Nowadays, one of the challenges in the organizations according to budget limitations in the com-panies, is how to prioritize their project portfolios in the events of their strategies. In other words, organizations are seeking to allocate resources in order to gain the maximum profit ac-cording to budget limitations. In this article, a hybrid decision making method is used to priori-tize construction project portfolio by considering sustainability criteria. First, Lexicographic method is applied to weight the sustainability criteria. Then, by considering the weights derived from the Lexicographic and sustainability criteria, projects are prioritized based on VIKOR method. The proposed method of this study is applied for a case study of projects in the refinery scope.

Generation of solid waste is the integral consequence of civilization and its management is stand-ing as a big challenge in front of state government at present time. Municipal solid waste in Durg-Bhilai is littered with improper places due to lack of understanding about the scientific im-portance of garbage and its consequences. Our foremost concern is the selection of appropriate dumping area nearby Durg-Bhilai (C.G.) and for the selection of appropriate dumping area, a multi criteria decision making technique is used. This paper attempts to evaluate 4 dumping areas based on 5 criteria. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the weighs for each criterion and quality function deployment (QFD) is also implemented. The results indicate that Potiyakala was the best dumping site nearby Durg-Bhilai area.

This study examines the properties of the downward-sloping region of the linear supply function equilibrium (cartel case), which has not been considered in the literature. In simple duopoly set-tings, we find two regions, depending on the cartel type. Specifically, in a tight cartel, fiercer competition yields higher profits to firms, but the equilibrium is unstable. Instead, in the case of a loose cartel, fiercer competition yields lower profits, and the equilibrium is stable. Thus, in our framework, individual firms’ profits as a stable equilibrium are maximized not in a pure cartel, but rather in a somewhat weak cartel. This result sheds lights on the situations policymakers should focus on while monitoring cartels.

Sustainability in project operations such as financial, social and environmental sustainability is one of the most prominent issues of the present times to address. The increased focus on sus-tainable business operations has changed the viewpoint of researchers and corporate community towards the project management. Today sustainability in business operations along with sustain-ability of natural and environmental resources are of paramount significance which has further caused a huge impact on conception, planning, scheduling and execution of the project manage-ment activities. In this paper, a literature review between 1987 and 2018 on different issues af-fecting the sustainability in project management is carried out. The present study also identifies and discusses the future possibilities to apply computational procedures in order to estimate and optimize the sustainability issues in the management of projects, for example the computational evolutionary algorithms can be applied to formulate the multi-objective decision-making problem after considering critical factors of sustainability in the projects and then yielding optimized solu-tions for the formulated problem to achieve sustainability in the projects. A new integrated framework with the inclusion of feedback function for assessment of each decision and actions taken towards the sustainability of the projects is also identified and presented.

The project scheduling problem is both practically and theoretically of paramount importance. From the practical perspective, improvement of project scheduling as a critical part of project management process can lead to successful project completion and significantly decrease of the relevant costs. From the theoretical perspective, project scheduling is regarded as one of the in-teresting optimization issues, which has attracted the attention of many researchers in the area of operations research. Therefore, the project scheduling issue has been significantly evaluated over time and has been developed from various aspects. In this research, the topics related to Re-source-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) are reviewed, recent developments in this field are evaluated, and the results are presented for future studies. In this regard, first, the standard problem of RCPSP is expressed and related developments are presented from four as-pects of resources, characteristics of activities, type of objective functions, and availability level of information. Following that, details about 216 articles conducted on RCPSP during 1980-2017 are expressed. At the end, in line with the statistics obtained from the evaluation of previ-ous articles, suggestions are made for the future studies in order to help the development of new issues in this area.

A search engine is an essential tool in our daily life. With the development of society and net-work technology, the users’ requirement of Internet information is increasing. For most search methods, keyword searching is in a crucial position. However, what about the quality of key-word search in different search engines? This paper evaluates the quality of keyword searching among different search engines project.

In recent years, clients often employ multiple contractors to implement different activities of the projects. Each contractor manages and implements a subset of activities according to the deter-mined schedule and payments. In this situation, time/cost trade-off problem becomes a distributed decision making problem in which the client, as leader, and the contractors, as followers, pursue their own objectives. We establish a multi-objective, bi-level distributed programming model based on fuzzy mathematical programming for this time/cost trade-off problem. The model is then developed for three common behaviors of client i.e. profit seeking, minimization of project time, as well as combination of profit seeking and minimization of project time behaviors. As the solution approaches, we propose transformation method based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker condi-tions projects to transform bi-level programming problem to a single level one. Numerical results reveal that the client’s behaviors have measurable impact on time and cost of activities performed by contractors. Moreover, we found that when the client does not have complete information about the contractors’ financial situations, the client should make trade-off between his confidence level and his profit.

Risk management plays an important role on the success of the any project. There are several techniques, which are available to help different phases of risk management process. This paper presents a survey to identify the necessary tools, which are mostly implemented and related to the success of any project management, and more specifically with effective project risk management. The survey is based on a questionnaire designed to a sample of project managers from the construction industries. The response data was studied to determine which tools are more used in the organizations, which could yield a better project management performance.

Selection of an appropriate contractor plays an important role for the success of the accomplish-ment of any construction project. This paper presents a multi-criteria decision making method for contractor selection. The proposed study uses six criteria, namely; Experience, Financial stability, Quality performance, Manpower resources, Equipment resources and Current workload for evaluating different contractors. Using analytical hierarchy process, the study ranks these criteria and finds the relative importance of them. Next, The technique for Order of Preference by Simi-larity to ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to rank the alternative contractors according to these criteria.

Nowadays, projects have become so widespread in the world that individuals and organizations are always involved in a variety of them. Recent advances in technology and fundamental chang-es in most scientific disciplines have had an essential impact on projects, and have made the na-ture and environmental conditions governing them to become more complex than before. With increasing complexity, the amount of information needed for project management increases. In general, the increasing complexity of projects is a growing source of project risks. It has been recognized that complexity affects the performance of a project and will be effective in its suc-cess. In this context, the traditional principles and practices of project management are no longer able to control the emerging complexity of projects. In addition, one of the key factors for the success of the projects is the appropriateness of the project manager's assignment. Many studies have been carried out in identifying the suitability criteria of the project manager and the methods of selecting the project manager. In most of these studies, the amount and type of complexity of the project are mentioned as factors influencing the design of an appropriate project manager. However, there has not yet been a specific approach for selecting the project manager with re-gard to the complexity of the project. Therefore, in this research, we try to investigate the rela-tionship between the complexity of the project and the merits of the project manager by applying a structural equation modeling approach.