The aim of the present work was to develop a guideline for approving the railway axles made of C35 steel and containing surface and/or in-body defects after manufacturing. First, several through and part-through circular cracks were modeled on the surface and in the body of the axle at its critical cross-section. Then, the permissible size of such cracks was determined by using the fracture mechanics. To verify the validity of the guideline, the theoretical result for the semi-circular surface crack was compared with the allowable size prescribed by the international railway standard. A very good agreement was found to exist between the predicted and the standard values.

One of the most important activities of tour and travel agencies is to select the appropriate tour configuration. There are normally two primary objectives of season and time period to set a group of cities called designing tour scenarios. The success of tour scenarios is deeply related to the experiments and wisdom of the experts and planners in travel agencies. This paper presents a fuzzy rule decision making to find the suitable set of cities where different possible criteria are ranked using analytical hierarchy procedure. The proposed model of this paper is applied for a real-world case study of Iranian tour agency and the results are analyzed under different.

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is one of the effective techniques for managing the inventory in supply chain. VMI models have been proven to reduce the cost of inventory compared with traditional ones under some conditions such as constant demand and production expenditure. However, the modeling of the VMI problem has never been studied under some realistic assumptions such as price dependent demand. In this paper, three problem formulations are proposed. In the first problem formulation, we study a VMI problem with one buyer and one supplier when demand is considered to be a function of price and price elasticity to demand, and production cost is also a function of demand. The proposed model is formulated and solved in a form of geometric programming. For the second and the third models, we consider VMI problem with two buyers and two suppliers assuming that each buyer centre is relatively close to the other buyer centre. Each supplier has only one product which is different from the product of the other supplier. Two suppliers cooperate in customer relationship management and two buyers cooperate in supplier relationship management as well, so the suppliers send the orders of two buyers by one vehicle, simultaneously. For the third model, an additional assumption which is practically applicable and reasonable is considered. For all the proposed models, the optimal solution is compared with the traditional one. We demonstrate the implementation of our proposed models using some numerical examples.

The Electre III is a widely accepted multi attribute decision making model, which takes into account the uncertainty and vagueness. Uncertainty concept in Electre III is introduced by indifference, preference and veto thresholds, but sometimes determining their accurate values can be very hard. In this paper we represent the values of performance matrix as interval numbers and we define the links between interval numbers and concordance matrix .Without changing the concept of concordance, in our propose concept, Electre III is usable in decision making problems with interval numbers.

In this survey, we perform a survey on different studies associated with critical success factors in project management. The study covers all related studies from 1987 to 2017 based on the arti-cles published on different value added journals. The survey shows that tremendous efforts have been dedicated on important factors, which influence on the success or failure of enterprise re-source planning. The other part of the survey is dedicated for the implementation of Six Sigma projects. Our survey shows that successful implementation of Six Sigma could contribute to the success of projects.

In this paper complexation reaction between Yb3+ and Human serum albumin is examined using isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). The extended solvation model was used to reproduce the enthalpies of HAS+Yb3+ interactions over the whole range of Yb3+ concentrations. The binding parameters recovered from this model were attributed to the structural change of HSA. The results show that Yb3+ ions bind to HSA with three equivalent affinity sites. It was found that in the high concentrations of the ytterbium ions, the HSA structure was destabilized.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an integrated system, which consists of various integrated applications. ERP is implemented to collect, store, manage and interpret data from different business activities, including product planning, expenses, production and/or service delivery, sales management, inventory planning, shipping and payment. The study covers the latest studies mostly on detecting factors influencing on the success of ERP implementations. The study has highlighted several factors including top management support, communication, cooperation, training and technological complexity, which were believed to be the most influential factors on development of ERP systems. In addition, several multi criteria decision making systems were used for ranking different software packages for ERP implementation. Moreover, many studies have attempted to consider mathematical methods by considering uncertainty associated with data.

Several researchers have considered similarities between Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), as tools for solving decision making problems. As the preferences of decision- maker (DM) on alternatives are not considered in classical DEA, some researchers have tried to consider it in DEA. The UTA-STAR method is one of the techniques widely used in Multi Criteria Decision Analysis. In this technique, the preferences of decision maker on alternatives are considered and UTA-STAR tries to compute the most suitable weights for criteria and alternatives to obtain a utility function having a minimum deviation from the preferences. The goal of this paper is interpreting decision maker’s preferences in UTA-STAR method, in a new manner, using the common set of weights (CSW) in DEA.

This paper presents an integration of balanced score card (BSE) with two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA). The proposed model of this paper uses different financial and non-financial perspectives to evaluate the performance of decision making units in different BSC stages. At each stage, a two-stage DEA method is implemented to measure the relative efficiency of decision making units and the results are monitored using the cause and effect relationships. An empirical study for a banking sector is also performed using the method developed in this paper and the results are briefly analyzed.

The interaction of Jack Bean Urease with cobalt (II) ion was studied by Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) at 300 K and 310 K in 30 mM Tris buffer, pH=7. The stability of the enzyme increases due to its binding with cobalt ions. The extended solvation model was used to reproduce the heats of Co2++JBU interaction. It was found that there is a set of 12 equivalent and noninteracting binding sites for Co2+ ions. The association equilibrium constant and the molar enthalpy of binding are 4260.76M-1, -16.5 kJmol-1 at 300 K and 3438M-1, -16 kJmol-1 at 310 K, respectively.