In project management literature, the concept of program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually. This paper attempts to identify program critical success factors focusing on Iran’s construction industry so that the level of relative importance of various factors could be determined for key stakeholders. Furthermore, since a program includes a set of projects, another objective of this study is to find out whether the projects of program are accomplished, successfully or not. Therefore, to run this study, first literature of topic based on research keywords is reviewed. Then a conceptual model including all the aspects of program success factors is presented. Next, critical success factors are quantitatively analyzed by performing an empirical investigation on active organizations and firms of Iran’s construction industry. The study employs questionnaire and performs interview surveys with construction program professionals and experts. Finally, the critical success factors of program are sorted according to their ranks. The results show that program-related factors maintain the highest effects on program success followed by organization-related and project-related issues.

Process of handling equipment selection is one of the most important and basic parts in the project planning, particularly mining projects due to holding a high charge of the total project & apos; s cost. Different criteria impact on the handling equipment selection, while these criteria often are in conflicting with each other. Therefore, the process of handling equipment selection is a complex and multi criteria decision making problem. There are a variety of methods for selecting the most appropriate equipment among a set of alternatives. Likewise, according to the sophisticated structure of the problem, imprecise data, less of information, and inherent uncertainty, the usage of the fuzzy sets can be useful. In this study a new integrated model based on fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) is proposed, which uses group decision making to reduce individual errors. In order to calculate the weights of the evaluation criteria, FAHP is utilized in the process of handling equipment selection, and then these weights are inserted to the FTOPSIS computations to select the most appropriate handling system among a pool of alternatives. The results of this study demonstrate the potential application and effectiveness of the proposed model, which can be applied to different types of sophisticated problems in real problems.

Pipelines systems are identified to be the safest way of transporting oil and natural gas. One of the most important aspects in developing pipeline systems is determining the potential risks that implementers may encounter. Therefore, risk analysis can determine critical risk items to allocate the limited resources and time. Risk Analysis and Management for Critical Asset Protection (RAMCAP) is one of the best methodologies for assessing the security risks. However, the most challenging problem in this method is uncertainty. Therefore, fuzzy set theory is used to model the uncertainty. Thus, Fuzzy RAMCAP is introduced in order to risk analysis and management for pipeline systems. Finally, a notional example from pipeline systems is provided to demonstrate an application of the proposed methodology.