Organic pollutants cause many environmental problems to our environment because of their toxicity, non-degradation and ability to long-range transport. The most common organic pollutants are known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and are known as hydrocarbons. Effective techniques for the removal of hydrocarbons and heavy metals from soil have drawn great attention. Remediation techniques represent one of the most important of these techniques because of their gentle impact on the environment. The study highlights numerous methods for Physical and chemical remediation techniques with explanation of the ability of some plants and agricultural wastes for remediation.

Nowadays, companies are recognizing their primordial roles and responsibilities towards the protection of the environment and save the natural resources. They are focusing on some contemporary activities such as Reverse Logistics which is economically and environmentally viable. However, the integration of such an initiative needs flows restructuring and supply chain management in order to increase sustainability and maximize profits. Under this background, this paper addresses an inventory control model for a reverse logistics system that deals with two separated types of demand, for new products and remanufactured products, with different selling prices. The model consists of a single shared machine between production and remanufacturing operations, while the machine is subject to random failures and repairs. Three stock points respectively for returns, new products and remanufactured products are investigated. Meanwhile, in this paper, a modeling of the problem with Discrete-Event simulation using Arena® was conducted. Regarding the purpose of finding, a near-optimal inventory control policy that minimizes the total cost, an optimization of the model based on Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithms was established. Computational examples and sensitivity analysis were performed in order to compare the results and the robustness of each proposed algorithm. Then the results of the two methods were compared with those of OptQuest® optimization tool.

In this study, Carbon, Glass, and Aramid fiber reinforced composite and their hybridized forms were fabricated using five different stacking sequences of the fabrics. Using the Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM) procedure, epoxy resin was injected into these fabrics and allowed to cure at room temperature. From these five stacking sequences, a standard specimen with four different orientations viz. 0/90°, 15/75°, 30/60°, 45/-45° orientations were obtained using the Abrasive Water Jet Machining(AWJM) Process. The influence of stacking order and fiber orientation on tensile and flexural properties of composite was investigated. From the result of tensile testing, the highest and lowest tensile strength values were observed for neat carbon fiber reinforced composite at 0/90° orientation and at 45/-45° orientation respectively. The highest flexural strength was achieved in a hybrid combination of two layers of carbon, glass and aramid fabric for 0/90° whereas the lowest flexural strength was found in glass reinforced composite for the 45/-45° orientation.

The purpose of this study is to analyze and find out the influence of the Tudang Sipulung, public accountability and transparency on budget performance in the Regional Government of Parepare. Respondents in this study were 102 employees of the Regional Government of Parepare. The analytical model used to determine the effect between variables is a structural model with the Partial Least Square (PLS) approach. The results show that Tudang Sipulung had no significant effect on Budget Performance, Public Accountability had a significant effect on Budget Performance, and Transparency had no significant effect on the Budget Performance. This means that the implementation of the Tudang Sipulung and transparency has not been optimal in seeing the performance of the budget, in contrast to public accountability which is considered quite good. To improve the performance of the budget, it is good for the regional government to be open starting from the planning process to reporting, creating good management and open to all information.

The Combinatorial Optimization Problem (COPs) is one of the branches of applied mathematics and computer sciences, which is accompanied by many problems such as Facility Layout Problem (FLP), Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), etc. Even though the use of several mathematical formulations is employed for FLP, Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the most commonly used. One of the major problems of Combinatorial NP-hard Optimization Problem is QAP mathematical model. Consequently, many approaches have been introduced to solve this problem, and these approaches are classified as Approximate and Exact methods. With QAP, each facility is allocated to just one location, thereby reducing cost in terms of aggregate distances weighted by flow values. The primary aim of this study is to propose a hybrid approach which combines Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) algorithm and Tabu Search (TS) algorithm to enhance solutions of QAP model, to reduce the distances between the locations by finding the best distribution of N facilities to N locations, and to implement hybrid approach based on discrete differential evolution (HDDETS) on many instances of QAP from the benchmark. The performance of the proposed approach has been tested on several sets of instances from the data set of QAP and the results obtained have shown the effective performance of the proposed algorithm in improving several solutions of QAP in reasonable time. Afterwards, the proposed approach is compared with other recent methods in the literature review. Based on the computation results, the proposed hybrid approach outperforms the other methods.

This study aims to examine the effect of entrepreneurial strategy on organizational performance, the effect of social capital on organizational performance with sustainable supply chain management as a mediating variable. Sustainable supply chain management has an important influence on organizational measurement in various industries. It is used in considering environmental impacts and supplier responsibilities. The population in the current study were 390 logistics managers of companies in the manufacturing industry in Indonesia. The sample in this study was taken by purposive sampling, namely the sampling method based on certain criteria and considerations. In this study, hypothesis testing used the Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis technique with the SmartPLS 3.0 application. The data collection technique used is an online survey. The survey was carried out by distributing online questionnaires designed using the 1 to 7 Likert method to managers in the logistics section of the manufacturing industry. The stages of data analysis were to test convergent validity, discriminant validity test, goodness fit model test to meet the R-square value and test the hypothesis. The results show that entrepreneurial strategy and social capital had an influence on organizational performance and sustainable supply chain management. In addition, sustainable supply chain management mediates between organizational performance and entrepreneurial strategy, while social capital sustainable supply chain management does not mediate the organizational performance variables.

In this paper, we propose the binary version of the Social Group Optimization (BSGO) algorithm for solving the 0-1 knapsack problem. The standard Social Group Optimization (SGO) is used for continuous optimization problems. So a transformation function is used to convert the continuous values generated from SGO into binary ones. The experiments are carried out using both low-dimensional and high-dimensional knapsack problems. The results obtained by the BSGO algorithm are compared with other binary optimization algorithms. Experimental results reveal the superiority of the BSGO algorithm in achieving a high quality of solutions over different algorithms and prove that it is one of the best finding algorithms especially in high-dimensional cases.

Entrepreneurship is vital for enhancing an organization position among its rivals and may establish new opportunities. The positive effects of entrepreneurship are realized, however, if the business environment is receptive to innovation; especially the internal environment within its leadership, it can act as a motivator for it. This study aimed to identify the impact of entrepreneurship on organizational excellence through the mediating role of visionary leadership, where the study population was the managers at different levels in the Jordan commercial bank. A random sample was used to collect data from (54) branch distributed between Jordan and West Bank, where the sample consisted of (183) distributed questionnaires, while the valid questionnaires for statistical analysis were (154), which is reflected a responding rate of (84.15%) of distributed questionnaires. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied as a statistical method to attain the study objectives and testing its hypotheses. The study results indicated that entrepreneurship with its dimensions (innovativeness, pro-activeness, risk-taking, and aggressive competition) had a significant impact on both visionary leadership and organizational excellence, also visionary leadership had a significant impact on organizational excellence, while the mediating test referred that the visionary leadership played a partial mediating role between entrepreneurship and organizational excellence. Consequently, the study concluded that external and internal environments could act as a motivator for entrepreneurship and consequently for achieving organizational excellence through having visionary leadership and flexible structures and policies.

This study aimed to examine the effect of integrating Business Intelligence (BI) into the supply chain on supply chain agility, within the Jordanian manufacturing sector. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, this study developed and examined a research model, to achieve its goal. The impact of three dimensions of BI including managerial, technical, and cultural competencies was examined. Using an electronic questionnaire, data was gathered from 462 administrative personnel and employees. Structural equation modeling techniques were employed to analyze the data. Results revealed that the three dimensions of BI have statistically significant positive direct effects on supply chain agility. In addition to that, the results revealed that BI cultural competence has statistically significant positive direct effects on BI technical and managerial competencies. This study contributes to the literature on the role of BI in promoting supply chain agility, from the perspective of a developing country. The findings of this study are expected to help organizations' administrations in making better decisions regarding employing BI to achieve an agile supply chain.

Tendons transmit forces from muscles to bones through joints. Typically, tendons and muscles work together to innovate a motion. In addition, tendons are often subjected to much higher stresses than the muscles that they serve in any given action. As a result, tendons are susceptible to injuries that may lead to a permanent dysfunction in joint mobility due to the fact that the scar tissue that forms after healing often does not have the same mechanical properties of the original tissue. It is therefore very important to understand the mechanical response of tendons. In this paper the performances are examined of two viscoelastic standard nonlinear models in modelling the elastic and plastic behaviour of the tendon in the light of a well-known hyperelastic Yeoh model. The use of the Yeoh model is more for validating the performances of the viscoelastic models within the elastic region than for comparison purposes. The Yeoh model was selected based on its superior performance in modelling the elastic phase of soft tissue, as reported in previous studies, combined with its simplicity. The results show that the two standard nonlinear solid models perform extremely well both in fitting accuracies and in correlating stress results. The most promising result is the fact that the two standard nonlinear models can model tendon behaviour in the nonlinear plastic region. It is also noted that the two standard nonlinear models are physically insightful since their optimisation parameters can easily be interpreted in terms of tendon elasticity and viscoelastic parameters.