Sharif Digital Repository

Business intelligence is a set of theories, methods, processes and technologies that are used to obtain useful and meaningful information. Due to the inclusion of different and various products, chain stores have to manage a lot of data, which is different from the retail and company data in terms of number and variety. in this regard business intelligence has to be used for making decisions. The catch is felt in different parts of the chain stores. The main purpose of this study is to provide a model to investigate the impact of using business intelligence on Ofogh Kourosh chain stores. Research variables were extracted using literature review on the impact of business intelligence on chain... 

A hierarchical production system in make-to-order environment is presented in this thesis. This production system is consisted of three different decision making levels. Maximum acceptance for production within customer specified time interval was done in the first stage, which is called order arriving stage, based on different client criteria, type of demanded product, and production system constraints. A new hierarchical decision making structure for accepting or rejecting arriving orders is proposed in this level. The output of this acceptance level is orders having maximum production system defined criteria, and minimum production cost along with order delivery time with minimum delay is... 

In recent years in assembly line balancing area many researchers have focused on identifying and modeling real world situations in assembly lines in order to obtain more suitable model. As a result many generalized models have been developed in assembly line balancing area. However, designing efficient algorithms to solve these generalized problems has just begun. In this study it is aimed to design efficient algorithms to solve one of these generalized problems. Specificcally two hybrid genetic algorithms (GA) are proposed to solve assembly line balancing problem with sequence dependent setup times. Scheduling of tasks in the stations has been less considered in the literature of assembly... 

In Computer-Aided Process Planning, there are two ways of manufacturing called Variant Manufacturing and Generative Manufacturing. Variant Manufacturing is based on a data base from a part family for a project. The part family is made in a series of root sheets regarding the final form of the intended part. The data base is updated after the manufacturing of each part. In order to make the system intelligent, one can use the OPITZ coding system that specifies the geometrical form, geometrical details and part manufacturing operations in a 13-digit number. The aim of this research is to choose the best machining parameters according to time and cost, that, based on the basic principles of... 

Knowledge markets where knowledge transactions take place are today see increasingly expansion by influences of the Internet and the importance of knowledge. A competitive space, thus, has been placed among different enterprises step in knowledge markets. With no exception to this general rule, one of these markets covers online question – answer knowledge market. Google Answers is a proposed website in this area which, although being of interest in recent decades, its activities ended in 2006 for several reasons. Significantly, these markets consist of many factors with interrelated effects on each other and this leads to complexity of systems. Therefore, in order to study these markets, it... 

In the proposed model, it is attempted to obtain the optimum cost of activities concerning their relevant risks. I n doing so, the concept of risk based project value (RPV) has been employed to measure the expected earn of each individual activity in the presence of risks. Generally, in the model, the risks are divided into critical and non-critical risks. Critical risks cause termination of activities and non-critical risks that are not as severe as critical risks and lead to monetary lost. In the next step, the risk response plans are utilized to reduce the possible adverse effects of risks. These plans, also known as action plans, are the preventive or adaptive actions that aim to reduce... 

In this thesis, project portfolio selection under uncertainty conditions is considered. Firstly, the problem is modeled with mathematical programming and also this problem has two objective functions that contain maximizing profitability and minimizing surplus resources. Each project has resource costs and contract prices. In addition, uncertainties for these parameters should be considered. Secondly, another innovation in this research is considering Cost/Time trade-off for duration and cost. To satisfy this subject, each project has different scenarios with various duration and usage of resources. Since the project has two objective functions, ε-constraint method is applied to optimizing... 

In the field of supply chain, management constantly seeks to adopt strategies for realizing its targeted objectives. The supply chain, therefore, includes integrated production-distribution processes with all effective parts where proper management requires a comprehensive and dynamic approach. It is necessary to meet required items at required time. This becomes more important with the supply systems providing items. On the other hand, the difficulty of supply chain management, decisions, and policy-making can be increased by a wide range of conditions such as changes in demand. Thus, a comprehensive approach is needed to take the present dynamics into account. The current paper develops a... 

In this thesis a two-tier supply chain containing an upstream supplier and a downstream producer have been modeled. This model presents a replicator interaction in supply chain. In this model supplier has to choose between two different production strategies which provide two types of output-quality. It is obvious the method with better output-quality has more production cost and the one with lower output-quality has lower production cost. The strategy of producer is to choose whether test the production before process it in production line or not. By the tool of evolutionary game theory trends of changing in players' strategies have been modeled and Nash equilibrium points and the types of... 

Due date assignment for customer orders has been studied in various production environments. In this thesis a production system is considered in which the orders of several customers are produced in a single lot because of the economy of scale. If a lot is completed before receiving customer orders, inventory carrying cost is incurred. On shortages, a due date is quoted to customers and lead time quotation cost is incurred. The due date may not be met because of (lead-time) uncertainty in production system. Hence if the order is delivered after its due date, tardiness cost is charged. The literature reviews show that such a model is not considered by other researchers. Two different problems... 

Optimal investment strategies are often derived in continuous time models, but have to be implemented in discrete time. It has been shown that in models with stochastic volatility or jumps; this could lead to significant utility loss, for an investor who utilizes ‘Derivatives’ in his/her portfolio. In this study, we determine the optimal investment strategies with discrete trading explicitly taken into account, through ‘Stochastic Dynamic Programming’. These strategies are in the form of optimal factor exposures for portfolio. The investor, then, needs to use sufficient non-redundant Derivatives in addition to the ‘Stock’ to gain the desired exposures in each point of state space he meet.... 

In this thesis, a multi-stage project portfolio selection and scheduling problem in an uncertain environment is modeled, analyzed and solved. Moreover, we investigate the situations in which a project manager is confronted to a large number of projects to be selected and scheduled while the required resources of the projects are limited and renewable. The aim is to maximize objective function which is the net present value of the profit of the projects. To solve the mentioned problem, we introduce a multi-stage stochastic programming. For the reason that, in real problems, optimization problems that included all restraints are large scale and have computational complexity, these problems are... 

Supply chain problems consist of a large number of issues. One of the key problem in this area is supplier selection in supply chain. Several criteria must be considered in the supplier selection. So, multi criteria decision making approach, neural network, mathematical programming and etc. are used for solving this problems. In most of these problems, supplier selection is done according to the buyer’s objectives.
So far, several methods are provided for supplier selection problem. In majority of them, supplier selection problem is surveyed from buyer’s viewpoint and in those have only been considered the buyer’s benefit maximization that will not necessarily lead to optimal condition... 

In this thesis departure programming are studied in general state and takeoff programming studied in special state. Departure programming consists of several parts that decisions for each part may influence in the other parts. Because of unforeseen delays this problem is a dynamic problem. Holding area is a part that overtaking operations performance before takeoff. An initial sequence obtained from ground controller. A heuristic algorithm that used in this thesis is a hybrid of constraint satisfaction and dynamic programming for minimizing sum of the total delays. The performance of the heuristic algorithm is compared with tabu search algorithm. The result shows that the proposed algorithm... 

In today’s global marketplace, individual firms no longer compete as independent entity in market, but rather as integral part of supply chain. Therefore, final success of company completely depends on its managerial ability to coordinate the network of business relationships among supply chain parts. In strategy research, the importance of supply chain strategic management concepts has long been discussed and recognized to hold the potential to lead to business success. Due to complex nature of business environment, managers need to use a integrated decision structure supporting all variables and their interactions. To identify an supply chain base organization’s strategy this study... 

This study frames optimal policies for determining price , warranty length and Advertisement rate when free replacement of defective items is the business policy and the demand is dependent on price, warranty, advertisement and cumulative sales for high-tech products which have functional aspects. We apply optimal control theory to a profit-maximization model that takes into consideration the expected warranty cost per item. The maximization of market values is based upon a pre-determined life cycle and spans across both expansion and saturation phases of the market. We further investigate the optimal policies for an exponential lifetime distribution, when the demand function is set by... 

The problem of stock price direction prediction is of great value among investors and researchers in the past decades. Even the smallest improvement in the performance of forecasting methods can lead to noticeable profit for investors. In this regard, in this research, a new method for filling the literature gap in the field of stock price direction forecasting is proposed. In the proposed method, two concepts of dynamics and model selection in dealing with data is investigated. Finally a predictive model is developed according to the two abovementioned concepts. Moreover, in this work, using a meta-learning approach one step towards making the prediction process automatic is taken. The... 

Due to the significance of exchange rates in economic policy making, different patterns have been proposed so as to explain the behavior, provide ways to model and deliver tools to forecast different exchange rates. Using a novel approach, this thesis tries to investigate the behavior of exchange rates by identifying time series nature of exchange rates, and performing nonlinear test for daily data between years 2003 to2006. In this study, we try to model and forecast the daily exchange rates by the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). We also compare the results with ARIMA model outputs based on measures for forecasting accuracy. 80 percent of the daily data, that is, 1160 days from... 

Health care systems are among most important service centers in every society because they directly deal with human's life. Among manifold different kinds of health care systems, emergency services are the most significant ones. Increasing costs of the system is the most important problem of emergency services all over the world. These high costs have resulted in low quality of the service. So, proposing an effective plan for decreasing the costs is severely needed.
In this research, initially a long term and strategic plan is offered for emergency capacity in a determined period of time. In this plan, total costs of system including capacity as well as waiting time of patients are... 

Businesses need to narrow down their segmentation and divide customers into smaller groups because some low-loyalty customers have the potential to become loyal customers. Therefore, we have focused on non-loyal customers. This study proposes a framework in which customers with low loyalty value are examined in four six-month time periods and an overall two-year time period and divided into smaller periods. First, a clustering was performed with K-Means algorithm and RFM model, then the migration pattern of customers from one cluster to another was identified using the sequential pattern technique. The transition of customers and their potentiality was determined and according to these...