The Slab Stack Shuffling Problem (SSSP) consists of retrieving slabs, stored in stacks in a warehouse, to efficiently satisfy a processing order. The problem is relevant in the steel industry as the slab yard serves as a storage buffer between the continuous casting stage and the rolling mill. Notably, the SSSP also arises in cutting/assembly centres within the shipbuilding supply chain, where already rolled slabs must undergo further production stages. The different slabs managed in these facilities confer the problem novel practical features, such as the existence of slabs' typologies and deadlines, i.e., a maximum time beyond which their quality certifications expire and are no longer usable. In such a context, the goals of the present paper are twofold: (i) providing a comprehensive taxonomy of the main aspects involved in the problem; (ii) proposing an original mathematical formulation for the SSSP. Specifically, the model is cast as a bi-objective multi-period program, seeking to minimise the number of shuffles and expired slabs. Computational tests on randomly generated instances prove the relevance of the trade-off between the above-mentioned objectives and the impact of the yard's configuration on the retrieval process, suggesting the most suitable storage strategy to adopt under different operational settings.

Closed-loop supply chain management is an effective and efficient solution for a set of activities to retrieve a product from a customer and improve its value or to dispose it. Today, designing and planning a closed-loop chain is an inevitable but difficult task. In this research, a scenario-based modeling approach is presented by considering both forward and reverse flows as a closed-loop supply chains in steel industry. The proposed study also develops a multi-product and multi-period model based on a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach for profit maximization. The study also considers uncertainty in the amount of raw material, processing, storage and distribution of several products flow. Uncertainty is associated with the quantity and quality of the products in the reverse flow, which are directly affected by customers and sorting centers, respectively. Finally, the model is deployed in Steel industry with real data. The results show that by increasing the quality level of returned products the need for raw materials is reduced and the total profit of the supply chain is increased.

Privatization is considered as the transfer of business from the government to the private sector. This process is often accomplished in an attempt to reduce the size of government, increase the productivity and export activities. There is no doubt that in an export oriented economy, government tries to promote expert based activities by making necessary changes on rules and regulations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors on promoting export in Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among some experts active in steel industry. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy is equal to 0.839 and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity yields an approximation Chi-Square value of 2485.02 (Sig. = 0.000, df = 276). Using principle component analysis with Varimax rotation, the study has detected five important factors including human resources development, productivity management, marketing management, creating competitive environment and building necessary infrastructures, which influence the most on export activities.

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.

During the last decades, environmental crises through energy consumption and economic growth were noticed as a growing concern among researchers. The industrial sector is the main part of economic growth in each country using conservative energy and emitting carbon dioxide that causes global warming. The Paris agreement and Kyoto protocol were two agreements to prevent governments from emitting CO2 freely. Purpose of this research was to investigate the cement industry, steel industry, and automobile industry products’ effects on CO2 emissions in Iran and to rank them according to their measured effects on CO2 emissions. The methodology used in this study was to estimate equations with CO2 emissions as a dependent variable and cement, steel, and automobile industries’ products with ordinary least squares (OLS) and generalized moment method (GMM) approaches. Stationary, Johansen cointegration, Durbin-Watson, Breusch-Godfrey, Chow breakpoint, and normal residual tests were checked. In-sample forecasting was implemented to check the precision of the estimation and an updated ranking was reported as a final result to consider which industry has affected CO2 emissions more than the others per unit of production cost. In conclusion, the cement industry, steel industry, and automobile industry had the most positive effects on CO2 emissions, respectively. This result is suitable to prioritize the industries for enhancing green technology and optimizing industrial production for a more sustainable economy.

During the past three decades there have been tremendous efforts on building steel factories on economic scales. The primary question is to find an economic scale for such plants which could also meet domestic demand. In this paper, we perform an empirical survey to find out whether building small steel factories are more suitable or setting up giant steel industries to meet regional demands. The results indicate that in many countries, building small steel plants based on the recent advances of technologies not only reduces the total cost of steel production but also it could significantly reduce the unnecessary transportation cost, providing cheaper labor, etc. This would lead to better competition which would increase the productivity.