This paper focuses on the problem of scheduling and routing workers in a courier service to deliver packages for a set of geographically distributed customers and, on a specific date and time window. The crew of workers has a limited capacity and a time window that represents their labor length. The problem deals with a combination of multiples variants of the vehicle routing problem as capacity, multiple periods, time windows, due dates and distance as constraints. Since in the courier services the demands could be of hundreds or thousands of packages to be delivered, the problem is computationally unmanageable. We present a three-phase solution approach. In the first phase, a scheduling model determines the visit date for each customer in the planning horizon by considering the release date, due date to visit and travel times. We use an expert system based on the know-how of the courier service, which uses an inference engine that works as a rule interpreter. In the second phase, a clustering model assigns, for each period, customers to workers according to the travel times, maximum load capacity and customer’s time windows. We use a centroid based and sweep algorithms to solve the resulted problem. Finally, in the third phase, a routing model finds the order in which each worker will visit all customers taking into account their time windows and worker’s available time. To solve the routing problem we use an Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic. We present some numerical results using a case study, in which the proposed method of this paper finds better results in comparison with the current method used in the case study.

The primary objective of the study is to investigate the mediating role of authentic leadership between employee training and employee performance in Jeddah Islamic Port of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia based on the complementary congruity theory (CCT). The study is based on analyzing 212 respondents from Jeddah Islamic Port employees. The present study uses the smartPLS 3.2.8 statistical software to reach a positive and significant relationship between employee training, authentic leadership and employee performance. Furthermore, the study finds a mediating role of authentic leadership between the relationship of employee training and employee performance in Jeddah Islamic Port. The study also recommends that the port management should focus on employee training and authentic leadership practices to enhance the employee performance which lead to port performance. Moreover, the study suggests that future study should validate the current study framework in other countries especially in the context of government departments.

This study considers representing decision maker preferences by Choquet integral in existence of interactions among criteria. Parameters of the Choquet integral are capacities which assign weights not only to criteria but also to each subset of criteria. This property provides Choquet integral with the ability of modeling some types of interactions. Different capacity types with different degrees of complexity have been defined in the literature. After making a review on the dependence (interaction) and independence concepts used in the multiple criteria decision making literature, we study and represent structures of interactions that can be handled by different capacity types through intuitive graphical demonstrations. Afterwards, we provide guidelines for specifying the appropriate capacity type in practical applications. Such guidance has not been provided in the literature for the practitioners to the best of our knowledge.

Like freedom of India, the demonetization reform was also unveiled in India during the midnight by the Indian Government and it was declared that one thousand and five hundred rupee notes would no longer be legal tender effective from 8th November 2016. At the same time, the Reserve Bank of India issued new two thousand rupee notes and new five hundred rupee notes on November, 10, 2016. This initiative was taken by the Central Government with the aim of preventing corruption, reducing black money and counterfeit currency notes. There was a significant impact on the entire Indian economy system and it was urged the citizens to switch to alternative modes of payment due to non-availability of hot currency i.e., e-payments, hence people faced many problems in all transactions after demonetization especially in service sectors. This paper performs a questionnaire based survey by collecting the necessary data from 629 beneficiaries/customers of service sector organisations in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state, India during November-December 2017 to measure the effects of demonetization after a year. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Structural Equations Model) was used to analyse the relationship between the effect, sustainability and the impact on the customer satisfaction. The study found that demonetization based on Adoptability, Implementation, Readiness and Acceptance of new payment methods significantly influenced the customer satisfaction under service sector. The effects of different factors such as Approach, Availability, Time, Delivery and Infrastructure also had significant contribution towards the customers’ satisfaction.

This paper studies the problem of scheduling a finite set of customers with stochastic service times for a single-server system. The objective is to minimize the waiting time of customers, the idle time of the server, and the lateness of the schedule. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, the optimal schedule is notoriously hard to derive with reasonable computation times. Therefore, we develop a simulation based K-steps look-ahead selection method which can result in nearly optimal schedules within reasonable computation times. Furthermore, we study the different distributed service times, e.g., Exponential, Weibull and lognormal distribution and the results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain better results than the lag order approximation method proposed by Vink et al. (2015) [Vink, W., Kuiper, A., Kemper, B., & Bhulai, S. (2015). Optimal appointment scheduling in continuous time: The lag order approximation method. European Journal of Operational Research, 240(1), 213-219.]. Finally, a realistic appointment scheduling includes experiments to verify the good performance of the proposed method.

This study examines the effect of strategic management on work performance through organizational commitment, and the influence of strategic management and organizational commitment on employee performance who worked at Muhammadiyah University of Indonesia. The sample used according to the calculation of cluster sampling probability proportionate to size model (PPS) with the formulation of Slovin which yielded 386 employees at 12 muhammadiyah universities in Indonesia. The developed instrument combines part of the existing questionnaire related to strategic management, organizational commitment, and work performance, using the Likert Method of Suc-cessive Interval (MSI) scale. The data were analyzed by regression equation using SPSS 21 soft-ware. The findings of this study concluded that strategic management and organizational commit-ment affect the performance of employees. Moreover, strategic management along with organiza-tional commitment affect the performance of employees. Finally, the effect of strategic management factors under the title of understanding of planning, adequacy to company, and utilization along with organizational commitment is observed positive on the work achievements. For the better un-derstanding, the effects of these factors should also be observed as presented through regression findings of the study. Based on such findings, it is suggested that management of the selected universities should consider the integration between strategic management, organizational commitment, and work achievements.

The continuous increase in energy consumption has brought worldwide attention to its significant environmental effect, which is triggered by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and rapid climate change. As such, more energy efficient buildings are required to minimize the energy consumption of heating and cooling. The present study introduces a set of machine learning-based models to predict the heating and cooling loads in buildings. This includes back-propagation artificial neural network, generalized regression neural network, radial basis neural network, radial kernel support vector machines and ANOVA kernel support vector machines. The comparisons were conducted as per mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE) and root-mean squared error (RMSE). Finally, the significance of the capacities of the machine learning models are evaluated using two-tailed student’s t-tests. Results demonstrate that the radial basis function network outperformed the aforementioned machine learning models.

This paper examines the relationship between public policy and education management in Indonesia by looking at various indicators influencing the public policy and the education management. For education management, factors like education achievement at elementary & higher school, college enrolment, job market in both local and international levels and social development are observed. Public policy is studied through work force development, higher education, brain drain, public safety, constitutional convention, job approval, legislature and operation policies. To examine this association, a survey questionnaire is developed and presented on various respondents regarding public policy and education management. A sample of 327 respondents is empirically examined and it is observed that the effect of work force development on elementary school achievement was significant while the effect of brain drains, job approval and legislature were crucial for the presented indicators of education management. Further studies can be conducted while considering other aspects of both public policy and education.
The editors of Management Science Letters retract this article [1] due to severe irrelevant and unusual citations on this paper from other sources.

A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is applied to obtain Pareto optimal solutions in widely used advanced machining processes, i.e., electric discharge machining, electrochemical micromachining, ultrasonic machining, abrasive water jet machining. The solutions obtained using the proposed method is in the form of the Pareto-optimal front, thus, any solution is acceptable and can be utilized to obtain optimum performance of the considered processes. The obtained results using NSGA-II show good agreement with the results of previous researchers. Implementation of the proposed method shows benefits to the process engineer of the industries as they can select alternative parameters based on the requirement.

High rates in turnover of skilled employees can turn to be a very significant concern in organizations world-wide. Turnover affects productivity, product or service quality and of course profitability. As Human Resources (HR) activities can be considered as a primary source of sustainable competitive advantage in organisations, it would also play a major role in employees’ intention to stay or to leave. This paper examines the influence of different human resource practices on employees’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment and eventually on job turnover with a focus on the governmental sector in the State of Qatar. In order to develop such investigation, a model was suggested and an online questionnaire was developed and distributed. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of more than 250 highly ranked employees in Qatar. Statistical correlations were conducted to examine the relationships among variables under investigation. The results show that positive relationships were observed between the HR practices under investigation and job satisfaction and organizational commitment which indicate intention to stay.