Sustainability in project operations such as financial, social and environmental sustainability is one of the most prominent issues of the present times to address. The increased focus on sus-tainable business operations has changed the viewpoint of researchers and corporate community towards the project management. Today sustainability in business operations along with sustain-ability of natural and environmental resources are of paramount significance which has further caused a huge impact on conception, planning, scheduling and execution of the project manage-ment activities. In this paper, a literature review between 1987 and 2018 on different issues af-fecting the sustainability in project management is carried out. The present study also identifies and discusses the future possibilities to apply computational procedures in order to estimate and optimize the sustainability issues in the management of projects, for example the computational evolutionary algorithms can be applied to formulate the multi-objective decision-making problem after considering critical factors of sustainability in the projects and then yielding optimized solu-tions for the formulated problem to achieve sustainability in the projects. A new integrated framework with the inclusion of feedback function for assessment of each decision and actions taken towards the sustainability of the projects is also identified and presented.

There are literally several studies accomplished to predict the fatigue life of leaf springs but estimation of fatigue life of a parabolic leaf spring by using CAE tools has not yet been executed in the past. Parabolic spring is an important component in a vehicle suspension system. It needs to have excellent fatigue life and in today’s scenario manufacturers rely on constant loading fatigue analysis. The objective of this work is to perform the fatigue analysis of parabolic leaf spring by three different methods where CAE analysis is performed to observe the distribution of stress fatigue life and damage using Goodman approach. In this work, fatigue life of the parabolic leaf spring is determined as per SAE spring design manual and experimentally by testing on full scale fatigue testing machine. ANSYS is used for CAE solution for the prediction of leaf springs fatigue life considering stress theory. The fatigue life estimated by all three modes is then compared for the purpose of validation. The methodology used in this paper brings a practical approach to the professionals in the industries who are engaged for design of mechanical components.

The present paper deals with the characterization of ion exchange resins Dowex 550A LC and Indion-930A based on kinetics of ion-isotopic exchange reactions for which the short lived radioactive isotopes 131I and 82Br were used as a tracers. The study was performed for different concentration of ionic solution varying from 0.001 mol/L to 0.004 mol/L and temperature in the range of 30.0 °C to 45.0 °C. The results indicate that as compared to bromide ion-isotopic exchange reaction, iodide exchange reaction take place at the faster rate. For both the ion-isotopic exchange reactions, under identical experimental conditions, the values of specific reaction rate increases with increase in the ionic concentration and decreases with rise in temperature. It was observed that at 35.00C, 1.000 g of ion exchange resins and 0.002 mol/L labeled iodide ion solution for iodide ion-isotopic exchange reaction, the values of specific reaction rate (min-1), amount of ion exchanged (mmol), initial rate of ion exchange (mmol/min) and log Kd were 0.270, 0.342, 0.092 and 11.8 respectively for Dowex 550A LC resin, which was higher than the respective values of 0.156, 0.241, 0.038 and 7.4 as that obtained for Indion-930A resins. From the results, it appears that Dowex 550A LC resins show superior performance over Indion-930A resins under identical experimental conditions.

This paper presents the free vibration analysis of stiffened isotropic plate by means of finite element method. Stiffeners are used in plates to increase the strength and stiffness. The effect of position of stiffeners on isotropic plate has been studied which involve the possible combination of clamped and free edge condition. The model has been discretized using a 20-node solid element (SOLID186) from the ANSYS element library. The natural frequencies are calculated using Block-Lanczos algorithm. The comparisons of stiffened plate with the available results are found to be in good uniformity. The effect of different boundary conditions, stiffeners location, thickness ratio, stiffener thickness to plate thickness and aspect ratio on the vibration analysis of stiffened plates has been studied.

Organized retailing (OZR) is one of the most promising industries in India. The OZR sector of India is now among the top five fastest growing markets of the world. High population, globalization, and the increasing income of middle class etc. are a number of factors that make Indian market more challenging and competitive. In today’s globalized world, effective supply chain performance (SCP) is highly important to ensure the productivity in the whole supply chain (SC). In this paper, we investigated the factors that affect cold supply chain performance (CSCP) of organized farm products retailing (OFPR), developed and validated a model. This research will be helpful to formulate better strategies for this sector to a greater extent; this model will also be useful and applicable for other developing Asian countries because of enormous similarities in their market tendencies.

In this paper, an integrated production-inventory model with multi-item is developed from the perspectives of single producer, multiple suppliers and retailers. In this three-layer supply chain, the retailers are non-competing. Every supplier delivers only single type of raw material to the producer. The producer manufactures finished goods from the combination of fixed percentage of different types of raw materials. The producer manufactures various types of objects and supplies them to retailers according to the demand of multiple retailers. This paper studies the impact of different types of business policies such as exponential demand rate, demand dependent production rate, optimum order size of raw materials, and unit production cost at each stage of integrated marketing system. Mathematica is used to develop the model and to optimize the integrated profit function. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis is illustrated to justify the feasibility of the proposed model.

This study investigates optimal pricing and inventory policies for non-instantaneous deteriorating items with permissible delay in payment. The demand rate is as known, continuous and differentiable function of price while holding cost rate, interest paid rate and interest earned rate are characterized as independent fuzzy variables rather than fuzzy numbers as in previous studies. Under these general assumptions, we first formulated a fuzzy expected value model (EVM) and then some useful theoretical results have been derived to characterize the optimal solutions. An efficient algorithm is designed to determine the optimal pricing and inventory policy for the proposed model. The algorithmic procedure is demonstrated by means of numerical examples.

Ti-6Al-4V Extra Low Interstitial (ELI) exhibits superior properties because of controlled interstitial element of iron and oxygen. The effects of four cutting parameters namely cutting speed, feed, depth of cut and tool nose radius on responses like cutting force, average cutting temperature and surface roughness have been investigated for turning of Ti-6Al-4V (ELI). Total 81 experiments have been performed in dry environment. Grey Relational Analysis has been used for multi-objective optimization. Analysis of Variance test has been carried out to investigate contribution of input parameters. The model was found fit with R-Square value of 88.74%. Regression and ANN models are developed for prediction and compared. From the Grey relational analysis, it is clear that optimum parameters to minimize cutting force, cutting temperature and surface roughness while turning Ti-6Al-4V (ELI), are cutting speed as 140 rpm, Nose radius 1.2mm, Feed 0.051mm/rev and depth of cut is 0.5mm. In comparison of regression model, the ANN model is found to be more accurate with average error of 3.57%.

Manpower planning using annualised hours is an effective tool where seasonal demand for staff in industry exists. In annualised hours (AH) workers are contracted to work for a certain number of hours per year. The workers are associated with relative efficiency for different types of tasks. This paper proposes a Mixed Integer linear Programming (MILP) model to solve an annualised working hours planning problem when spike in demand exists. The holiday weeks for the workers are considered as partially individualised. If a worker has been assigned with more than one type of working week in a week, this will be compensated with one or more holiday week. The performance of the model is demonstrated with an example. It can be seen that this type of modelling helps to meet the spikes in demand with less capacity shortage compared with one working week in a week.

Supply chain is a network of organizations that work together and performs various business functions such as procurement of raw materials, converting the raw material into semi-finished or finished goods and distributing the same to their ultimate customers. Presence of bullwhip effect in a supply chain is costly and degrades the performance of the supply chain. Reduction in bullwhip effect can improve the efficiency or profitability of a supply chain. The objective of this paper is to know the impact of imperfect Advance Demand Information (ADI) sharing on bullwhip effect in a four-stage serial supply chain and to evaluate the supply chain performance by conducting an experiment similar to the beer distribution game. The performance measures used are variance of orders placed by each stage, fill rate, total inventory at each stage and total holding cost of the supply chain. Results show that imperfect ADI improves the performance of the supply chain. The performance of the supply chain is also evaluated under order up to level (R, S) policy with safety stock and it is found that the performance of supply chain is better when inventory policy used.