Abstract: Supplier selection is one of the most essential activities in purchase management and plays a crucial role in the production phase. Supplier selection as a vital step of supply chain management is a multi-criteria decision-making issue. For any organization, the process of selecting the best supplier holds variable multilayered complications involving quantitative and qualitative criteria. This paper tackles the supplier selection problem in a Turkish Textile Company. The present study carries out a novel grey integrated multi-criteria approach for enhancing the supplier procedure within Textile Company with the help of the grey analytical hierarchy process G-AHP model for weighting the set of criteria, and the grey weighted aggregated sum product assessment WASPAS-G model for prioritizing the suppliers. The study starts with reviewing the previous works of multi-criteria decision-making MCDM methods and the list of existing criteria evaluation in supplier selection. Then, the range of criteria is selected based on the company requirements and the experts’ interview. In the case study, the consistency rate of the models is tested in order to verify the quality of experts’ judgments. The final results affirm that Grey integrated approach could be efficient and far more precise than the existing models for overcoming the supplier selection and evaluation obstacles in the supply chain management.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: The ownership - efficiency relationship in a firm has always been an important topic. In this paper, we focus on the state owned versus non-state-owned status of Vietnamese manufacturing firms, to shed light into the relationship between these two variables when using a more state-of-the-art method as a stochastic meta-frontier method. Applying the method for two periods: one during the global economic crisis and the other after the end of the crisis, the study determines that in both periods, there was a strong evidence that non-state-owned firms performed much better than state owned counterpart. We also found that the difference became even larger during the harsh time and sub-industries with non-state-owned firms could outperform the state-owned firms, significantly.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This study presents a new hybrid framework based on the multi-criteria decision making in order to rank the potential site layout locations by consideration of the cost and safety criteria in the Mehr Construction Project in Tehran, Iran. To this end, all of the criteria in selecting suitable potential locations are extracted from the research literature and the most effective ones, which are matched with existing conditions in Tehran are considered based on the opinion of experts,. Then, the proper locations for site layout are determined as the potential alternatives and ranked by experts based on the structure. According to the data collected from the questionnaires, the weights of the selected criteria are calculated using Best Worst Method (BWM) and the final ranking of the locations is performed using two Gray Relational Analysis and VIKOR methods. The computational results indicate that both VIKOR and GRA methods yield the same ranking. However, a method with higher reliability should be used to select the best potential location of construction site layout. Therefore, the sensitivity analysis of final outputs on the parameters existing in VIKOR and GRA methods is used in order to rank the alternatives and select the best approach. According to the computational results, the GRA method provides higher robustness compared with the VIKOR method. Accordingly, the ranking obtained from the GRA method is employed as the final solution in implementing the case study.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: Nowadays, Saudi government has established several strategic tactics such as Saudi Vision 2030 to predict the future of the country. In order to accomplish a superior growth in the economy of the country, mathematical model and forecasting techniques are important tools. In this study, total annual exports and imports of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are forecasted using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models. This paper tries to predict a time series data using ANN and ARIMA models on total annual exports and imports of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from the year 1968 to the year 2017 with the help of statistical software XLSTAT. The applied models are used to predict some future values of total annual exports and imports of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is found that the ANN and ARIMA (1, 1, 2) and ARIMA (0, 1, 1) models are suitable for predicting the total annual exports and imports of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: The current paper deals with incomplete Pairwise Comparisons (‘PWs’) when a large number of alternatives is evaluated. PWs are used to quantify decision maker's preferences, both ordinal and cardinal, in multi-criteria decision-making settings for eliciting the priorities of alternative options or weights of criteria. We use additive PWs with a different scale and show how 2-diagonal samples are used to deduce the implied weights thus prioritizing the alternatives. As a consequence, the number of PWs in incomplete judgment decision matrices is greatly reduced while preserving consistency and quality of the results. Computational results are provided and an example from the literature is applied to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: Road accidents as a global challenge, imposing irreparable financial and human life losses in almost all countries, especially in developing countries, annually. According to world health organization (WHO), if this trend continues, road accidents will become the 7th cause of human death by 2030. Thus, road safety policy makers have been trying to use safety promotion and preventative actions. In this paper, the road safety performance of Iranian provinces is studied. To evaluate road safety efficiency scores, data envelopment analysis based on road safety (DEA-RS) method in two deterministic and non-deterministic situations is used. To consider the uncertainty in input and output data, this paper develops credibility DEA-RS (CreDEA-RS) model. In fact, the constraints of DEA-RS model are considered as credibility constraints and a counterpart credibility DEA-RS (CreDEA-RS) model is proposed for evaluating road safety of provinces of Iran. According to the results, provinces located in mountainous and forest areas such as Gilan had a much weaker performance than provinces in desert areas such as Yazd.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: The main objective of the present study is to investigate the risk factors influencing on construction firm’s project success in Pakistan. The study uses the partial least square structural equation modelling technique to analyse the data collected from 61 construction firms. The study finds positive impacts of design risk, financial risk, technical risk and labour risk on the success of the project. Alternatively, the current study finds no relationship between external risk factors and the success of the project. Furthermore, the current study suggests government and construction firms to consider the risk factors during the decision making for project implementation.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This paper proposes a framework to develop a deterministic model for the valuation, selection and grading (ranking) of e-suppliers by using Modified Distance Based Approach (MDBA), which has not been used earlier in e-supplier selection. The e-supplier selection system performs a major part for the successful running of any supply chain. Thus, for effective running of any supply chain, it is necessary to build a system for the selection of e-supplier. Building such a decision support system software is important for the development of any decision support system efficiently with reduced cost, time and effort. The current research is based on 8 criteria and 52 sub-criteria by giving equal weightage to all of them. In this study, the major criteria are disintegrated into small sub-criteria. To validate the results obtained through the proposed distance based approximation method, the results are compared with other methodologies. Finally, with the illustration of the example problem, the applicability of the developed model is described.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: Correct application of the classical factorial F-test depends on normality and homogeneity of variance assumptions. If these assumptions are violated the type I error rate will be inflated and power of the test will be decreased. Therefore nonparametric statistical tests have been proposed to analyze the interaction effects in factorial designs. A simulation was conducted to investigate the effect of non-normality on type I error rate and power of the test of the classical factorial F-test and five nonparametric tests namely rank transformation (FR), Winsorized mean (FW), modifies mean (FM), adjusted rank transform (ART) and adjusted median transform (AMT) using program SAS 9.4 with 1,000 replications. The study used 2×2 factorial design with replications of 3, 4 and 6 making sample sizes of 12, 16, and 24, respectively and 3×3 factorial designs with replication of 3 making a sample size of 27 studied at 0.05 level of significance. As a results, when the normality of assumption is satisfied all six statistical tests have the ability to control type I error in all situations. The ART test cannot control type I error rate for 3×3 factorial design when sample size is 27 when normality assumption is violated. For power of the test, the F-test provided the highest test power when the normality of assumption is met. The ART and AMT tests provided approximately the same test power. The AMT and ART tests can be effectively used to analyse the interaction effect between factors A and B in 2×2 factorial design when the sample size is 12 and 16 or 24 respectively and the normality of assumption is not met. Moreover, the results showed that when sample sizes increased, all six statistical tests tended to increase the power of the test.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new distribution named the negative binomial-weighted Lindley. The study uses the maximum likelihood estimation to estimate the parameters of the proposed distribution and compares the performance of the new method with other distributions. The study finds that the negative binomial-weighted Lindley distribution, obtained by the mixing the negative binomial distribution with the weighted Lindley distribution is another mixed negative binomial distribution and may provide an appropriate fit for data estimation with overdispersion. Some characteristics of the proposed distribution, such as mean and variance are also derived.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This paper characterizes the routing problems arising in distribution of rice-for-the-poor in a district and presents a generic mathematical formulation of vehicle routing problems (VRP) for solving the problems. The proposed generic model, framed as a mixed integer linear programming, is formulated in such a way to encompass three distinct features; namely multiple depots (MD) establishment, multiple trips (MT) transportation, and split delivery (SD) mechanism. This model is implemented for a real-world problem of rice-for-the-poor distribution in the Ponorogo district of Indonesia, involved for deliveries among 3 depots—8, 17, and 23 villages depended on the distribution period—using a fleet of 5 vehicles of homogeneous capacity. Three types of distribution model are identified as MD-MT-VRP, MD-VRP-SD and MD-MT-VRP-SD.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: Data envelopment analysis models play an important role in decision making. In this paper, one-stage and two-stage nonlinear programming problems are investigated in order to evaluate the efficiency of two types of network data envelopment analysis model. The first type of network data envelopment analysis model has a series structure with three stages and a feedback between the last step and the middle step, the second model has a three-stage series structure with two feedback between the final step and the first step and the middle step. By examining the overall efficiency of the models based on the one-stage programming problem, a two-stage programming problem is also applied in order to evaluate the efficiency of each step. In order to solve one-stage nonlinear programming problems and two-stage linear and nonlinear programming problems derived from modeling, a linearization method based on coordinate transformation, and constant assumption and gradual growth of some variables is presented. In the last section, the proposed methods have been discussed using some numerical examples.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This paper presents a new penalty function called logarithmic penalty function (LPF) and examines the convergence of the proposed LPF method. Furthermore, the LaGrange multiplier for equality constrained optimization is derived based on the first-order necessary condition. The proposed LPF belongs to both categories: a classical penalty function and an exact penalty function, depending on the choice of penalty parameter. Moreover, the proposed LPF is capable of dealing with some of the problems with irregular features from Hock-Schittkowski collections of test problems.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Abstract: This paper proposes a framework for selecting energy storage technology (EST) for small-scale renewable energy systems. The present study was able to achieve this using the results that were generated from a Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) and a fuzzy quality function deployment (FQFD) model. Using the FQFD model, experts' opinions were incorporated into the framework during the evaluation of the techno-economic requirements importance for the selection process. The FQFD model considered system safety, availability, flexibility, reliability and effectiveness as customers’ requirements, while nominal voltage, nominal discharge current, peak measured voltage, operating cost and cost of energy were among the techno-economic requirements. During the framework application, a questionnaire was used to collect information from experts on the techno-economic requirements importance, while information on the techno-economic (eleven) requirements for four ESTs were obtained from literature. The FQFD model results were incorporated into a PROMETHEE and TOPSIS models. The PROMETHEE and the TOPSIS models identified Lithium-Ion EST as the best EST for small-scale renewable energy systems.

	© 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the license. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)