained numerical results with the analytical solutions of other researchers. The two main advantages of the proposed method in comparison with the exact solutions available in the literature are: 1) it is less time-consuming and subsequently moreefficient; 2) it is able to analyze the free vibration of the beams whose section varies as an arbitrary function which is difficult or sometimes impossible to solve with analytical methods.

This paper studies inventory and pricing policies in a non-cooperative supply chain with one supplier and several retailers who are involved in producing, delivering and selling a single product. We consider inventory policies in an information-asymmetric vendor managed inventory. The study consists of different scenarios where a supplier produces the product at the wholesale price to multiple retailers. The retailers also distribute the product in dispersed and independent markets at retail selling prices. The demand rate for each market is a non-decreasing concave function of the marketing expenditures of both local retailers and the manufacturer, but a non-increasing and convex function of the retail selling prices. The primary purpose is to determine wholesale price, marketing expenditure for supplier and retailers, replenishment cycles for the product, and backorder quantity to maximize the total profit for both groups of supplier and retailers. All scenarios are modeled as a Stackelberg game where the manufacturer is the leader and the retailers are the followers. A numerical study has been presented to demonstrate the influences of decision variables and/or parameters in various scenarios. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to study the impact of different parameters on total profitability.

In this study, flooring grade epoxy/nanoSiO2 nanocomposites were prepared by in-situ polymerization method. Nano silica was treated by coupling agent in order to surface treating and introducing of reactive functional groups to achieving adequate bonding between polar inorganic nano particles and epoxy organic polymer. ?-Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (Amino A-100) was used as an effective and commercially available coupling agent and nano silica treated in acetone media. SEM observations of cured samples revealed that the nano silica was completely dispersed into polymer matrix into nanoscale particles. Thermal and physical properties of prepared samples were investigated and data showed improvements in physical and mechanical properties of the flooring samples in comparison with unfilled resin.

Building sector is considered as the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Being green, or sustainable, is one of primary issues coming from internal/ external driv-ers for construction and engineering firms. The green building practice extends and supplement the traditional building design perspectives including economy, utility, durability, and comfort. This paper presents a review on recent advances dedicated on different state-of-art articles in the area of green building. The paper raises serious concern to take the necessary actions for green building development.

The effects of mismatch parameters on isochromatic fringe patterns were studied using the technique of photoelasticity. First, the mathematical equations of isochromatic fringes were derived for singular stress field near a bi-material notch. These equations were used to study the effects of mismatch parameters on the shape of isochromatic fringes theoretically. Analytical results indicated that the mismatch parameters have a significant effect on the shape of the isochromatic fringe patterns around the bi-material notch tip. In order to assess the accuracy of the analytical results, a photoelastic test program was conducted on the V-notched bi-material Brazilian disc specimens. A very good agreement was shown to exist between the experimental results and the analytical reconstructions.

Exporting goods and services play an important role on economy of developing countries. There are many countries in the world whose economy is solely based on exporting raw materials such as oil and gas. Many believe that countries cannot develop their economy as long as they rely on exporting one single group of raw materials. Therefore, there is a need to help other sectors of industries build good infrastructure for exporting diversified products. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis to determine the critical success factors on exporting different goods. The results are analyzed using some statistical non-parametric methods and some useful guidelines are also suggested.

Product selection is always one of the troubles that decision makers are facing with it. Correct selection requires having suitable method for this important issue. In this article, we concern to introduce an approach of fuzzy decision making for selection to decision makers. The nature of decision making is usually complex and without structure. Totally, most of qualitative and quantitative factors such as quality, price, and flexibility should be concerned for determining a suitable product. In this study, it is attempted to use recent advances in ranking methods for product selection. The proposed study uses oral preferences language shown in terms of triangular and trapezoid fuzzy numbers. Then, a multi criteria hierarchical decision making is suggested on the basis of fuzzy collection theory for product selection where the proposed fuzzy VIKOR uses different qualitative and quantitative criteria.

Many supply chain problems are involved with different parameters, which are under uncertainties. One of the primary concerns on supplier selection is to handle the uncertainty under different circumstances. The primary objective of this paper is to design a model to select suppliers and to determine the amount of purchase from any supplier in the supply chain system. For this purpose, we select the most important criteria using fuzzy questionnaires where the questionnaire uses experts’ opinions in terms of linguistic values. Then, a hierarchy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model based on fuzzy-sets theory is proposed to rank different suppliers and using a goal programming approach, we determine the amount of order product from each supplier. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated using a real-world case study.

Experiences and studies, results and documentations review show that the impress and the stra-tegic level of Project Management (PM) have been increased. Different organizations have in-troduced various standards for PM. Indeed, the main criterion to select and apply PM standards relies on the standard, depending on the project type and the experiences of PM managers. The primary objective of PM standards is to direct a project into a systematic and regular framework. Application of PM standards makes project easier and gives accurate analysis that provide bene-fits for executives and gives some managerial approach. The main purpose of this research is to compare and evaluate two most popular and versions of PM standards; namely PMBOK and ISO 21500.