Operations research techniques have been used widely in simulating the dynamics of workforce systems. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and System Dynamics (SD) are among the techniques that have been increasingly used in modelling military workforces. In the last five years, DES has seen more interest in modelling both career management and the training pipeline. Two significant reasons for this are discussed in this paper. This article presents some notes in comparing the two techniques in modelling military workforce. The study found that DES is an appealing method in workforce modelling, especially with a small size population, as it more easily accommodates new personnel attributes and prevents the fractionalisation of personnel through the system.

Web mining has been widely used to discover knowledge from various sources in the web. One of the important tools in web mining is mining of web user’s behavior that is considered as a way to discover the potential knowledge of web user’s interaction. Nowadays, Website personalization is regarded as a popular phenomenon among web users and it plays an important role in facilitating user access and provides information of users’ requirements based on their own interests. Extracting important features about web user behavior plays a significant role in web usage mining. Such features are page visit frequency in each session, visit duration, and dates of visiting a certain pages. This paper presents a method to predict user’s interest and to propose a list of pages based on their interests by identifying user’s behavior based on fuzzy techniques called fuzzy clustering method. Due to the user’s different interests and use of one or more interest at a time, user’s interest may belong to several clusters and fuzzy clustering provide a possible overlap. Using the resulted cluster helps extract fuzzy rules. This helps detecting user’s movement pattern and using neural network a list of suggested pages to the users is provided.

Iran’s 4th development plan has enrolled the federal government to increase energy prices and remove any subsidies paid to energy sector in an attempt to increase productivity and provide better social welfare. It is, therefore, important to investigate the effects of the law on different industries and the subsequent effects on economic growth. This study investigates the impacts of subsidies on the market value of listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange in Petrochemical and Steel industries. The study selects two firms, Esfahan & apos; s Mobarakeh Steel Company and Fanavaran Petrochemical Co. using Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) over the period 2008-2013. The results have indicated that there was a meaningful relationships between removal of subsidies and market value of the firms.

Nowadays, many organizations focus on discovering their customers’ hidden patterns to maintain their competitive position through customer analysis. In fact, more and more organizations are realizing that customers are their most valuable resources. This paper performs a research using data associated with 300 clients of an insurance company in city of Anzali, Iran and they are analyzed using K-Means clustering method. Using demographic variables including gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence and clients’ incomes, the study determines the optimal numbers of clusters in order to achieve necessary data for grouping customers. Next, the study uses the method of association rules to find hidden patterns for the insurance industry.

According to the 4th Iran’s development plan, there must an increase in energy prices and removal of subsidies paid to energy sector. Therefore, it is necessary to study the effects of removing subsidies paid on energy on different industries and the subsequent impact on economic growth. This study aims to investigate the effects of subsidies on the market value of listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange in automotive and cement industries. The study selects two firms, Fars & Khuzestan Cement Co. and Irank Khodro using Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) over the period 2008-2013. The results of study have indicated that there was a meaningful relationship between removal of subsidies and market value of the firms.

The primary objective of this study is to assess the factors affecting citizen participation in community management in district 13 of Tehran Municipality. Measured variables are: social cohesion, profitable partnerships, social-economic agencies, trust among civilians, trust in municipality management, feelings of powerlessness and social anomie. The results of the implementation of Pearson correlation test show that all of these variables had significant relationships with community participation in neighborhood management. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that three variables of social cohesion, profitable partnerships and socio-economic status had explained 37% of changes in citizen participation in community management while the changing social cohesion maintained the highest impact.

An opportunity to investigate the technical and organizational effect of management accounting system changes has appeared with companies' adoption of activity-based costing (ABC). This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of ABC system for case study from food industry in Iran. From this case, the paper develops a framework for assessing ABC implementation and hypotheses about factors that influence implementation. The study detects five cost centers and for each cost center, it determines different cost drivers. The results of our survey has detected that implementation of ABC system not only helps precise allocation of overhead costs but also helps internal management companies for better planning and control of production, making better decisions for company & apos; s profits.

This paper seeks to identify the priority of factors affecting the quality of banking services in Bank Saderat Iran for better allocation of resources to enhance the quality of its banking services. The study develops a fuzzy method to handle uncertainty associated with the data and using analytical network process (ANP) ranks different factors influencing on service quality. The results have indicated that the quality of e-services (ESQ) is the most important factor followed by the quality of banking services agility (ASQ), the service system quality (SSQ), and the behavioral service qualities (BSQ). Moreover, the employees’ competence and skills, the reliability of the electronic system and the reliability of the service system, an impeccability banking system integrity and accountability instruments are among other effective factors influencing on the quality of banking services.

he VIKOR (Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje which means multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution, in Serbian) method has already become a quite popular multi-criteria decision making tool for its computational simplicity and solution accuracy. This method focuses on selecting and ranking from a set of feasible alternatives, and determines compromise solution for a problem with conflicting criteria to help the decision maker in reaching a final course of action. It determines the compromise ranking list based on the particular measure of closeness to the ideal solution. Depending upon the type of decision problem and necessity of the decision maker, apart from VIKOR method, different variants of it, like comprehensive VIKOR, fuzzy VIKOR, regret theory-based VIKOR, modified VIKOR and interval VIKOR methods have also been subsequently developed. In this paper, the ranking performance of original VIKOR method and its five variants is analyzed based on two demonstrative examples. It is observed that interval VIKOR method performs unsatisfactorily and when the information in a decision problem is imprecise, fuzzy VIKOR method should always be preferred. But, for any decision problem, original VIKOR is the best method for solution without unnecessarily complicating the related mathematical computations.

A key indicator to evaluate the success of an organization is the degree of meeting specific civil project goals based on a predetermined schedule. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of governmental administration agencies based on realization of civil project goals. In this paper, the information published by the President Deputy of Strategic Planning and Control, that publishes an annual report of evaluation indicators for national civil development projects, are used to evaluate and prioritize the major and non-major governmental agencies. Also, the Gray Relational Analysis (GRA) and the TOPSIS method are employed to analyze the data. The results indicate that using the GRA method, Supreme Council of Seminary and using the TOPSIS method, The Ministry of Labor and Social Affaires have gained the highest ranking.