During the past five decades, there have been tremendous efforts to offer different methods for portfolio management. The primary objective of many of these methods is to provide a trade-off between risk and reward. The proposed study of this paper uses analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and grey relational analysis to offer a method for portfolio management. The proposed method of this paper uses a statistical sample consists of 16 firms whose shares were trading during the fiscal year of 2010 on Tehran Stock Exchange. The study uses AHP and gray relational analysis to assign weight to each firm. We also use a linear programming technique to model the resulted problem by considering some realistic constraints.

Ranking various alternatives has been under investigation and there are literally various methods and techniques for making a decision based on various criteria. One of the primary concerns on ranking methodologies such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is that decision makers cannot express his/her feeling in crisp form. Therefore, we need to use linguistic terms to receive the relative weights for comparing various alternatives. In this paper, we discuss ranking different alternatives based on the implementation of preference relation matrix based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets.

In today’s competitive business environment, companies strive to increase their market shares. All companies clearly understand that they have to reach this goal by implementing cost effective methods and increase profits as much as possible. The cost of purchasing raw materials and component parts are significant portion of products in most manufacturing firms. Supplier selection and evaluation have been widely recognized to be one of the most substantial issues on material purchasing. In order to choose reliable suppliers it is necessary to have a trade-off between some tangible and intangible factors where some of them are in serious conflict. In this paper, an integrated technique of analytical network process improved by VIKOR and fuzzy sets theory and multi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming is proposed to determine the appropriate suppliers. The proposed model of this paper also determines the order quantity allocated to each supplier in the case of multiple sourcing, multiple products and multi-period time horizon for an Iranian cable company.

This paper presents a hybrid method for detecting the most important failure items as well as the most effective alternative strategy to cope with possible events. The proposed model of this paper uses grey technique to rank various alternatives and FMEA technique to find important faults. The implementation of the proposed method has been illustrated for an existing example on the literature. The results of this method show that the proposed model has been capable of detecting the most trouble making problems with fuzzy logic and finds the most important solution strategy using FMEA technique.

Measuring the relative performance of universities play important role on better educational planning. During the past few years, balanced scorecard (BSC) has become popular among researchers as a technique for measuring the performance of business units. This method studies a particular firm in terms of four different perspectives including internal processes, learning and growth, customer and financial figures. One primary concern on using such method is that this method does not consider the relative importance of these components. In this paper, we present a hybrid of BSC with analytical network process to measure the relative performance of an educational unit in Iran.

A new durable antibacterial cotton fabric was successfully prepared by free-radical graft copolymerization of acrylic acid (AA) and itaconic acid (IA) onto a cotton fabric in an aqueous medium. Ammonium persulfate (APS) was used as the initiator in the presence of a crosslinker, methylene bisacrylamide (MBA). The nanocomposite hydrogel was obtained from in situ formation of silver nanoparticles from reduction of silver cations by sodium borohydride. A proposed mechanism for nanocomposite formation was suggested and the effect of ratio of IA to AA on water absorbency discussed. FTIR, UV-Vis, X-ray, and scanning electron microscopy were employed to characterize the structure of the prepared superabsorbent. The antibacterial activity of the hydrogel was tested qualitatively and quantitatively. Results showed that the silver nanoparticle-loaded fabric has potent antibacterial activity to Escherichia coli Gram-negative bacteria.

Imines of six new quinolin-5-ylamine derivatives 3(a-c) and 5(a-c) were synthesized by the reaction of quinolin-5-ylamine (1) with different aldehydes 2(a-c) and ketones 4(a-c). The chemical structures of the compounds were confirmed by UV-visible, FT-IR and 1H NMR spectral study. New compounds were screened for the antioxidant activity by DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) method. Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT) was used as standard. All the compounds showed DPPH radical scavenging activity, where compound 3c was the best radical scavenger.

In this study, for the first time we report a highly selective and sensitive lutetium ions chemical optical sensor based on immobilization of a asymmetrically S–N Schiff’s base, namely N-(thien-2-ylmethylene)pyridine-2,6-diamine (TPD) on a triacetylcellulose membrane. This optode exhibits a linear range of 5.0 ×10-7 –1.0 ×10-5 M of the Lu(III) ion concentration with a detection limit of 9.3 ×10-8 M at a wavelength of 336 nm. The influence of responsible factors for improving sensitivity of the sensor was studied and identified. Response time of the newly designed optode was within 20-30 s depending on the Lu(III) ion concentration. Response of the optical sensor is independent of the pH of the solution in the range of 3.0–9.0. It manifests advantages of fast response time, low detection limit and most significantly, very good selectivity with respect to a number of lanthanide ions. The sensor can readily be regenerated with thiourea solutions and its response was reversible and reproducible. This optode was applied to the determination of Lu(III) in aqueous and CRM samples.

In today’s competitive economy, quality plays an essential role for the success business units and there are considerable efforts made to control and to improve quality characteristics in order to satisfy customers’ requirements. However, improving quality is normally involved with various criteria and we need to use Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) to handle such cases. In this state-of the-art literature survey, 45 articles focused on solving quality problems by MCDM methods are investigated. These articles were published between 1994 and 2013.Seven areas were selected for categorization: (1) AHP, Fuzzy AHP, ANP and Fuzzy ANP, (2) DEMATEL and Fuzzy DEMATEL, (3) GRA, (4) Vikor and Fuzzy Vikor, (5) TOPSIS, Fuzzy TOPSIS and combination of TOPSIS and AHP, (6) Fuzzy and (7) Less frequent and hybrid procedures. According to our survey, Fuzzy based methods were the most popular technique with about 40% usage among procedures. Also AHP and ANP were almost 20% of functional methods. This survey ends with giving recommendation for future researches.

HDPE was functionalized with two different esters in an inert atmosphere at 160°C, under different experimental conditions by thermolysis method. The order of the functionalization and crosslinking reactions was determined. The C=C formation peak is assigned at 1610 cm-1.The percentage of functionalization was determined by FTIR spectroscopy method. Thermogravimetric analysis and differential scanning calorimetric methods were also used to study about the thermal properties of the functionalized HDPE.