A new and simple method for the preconcentration and spectrophotometric determination of trace amounts of nickel was developed by cloud point extraction (CPE). In the proposed work, dimethylglyoxime (DMG) was used as the chelating agent and Triton X-114 was selected as a non-ionic surfactant for CPE. The parameters affecting the cloud point extraction including the pH of sample solution, concentration of the chelating agent and surfactant, equilibration temperature and time were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration graph was linear in the range of 10-150 ng mL-1 with a detection limit of 4 ng mL-1. The relative standard deviation for 9 replicates of 100 ng mL-1 Ni(II) was 1.04%. The interference effect of some anions and cations was studied. The method was applied to the determination of Ni(II) in water samples with satisfactory results.

This piece of work aims at the modeling and using the finite element method approach (FEM) to analyze the fatigue behavior of bolted beam to column end-plate connection in the structural steel framework subjected to static loading. A detailed three dimensional (3D) simulation model of the bolted beam to column end-plate connection is constructed in PRO-E wildfire and it is analyzed in the ANSYS workbench to obtain its behavior. The bolted end-plate connection is chosen as an important type of beam to column joint. The end-plate connection is chosen for its complexity in the analysis and behavior due to the number of connection components and their inheritable behavior. The solid elements, bonded contact and the bolt pretension are included to obtain the behavior of the structure. The FEA results of the structure with or without bolt pretension are compared with the available literature. At last the fatigue behavior of connections under over tensioning is presented in this work.

This paper presents an investigation on the role of human resource management on enterprise resource planning in one of higher educational systems in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 30 questions, distributes it among some Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number of questions are reduced to 20. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.716 and 1169, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived five factors including environment analysis, infrastructure components, managerial decisions, integrated information systems and control components.

In today & apos; s competitive world, productivity- as a core source of production - is the most important target of the organization. Experimental studies in developed industrial countries prove that productivity improvements resulted from development of management systems play a more important role in production than physical increases in labor and capital factors. This paper, while focusing on productivity from a CRM perspective, employs a European Organizational Excellence Model framework to identify factors affecting productivity and the role of CRM systems. We perform an empirical study for a case study of home appliance manufacturing and using a questionnaire computed present status and compared with desired status of CRM components such as customer leadership, strategy, skill and motivation of labor work, effective use of information technology and process management.

The primary assumptions with many multi-period inventory lot-sizing models are fixed time horizon and uniform demand variation within each period. In some real inventory situations, however, the time horizon may be unknown, uncertain or imprecise in nature and the demand pattern may vary within a given replenishment period. This paper presents an economic order quantity model for deteriorating items where demand has different pattern with unknown time horizon. The model generates optimal replenishment schedules, order quantity and costs using a general ramp-type demand pattern that allows three-phase variation in demand. Shortages are allowed with full backlogging of demand and all possible replenishment scenarios that can be encountered when shortages and demand pattern variation occur in multi-period inventory modeling are also considered. With the aid of numerical illustrations, the advantages of allowing for variation in demand pattern within replenishment periods, whenever they occur, are explored. The numerical examples show that the length of the replenishment period generated by the model varies with the changes in demand patterns.

This research investigates the human-behavioral dimension of technology acceptance in enterprises. It is evident that accepting a technology depends on the underlying circumstances of the environment. We have approached this issue from two different angles of social and technological architecture. The research tries to explore proper enterprise architecture for ERP system acceptance. Social Architecture (SA) is defined as the set of circumstances that makes people behave in a particular way. So behavior of persons (employees of an enterprise) can be a function of SA. Hence acceptance of a system can be dictated by SA and manipulating SA can result in desirable success for a technology system. We have achieved various variables of social architecture and have examined their relevance to system acceptance and success in related enterprises (research domain) beside technological architecture variables.
The results have indicated that a special form of social and technological architecture can lead to success for ERP system in the enterprises of the research domain. This gave us a model of architecture.

Distribution network design is an important issue in supply chain management and plays an important role in making new market development. Because of JIT philosophy, most of managers now have focused on designing appropriate distribution networks. Thus, categorizing distributors and selecting the best ones are crucial for companies. This paper provides a new method to categorize and select distributors. The fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) algorithm is utilized to categorize distributors according to their similarity. To improve the performance of the algorithm, we train the algorithm using the past data. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to examine the validity of the proposed algorithm.

Meta-heuristic approaches are general algorithmic framework, often nature-inspired and designed to solve NP-complete optimization problems in cellular manufacturing systems and has been a growing research area for the past two decades. This paper discusses various meta-heuristic techniques such as evolutionary approach, Ant colony optimization, simulated annealing, Tabu search and other recent approaches, and their applications to the vicinity of group technology/cell formation (GT/CF) problem in cellular manufacturing. The nobility of this paper is to incorporate various prevailing issues, open problems of meta-heuristic approaches, its usage, comparison, hybridization and its scope of future research in the aforesaid area.

Railroad maintenance engineering plays an important role on availability of roads and reducing the cost of railroad incidents. Rail is of the most important parts of railroad industry, which needs regular maintenance since it covers a significant part of total maintenance cost. Any attempt on optimizing total cost of maintenance could substantially reduce the cost of railroad system and it can reduce total cost of the industry. The paper presents a new method to estimate the cost of rail failure using different cost components such as cost of inspection and cost of risk associated with possible accidents. The proposed model of this paper is used for a real-world case study of railroad transportation of Tehran region and the results have been analyzed.

Measuring the relative efficiency of similar units has been an important topic of research among many researchers. Data envelopment analysis has been one of the most important techniques for measuring the efficiency of different units. However, there are some limitations on using such technique and some people prefer to use other methods such as analytical hierarchy process to measure the relative efficiencies. Besides, uncertainty in the input data is another issue, which makes some misleading results. In this paper, we present an integrated robust DEA-AHP to measure the relative efficiency of similar units. The proposed model of this is believed to capable of presenting better results in terms of efficiency compared with exclusive usage of DEA or AHP. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated for a real-world case study of Airport industry and the results are analyzed.