Humanitarian assistance by foreign organizations in general and foreign military forces in particular, is typically provided in a non-neutral political environment. Local politics that range from national pride, through strained relations with the country offering military logistic support, to blatant aversion to the population in need, affect the ability to provide effective humanitarian aid. The current paper presents the use of mathematical modeling and robustness approach when the government of the affected area declines offers of aid from international organizations because of political constraints. The multi-objective model seeks to minimize unsatisfied demands and total costs of the government and suppliers. To explore the effects of various parameters and show managerial insights that can guide DMs under a variety of conditions, the sensitivity analysis of the experiments are presented.

During the past few years, there have been an increasing competition among auto producers. Customers have experienced emissions misrepresentation activities from well-known auto producers such as Volkswagen and Mitsubishi, and have increased their expectations, accordingly. This paper designs a questionnaire to measure factors influencing on customer satisfaction in Likert scale, and distributes it among 210 randomly selected people who purchased a product from an Iranian Auto maker named SAIPA. The questionnaire was validated by some experts and it was also verified using Cronbach alpha (α = 0.83). Using structural equation modeling with Varimax rotation, the study has detected four groups of factors including car specifications and options, before sales services, after sales services and payment policy, which influence the most on customer satisfaction.

There have been many unexpected natural disasters such as earthquake, flood, etc. in developing countries, which have created catastrophic incidents and we need to do appropriate planning for relief to reduce the possible casualties. Such actions normally face different challenges such as damages on transportation infrastructures including roads, bridges, etc. One of the primary actions for such crises management is associated with facility location for relief distribution centers. This paper presents a multi-objective mathematical problem and applies it for a real-world case study in northern region of Iran. The study uses Lp metric to handle different objectives and fuzzy programming is used to cope with uncertainty. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed study of this paper has been able to provide efficient results.

This paper presents a mathematical model to choose appropriate technology for production and capacity planning. The proposed study considers manufacturing planning in textile industry as a make-to-order (MTO) system by managing employees and water consumption and the possibility of outsourcing. The resulted model has been formulated as a mixed integer programming problem, which can be solved using a commercial software package. The implementation of the proposed study has been considered for a real-world case study and the results are discussed.

This paper deals with developing an inventory model for two warehouses. In today’s business era, there are various types of conditions such as discounts, bulk storage and seasonal products forcing the buyer to purchase the order more than owned warehouse capacity. To store the excess unit of purchase order, buyer arrange additional storage space called as rented warehouse. It is known that the demand of the seasonal products (as woolen garments) increases at the beginning of the season up to a certain time and then stabilizes to a constant rate for the remaining time of the season. The ramp type demand rate forces the buyer to store a higher quantity of the product at the beginning of the season. Most of the physical goods undergo decay or deterioration over time so we study deteriorating seasonal products in this paper. This two warehouse inventory model is developed with inflation and shortages. The model starts with rent warehouse, in first rent warehouse’s inventory level is depleted due to demand and deterioration. At this time own warehouse is depleted due to deterioration only. But after that the inventory level of owned warehouse is depleted due to both demand and deterioration. The shortages are considered in owned warehouse, which is partially backlogged. Numerical solution of the model is obtained to verify the optimal solution. Comprehensive sensitivity analysis has been carried out for showing the effect of variations in the parameters. The model is solved analytically by minimizing the total cost.

This study deals with an economic order quantity model to find out the optimal selling price and optimal ordering quantity for the products which deteriorates over time. The demand for the products depends on available stock level and selling price of the products. The shortages are allowed, and it is assumed that the occurring shortages are partially backlogged. Depending on the rate of backlogging two models are presented in this study. The first model assumes a constant rate of backlogging, while in second model the backlogging rate is assumed to be dependent on waiting time. Numerical example and sensitivity analysis are presented to illustrate the results of the proposed model.

A two warehouse production inventory model is developed for deteriorating items under reliability consideration. The effect of trade credit is considered under inflation. Since, formulating a suitable inventory model is one of the major concerns for an industry, the main objective of this paper is to optimize the total related cost for reliable production process. The model is illustrated through numerical example. The sensitivity analyses of the cost function are performed due to different measures and some managerial inferences are presented.

This paper formulates a multi-level supply chain network with a single producer, multi distributors and multi retailers during a finite planning horizon. The demand rate is assumed to be exponential function of time; shortages are allowed and completely backlogged. The stock is assumed to undergo deterioration as soon as it is produced. The production rate is dependent on demand rate and greater than the demand rate. Optimal solution for the proposed model is derived and using a numerical example, the behavior of the model is analyzed.

The purpose of these comments is to serve as a revision to the article by Khan et al. (2016) [Khan, M., Jaber, M.Y., Zanoni, S., & Zavanella, L. (2016). Vendor managed inventory with consignment stock agreement for a supply chain with defective items. Applied Mathematical Modelling, 40(15–16), 7102–7114.]. This commenting paper suggests that the expected total cost function derived in Khan et al. (2016) was incorrect, and then offers revisions to complement the shortcomings.

Today, distributing high quality perishable foods is one of the challenging issues in food industry. This paper introduces a deterministic vehicle routing problem model with multiple middle depots and proposes the freshness of perishable foods as a new concept to obtain optimal delivery routes. For the proposed mathematical model, profit maximization of delivering the product, minimization of the transportation costs and vehicle traveling time, and maximum level of delivered product perishability (loss of freshness) are considered. GAMS software is implemented to show the authority of the model. Furthermore, genetic algorithm (GA) has been developed to solve the model for large size instances. Several problems are tested in order to compare the exact and the GA solutions.