Inspired by the industries such as food and beverage, metal and steel, as well as petroleum and petrochemical ones, the current study addresses a joint order acceptance and scheduling, lot streaming in a flexible flow shop and batch delivery problem. For maximizing a profit objective function with trading off between the revenue of the accepted orders and the costs incurred, a novel mixed integer linear programming is proposed. This paper develops a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm based on the Genetic Algorithm. In the developed algorithm, (1) a heuristic, (2) a local search, and (3) a restart phase is proposed. To set the appropriate parameters of the algorithms, Taguchi experimental design was applied. The obtained results reveal the appropriate performance of the hybrid genetic algorithm.

The agricultural production, due to the specificity of the functioning of the agricultural industry, is influenced by factors that have significant impacts on agricultural enterprises and determine the importance of state support. The unpredictable factors of agrarian production such as weather, natural disaster, and epidemics increase the risks of agricultural business. That is why farmers need to attract investments. But some farmers do not attract investment because of government subsidies. Besides, using government subsidies could have a negative impact on agrarian business. So, it is necessary to establish the effectiveness of governance for agricultural production and food security in general.

Medical tourism industry is an international phenomenon, which most of medical tourists for some reasons such as high costs of treatment, long waiting queues, lack of insurance and lack of access to health care in the origin country, travel long distances to benefit from health care services of destination country. Given the competitive nature of this industry, most countries are designing practical and legal services and planning for their development. For this purpose, this study has been conducted to develop a strategic planning framework for development of medical tourism industry in Yazd province of Iran; because in recent years Yazd has recognized as the health pole by patients in developing countries. In sum, emphasizing on servicing, enhancing and developing specialized treatment centers, has attracted patients from center, south and east of the country as well as Middle East and Central Asia countries. The dominant approach in this study is developmental – practical and also the research method is descriptive, analytical and survey. In order to analyzing the data, the SWOT model and best-worst techniques have been used. In the following, after identifying strategic position of Yazd province in terms of medical tourism industry, the related strategies were formulated and practical results were presented.

The main objective of the study was to find out the relationship between saving and investment pattern and orientation towards finance among the working women at the universities of Saudi Arabia. Orientation towards finance (ORTOFIN) is one's attitude towards effectively managing financial activities. This attitude is backed by individual behavior toward financial management. ORTOFIN scale was made as a construct to measure the behavioral dispositions of individuals that are connected to their behavior patterns towards finance and orientations. The data was collected using the ORTOFIN scale which was constructed and used in the European population as well as validated using standard procedures into the Asian population. The present study concentrates on the working women at the Universities of Saudi Arabia. The data collected from 192 women employees of different Universities in Saudi Arabia. This study states there is a significant positive relationship among the saving and investment pattern and orientation towards finance among the working women at the universities of Saudi Arabia. The finding of the study revealed Financial Management Behavior act as a major contributor to the orientation towards finance and the factor of personnel planning is another significant contributor towards ORTOFIN.

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of cloud-based solutions on the digital transformation of human resource (HR) practices in Jordan. The study is quantitative in nature and the data was gathered from primary sources by gathering the responses from 346 respondents. The SEM technique was used for the purpose of determining the direct effect. The study found that infrastructure as a service, performance as a service and software as a service had significant and positive impact on the digital transformation of the HR practices. The information gathered from the secondary sources was provided with reference and was also well paraphrased to avoid the issue of similarity. The study focused on the public sector which restricts the results of this study to this sector only. On the other hand, only one country was considered in this study i.e., Jordan. The research is considered as the first attempt to examine the impact of cloud-based solutions on the digital transformation of HR practices in a developing country such as Jordan.

In this study, a 3D finite element model of an intact mandible was used for the simulation of the movement of the lower jaw and analysis of the effects of TemporoMandibular Joint (TMJ) prosthesis replacement on the jaw movement. Seven bundles of muscle fibers were inserted in their appropriate positions following anatomical data. Digastric, geniohyoid and lateral pterygoid muscles were considered for opening the mouth while medial pterygoid, superficial masseter, deep masseter and temporalis muscles were used for closing the mouth. Then, the TMJ was replaced by two different types of TMJ prostheses in the same way as in a surgery operation. One of the prostheses was designed based on anatomical shape of the ramus and condyle of the mandible while the other one was taken similar to the commercial TMJ prostheses. Eventually, all three models underwent an opening jaw simulation and produced an identical range of motion while were mismatched in other parameters. The results show that since the anatomical TMJ prosthesis resembles the shape and structure of an intact mandible; therefore, it is more capable of simulating the motion of mandible compared to the commercial TMJ prosthesis. Furthermore, better contact between the anatomical TMJ prosthesis and the mandible leads to lower stress distribution in comparison with the commercial TMJ implant. Finally, as the amount of muscle forces and strain in anatomical TMJ prosthesis replacement are less than the commercial one, the patient needs to make less effort to move the mandible and open the mouth.

Cell load variation is considered a significant shortcoming in scheduling of cellular manufacturing systems. In this article, a new method is proposed for scheduling dynamic cellular manufacturing systems in the presence of bottleneck and parallel machines. The aim of this method is to control cell load variation during the process of determining the best trading off values between in-house manufacturing and outsourcing. A genetic algorithm (GA) is developed because of the high potential of trapping in the local optima, and results are compared with the results of LINGO® 12.0 software. The Taguchi method (an L_9 orthogonal optimization) is used to estimate parameters of GA in order to solve experiments derived from literature. An in-depth analysis is conducted on the results in consideration of various factors, and control charts are used on machine-load variation. Our findings indicate that the dynamic condition of product demands affects the routing of product parts and may induce machine-load variations that yield to cell-load diversity. An increase in product uncertainty level causes the loading level of each cell to vary, which in turn results in the development of “complex dummy sub-cells”. The effect of the complex sub-cells is measured using another mathematical index. The results showed that the proposed GA can provide solutions with limited cell-load variations.

Tourism infrastructure development in different regions of the world does not follow a symmetrically equal pattern. Because of the importance of infrastructure in the tourism development, the present research is an attempt to examine the hard elements of tourism infrastructure in different provinces of Iran, using the indicators proposed by Pearce and Wu (2015) [Pearce, P. L. & Wu, M. Y. (2015). Soft infrastructure at tourism sites: identifying key issues for Asian tourism from case studies. Tourism Recreation Research, 40 (1), 120-132.]. To accomplish this, the data registered in the statistical yearbook of the Statistical Center of Iran were investigated. The method of research was analytical survey. To analyze and rank the data collected from the yearbook, VIKOR and TOPSIS methods were employed. The results of the analysis show that Tehran Province was under the best conditions of the Iranian tourism infrastructure, whereas Ilam Province was under the worst condition. The results about the condition of hard tourism infrastructure in the provinces of Iran, next to their tourism potentials, can provide necessary data for the future planning of the industry.

This study is to examine the effects of service quality, customer relationship learning, product quality, and customer engagement on increasing customer value. The researchers propose a model, and plan to show the concept of customer engagement variables as intervening variables. The study population includes the customers of Bank Jatim and uses the SEM analysis and the purposive sampling method for 384 respondents. The proposed model shows customer engagement acts as a good intervening variable. Customer value increases, as customer engagement increases. Finally, customer relationship learning determines the value of the existence of customer engagement in bank service customers.

Road accidents are an essential issue for every country in the world because their consequences are devastating for the people involved in all senses. Speeding has been considered one of the main reasons for these tragedies. Therefore, the current research analyzed the relationship between speeding and severe accidents on the Pan-American highway in Peru. Publicly available data kept in a Peruvian official agency was employed. Methodologically, the logit regression was harnessed since the data were categorical. After the analysis, the research found that it was riskier to have severe accidents than speeding in urban areas crossing the highway and driving or being inside a truck.