Sharif Digital Repository

We study the kidney market in Iran. The most effective treatment for end-stage renal disease is a kidney transplant. While the supply of cadaveric kidneys is limited, the debate has been focused on the effects of the existence of a free market for human organs. Economists as well as medical and legal researchers are divided over the issue. Iran has a unique kidney market which has been in place for over 20 years, frequently reporting surprising success in reducing the waiting list for kidneys. This paper demonstrates how the Iranian system works  

CMMI is a unified model for software and system engineering in organizations. The initial CMM has been designed for software development. According to its successes, different models were developed by different groups such as: SECM, SACMM, IPDCMM, and FAAICMM. CMM Integration was introduced due to some problems such as lack of uniformity, overlapping, and incompatibility of mentioned models. Current paper is a research on CMMI, especially on configuration management process. We believe that accepting all change requests lead to ad-hoc versions and rejecting them lead to customer dissatisfaction. Therefore a Change-Request buffer is needed in configuration management process based on CMMI... 

Decision making is the process of finding the best option among the feasible alternatives. In classical multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods, the ratings and the weights of the criteria are known precisely. Owning to vagueness of the decision data, the crisp data are inadequate for real-life situations. Since human judgments including preferences are often vague and cannot be expressed by exact numerical values, the application of fuzzy concepts in decision making is deemed to be relevant. Here, we apply a new distance formula to compute the standard deviation of fuzzy data to achieve crisp data by normalization. There is a flexibility to consider various fuzzy values as... 

"Product" and "process" are two mutually orthogonal and important aspects of software. As Part 1 discusses "product", Part 2 discusses "process". "Process" is independent of "product" and is used commonly by various "producers". This paper first explains the structure of "process" and then introduces important technique by "divide and conquer". Various important management issues are discussed  

The classical economic production quantity (EPQ) model is a well-known and commonly used inventory control technique. A common assumption in the EPQ model is that all units produced are of perfect quality, since in practice non-conforming product or scrap items are possible, this assumption will underestimate the actual required quantity. The objective of this paper is to provide a framework to integrate product of imperfect quality items, inspection errors, rework and scrap items into a single EPQ model. To achieve this objective a suitable mathematical model is defined and the optimal production lot size which minimizes the total cost is obtained  

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a well-known metaheuristic in which a colony of artificial ants cooperate in exploring good solutions to a combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, an ACO algorithm is presented for the graph coloring problem. This ACO algorithm conforms to max-min ant system structure and exploits a local search heuristic to improve its performance. Experimental results on DIMACS test instances show improvements over existing ACO algorithms of the graph coloring problem  

Photoplethysmography is a non-invasive method which is suitable to estimate vascular compliance. Photoplethysmogram (PPG) waveform has been used to evaluate vascular characteristic changes due to exercise. Quantification of the primary and secondary peak position is of interest as a potential objective, individualized measure of the level of exercise that a subject has achieved with respect to a baseline status, prior to the beginning of the exercise session. The modified bicycle ergonomic protocol was selected for this experiment. Two different signal processing methods were employed in processing the PPG waveform to characterize its changes through a single parameter. Both, the visual... 

In this paper, we investigate the simultaneous coordination of price and capacity building decision in a dyadic supply chain which is in the context of capacity reservation problem. While the coordination in this context with stochastic demand and fixed price has been received much attention in the literature, but the price-dependent and stochastic demand has been less considered. There is a price-setting buyer which faces a linear decreasing demand with respect to price. To capture the uncertainty nature of the demand we add a stochastic variable to the demand function. In addition, we incorporate production time and inventory cost in supplier side. We study the model in both additive and... 

In this paper a lower bounding method for the flowshop sequence dependentgroups scheduling problems by minimization of makespan criterion (Fm|fmls, Sijkprmu|Cmax) is proposed. Theperformance of the proposed lower bound (LB) is compared with the availablelower bounding methods in literature. In order to do this, the performance ofthe proposed LB and the one available in literature are compared with theavailable upper bound in literature based on solving the available testproblems. The results show that the proposed LB has a superior performancecompared to the available ones in literature. The average percentage error ofthe proposed LB for the test problems is 1.1% and 1.4% for three and six... 

The purpose of this paper is to adopt and analyze a new ordering policycalled one-for-one-period policy in a multi-echelon supply chain consisting ofone retailer and a series of TV suppliers. The main advantage of adopting theone-for-one-period (7,7) ordering policy for retailers is the elimination ofuncertainty for supplier which leads to total elimination of the safety stocksat all suppliers. This in turn leads to the reduction of the total system costsand in case any supplier's ordering cost is negligible it can even eliminate theneed for him to carry any inventory. In addition to this advantage, thenumerical results show that the application of this new policy for the retailerleads to... 

This research effort attempts to investigate the conditions under whichbetter variance reduction can be achieved in simulation of a system where randomdeviates are generated by the acceptance-rejection technique. To inducecorrelation among the generated deviates, both antithetic and stratifiedsampling will be considered to study the magnitude of variance reduction inestimating the renewal function for a single component replacement process withGamma distributed life. The negative exponential and the Cheng envelopingfunctions will be considered and all four combinations of correlationinduction-enveloping function will be tested. We will propose the correctapproach in incorporating streams of... 

This study presented a qualitative and quantitative project risk assessment using a hybrid PMBOK model developed under uncertainty conditions. Accordingly, an exploratory and applied research design was employed in this study. The research sample included 15 experienced staff working in main and related positions in Neyr Perse Company. After reviewing the literature and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), 32 risk factors were identified and their number reduced to 17 risks using the expert opinions via the fuzzy Delphi technique run through three stages. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis showed that all risks were confirmed by the members of the research sample.... 

We consider a single item, two-level inventory system which consisting of two suppliers and one retailer. Transportation times are constant. The retailer faces Poisson demands and applies continuous (R,Q) policy. Each supplier starts with m initial batches of size Q/2 and places an order in a batch of size Q/2 to an outside source immediately after the retailer's inventory position reaches R+s. In this paper using the idea of the one-for-one ordering policy, we derive the exact value of the expected total cost in the convergent coordinated supply chain. © 2008 IEEE  

Weibull distributions play an important role in reliability studies and have many applications in engineering. It normally appears in the statistical scripts as having two parameters, making it easy to estimate its parameters. However, once you go beyond the two parameter distribution, things become complicated. For example, estimating the parameters of a three-parameter Weibull distribution has historically been a complicated and sometimes contentious line of research since classical estimation procedures such as Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) have become almost too complicated to implement. In this paper, we will discuss an approach that takes advantage of Artificial Neural Networks... 

Repetitive decomposing of the objective concept hierarchically, developed for design involves a human intentional activity, ranging from management to physical works. This model proved the empirical rules in Industrial Engineering. In addition to these "design" process characteristics, the "test" process is found to be a defect attenuating process with the attenuation rate of its error rate of the second kind. As these are applicable to any software process, they are very useful  

In order to monitor auto-correlated processes, many kinds of model-free control charts have been recently proposed based on the methods used in simulation output analysis. However, these control charts always have a restricting assumption that a large volume of observations is available while defects within them are scarce (zero-defect or high-quality processes). In this paper, we develop a new type of model-free unweighted batch means control charts, called grouped batch means (GBM) to monitor autocorrelated processes. In addition to its better performance in some cases, the GBM control chart can be applied not only to high-quality processes but also to all kinds of auto-correlated... 

In this paper we consider a dyadic supply chain consisting of one warehouse and one retailer with an unequal order batch size and information exchange. Transportation times are constant and retailer faces independent Poisson demand. The retailer applies continuous review (R,Q)-policy. The supplier starts with m initial batches (of size Q), and places an order in a batch of size nQ to an outside source immediately after the retailer's inventory position reaches R+s. In this paper using the idea of the onefor- one ordering policy we obtain the exact value of the expected system costs  

In this paper we consider a dyadic supply chain consisting of one warehouse and one retailer with information exchange. We assume that the demand process to the retailer is a Poisson process and transportation times are constant. The retailer applies continuous review (R,Q)-policy. When the retailer's inventory position reaches R+s she sends information about her customer demand and inventory activities to the supplier. The supplier receives this information after a constant time lag. The supplier starts with m initial batches (of size Q), and places an order in a batch of size Q to an outside source immediately after receiving the information from the retailer. In this paper using the idea... 

This paper considers economic batch quantity (EBQ) in a single machine system in which defective items are produced and are all reworked in the same cycle. In the literature of inventory control, when the rework is done in the same cycle, the setup times are not considered; the rework process starts immediately after each production run, and the waiting of defectives for rework is ignored. Considering these points we assume non-zero setup times for rework, delayed rework in the same cycle, and the cost of waiting, to obtain the EBQ for two different cases  

Recently, several high-order accurate methods have been developed for solving nonlinear equations governing in the high-frequency oscillations of a fluid column. If we assume that the value of Reynolds and Prandtl numbers are high enough then it is possible to neglect the effect of Stokes Layer and it has been previously shown that the calculated pressure profile obtained by solving three-dimensional axisymmetric compressible NS (Navier-Stokes) equations is in good agreement with one-dimensional adiabatic model of Ilinskii. For this particular flow which is the typical of engineering flows inside acoustical compressors, it is clear that high-resolution simulation of NS equations in higher...