Sharif Digital Repository

This paper addresses a bi-level mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for the competitive facility location problem in a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC), in which a firm (i.e., leader) aims at entering a market by locating new distribution and collection facilities, where a competitor (i.e., follower) already exists. The goal is to find the location and attractiveness of each facility going to be established by the leader who seeks to maximize its profit while also taking the follower's response into account. The attractiveness of each facility is a function of integer variables related to the facility's characteristics. Customer behavior is considered to be probabilistic based... 

Supply chain management (SCM) deals with various strategic, tactical, and operational level decisions in which pricing is of utmost importance to decision makers. Most of the real-life supply chain pricing problems consider competition as a crucial factor in order to expand the market share and tackle emerging competitors. Accordingly, competitive pricing in SCM has attracted great attention by practitioners and academicians in the last four decades. Now after 40 years, it seems necessary to systematically review and classify the previous studies and present the most appealing future research directions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art published papers in... 

Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a coinfection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a coevolutionary model where the simultaneous spreading is described by a two-pathogen susceptible-infected-recovered model in an either synergistic or competitive manner. At the end of each epidemic season, the pathogens species reproduce according to their fitness that, in turn, depends on the payoff accumulated during the spreading season in a hawk-and-dove game. This coevolutionary model displays a rich set of features. Specifically, the evolution of the pathogens' strategy induces abrupt... 

Given the various advantages of electric vehicles compared to conventional gasoline vehicles in terms of energy efficiency and environmental pollution (among others), this paper studies the factors affecting customers’ willingness to purchase electric vehicles. An integrated discrete choice and agent-based approach is applied to model the customers’ choice for the valuation of electric vehicles based on the internal reference price. The agent-based model evaluates customers’ preferences for a number of personal and vehicle attributes, according to which vehicle they chose. Data from 376 respondents are collected to estimate a random-parameter logit model where customers are asked to reveal... 

Fractional flow reserve (FFR)-based decision improves the outcomes of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for some patients, while its effectiveness in improving the results of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) is unclear, in particular for moderate stenosis. It may be due to the fact that FFR cannot take into account the impacts of competitive flow (CF), intimal hyperplasia (IH), as well as compliance mismatch (CMM). As a result, two questions arise 1) whether FFR is a sufficient factor to decide to perform the CABG for patients with moderate to severe stenosis or not and 2) whether post-operative FFR shows the effectiveness of a graft. To shed light on this matter, two... 

The current study describes design and synthesis of silica-coated zinc oxide nanoparticles containing Ponceau 4R food colorant (named as ZnO@SiO2@APTMS/P4R). The interactions of Ponceau 4R and ZnO@SiO2@APTMS/P4R with calf thymus-DNA were investigated It should be noted that the competitive binding experiment revealed that both Ponceau 4R and ZnO@SiO2@APTMS/P4R could release Hoechst 33258. As inferred from the results the binding of the Ponceau 4R and ZnO@SiO2@APTMS/P4R with DNA were surface binding, mainly due to groove binding. Furthermore, antibacterial properties of ZnO, Ponceau 4R and ZnO@SiO2@APTMS/P4R samples against gram-positive bacteria and gram-negative bacteria were examined and... 

The production with high quality at the lowest production time can be a key means to success in the competitive environment of manufacturing companies. Therefore, in recent years, the need for extra precise and high-speed machine tools has been impressively increased in manufacturing applications. One of the main sources of errors in the motion of high-speed spindles is the occurrence of non-repetitive runouts (NRRO) in the bearing. The NRRO can be caused by some factors such as the form of balls, the waviness of rings, the number of balls, and the permutation of one or two balls in the ball bearing. In this paper, a Taguchi-based approach is proposed for the optimal design of high-speed... 

The concept of energy hub has been used recently to study multi-carrier energy systems. A model has been proposed in this paper for planning multi-hub energy system considering the competition between the hubs. The energy hubs are interconnected by a power grid. Hubs supply the demands for heat and electricity using various technologies and access to several energy carriers. To this aim, load zones were used to incorporate demand profiles for both heat and electricity in the different seasons of the year. Supplying the demand most cost-effectively is the objective function of each hub. These hubs select the optimum strategy separately in a competitive space. The power grid is owned by... 

Energy hub concept has been emerged as a suitable tool to analyze multi-carrier energy systems. Deregulation and increasing competition in the energy industry have provided a suitable platform for developing the multi-agent energy systems. Planning of energy hubs considering the competition between the hubs has not been sufficiently addressed, yet. A model has been proposed in this study for planning of a multi-hub energy system considering the competition between the hubs. The hubs are interconnected via an electric transmission system. A linear model has been developed to determine the optimal planning/operation strategy for energy hubs in a multi-period planning horizon to meet the heat... 

We study the problem of fair allocation for indivisible goods. We use the maximin share paradigm introduced by Budish [Budish E (2011) The combinatorial assignment problem: Approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes. J. Political Econom. 119(6):1061-1103.] as a measure of fairness. Kurokawa et al. [Kurokawa D, Procaccia AD, Wang J (2018) Fair enough: Guaranteeing approximate maximin shares. J. ACM 65(2):8.] were the first to investigate this fundamental problem in the additive setting. They showed that in delicately constructed examples, not everyone can obtain a utility of at least her maximin value. They mitigated this impossibility result with a beautiful observation: no... 

Maximizing the value of resources and producing less waste are strategic decisions affecting sustainability and competitive advantage. Sustainable closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) are designed to minimize waste by circling back (repairing, reselling, or dismantling for parts) previously discarded products into the value chain. This study presents a novel two-stage fuzzy supplier selection and order allocation model in a CLSC. In Stage 1, we use the fuzzy best-worst method (BWM) to select the most suitable suppliers according to economic, environmental, social, and circular criteria. In Stage 2, we use a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MOMILP) model to design a... 

In the post-recession period, the business environment in developing countries is still relatively undesirable. Based on the reports published, the number of closed entrepreneurs are significantly more than the number of those newly established. These statistics also reflect that the development of entrepreneurship faces several challenges. However, a strategic management program must be accurately conducted to effectively control entrepreneurial challenges based on the limitation of time and financial resources. On the other hand, the program should provide an appropriate opportunity for competitiveness by producing better quality goods and services successfully marketed to consumers. The... 

Identifying the factors affecting profitability is important from the perspective of market players. One of the most important benchmarks of firm performance is accounting profit and effective factors analysis so that users of accounting information analyse the factors affecting profit, firm performance and various aspects of its performance and according to estimates Done, make your own decision on how to allocate resources. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some factors of competitiveness, entrepreneurship and business environment indicators on the profitability of the world’s top companies. For this purpose, 176 top companies in the world from 2013 to 2018... 

The capital intensive network industries such as electricity and gas delivery infrastructures exhibit natural monopoly characteristics because of their high economy of scale relative to the size of the market. Due to the absence of direct competition in these regulated industries, infrastructure providers hardly undertake the appropriate level of innovation activities to optimise the operation and continuity of their services; a review is provided to show how different countries support innovation in the network industries. As innovation activities are costly and risky undertakings, a relevant query is how to incentivise innovation through economic regulations. This paper models three... 

This paper proposes a novel 3D action recognition technique that uses time-series information extracted from depth image sequences for use in systems of human daily activity monitoring. To this end, each action is represented as a multi-dimensional time series, where each dimension represents the position variation of one skeleton joint over time. The time series is then mapped onto a vector space using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance. Furthermore, to employ the correlation-distinctiveness relationship of the sequences in recognition, this vector space is remapped onto a discriminative space using the regularized Fisher method, where final decisions about the actions are made. Unlike... 

We formulate an integrated mathematical model for distribution of the injured on a three-type transportation network with destroyable independent links and with actual travel times considering two different groups of the injured. The aim is to find the temporary locations for aid stations and their capacities, the percentage of the injured with various severities allocated to each station and to different routes and the number of vehicles so that the total relief time is minimized. For this, we present a new approach, called circle-based approach, in which the effects of the disaster are considered as a number of concentric circular regions. The original problem is formulated as an integer... 

The purpose of this paper is to present a mixed-integer linear programming model for the scheduling problem in an open-shop manufacturing system involving reverse flows, where two job flows (direct and reverse) in two opposite directions are processed on the same machines. The aim is to minimize the maximum completion time of all jobs on all machines (i.e., the makespan). A numerical example is presented and solved using the GAMS software (version 25.1.2) to validate the proposed mathematical model. As this problem is NP-hard, a vibration damping-based optimization (VDO) algorithm is proposed to solve large-scale problems in reasonable execution times. Besides, the Taguchi experimental... 

The purpose of this paper is to present a mixed-integer linear programming model for the scheduling problem in an open-shop manufacturing system involving reverse flows, where two job flows (direct and reverse) in two opposite directions are processed on the same machines. The aim is to minimize the maximum completion time of all jobs on all machines (i.e., the makespan). A numerical example is presented and solved using the GAMS software (version 25.1.2) to validate the proposed mathematical model. As this problem is NP-hard, a vibration damping-based optimization (VDO) algorithm is proposed to solve large-scale problems in reasonable execution times. Besides, the Taguchi experimental... 

Passenger cars (PCs) not only are a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Iran but also pose severe energy security challenges due to their dependence on gasoline. This study aimed to understand the future trends of the gasoline demand and GHG emissions from PCs in Iran and assess the effectiveness of mitigation policies. The data were collected from multiple sources and used to develop the survival rate function of PCs. The study used back-calculation to compensate for the short period of stock data availability. The use intensity of PCs was estimated based on the gasoline consumption statistics. Econometric models were developed to project the future PC stock and use... 

In recent years, economic globalisation and manufacturing resource globalisation as two key factors have driven enterprises to transform their business processes to survive in competitive environments. This transformation is challenging as manufacturing enterprises should maintain their support for their customers with high-quality products, lower cost, product customisation capabilities, and quick delivery. Moreover, globalisation has resulted in geographically distributed suppliers across the globe. This challenge will turn into a major research topic when paradigms like Cloud manufacturing are introduced. Cloud manufacturing is a new paradigm which provides ubiquitous, convenient,...