The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of crumb rubber and Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene (SBS) on rutting potential of porous asphalt mixtures. Optimal binder content of control mix, 5% SBS, and mixtures containing 10%, 15%, and 20% of crumb rubber were determined using Cantabro Loss test. Dynamic creep, wheel tracking, draindown, and falling-head permeability tests were then carried out on specimens to examine rutting resistance, resistant to draindown, and permeability. SBS modified and 10% rubberized asphalt satisfied all the requirements of porous asphalt design criteria. They also have similar rutting performance, permeability. Except for rutting performance, 10% rubberized asphalt has the best performance. Instead, asphalt mixture containing 20% crumb rubber was the most mixture against rutting resistance.

Knowledge management is frequently identified as an important antecedent of innovation. However, few empirical studies have specifically addressed antecedents and consequences of effective knowledge management. Today, domestic organizations are compelled, as well as other international organizations and have to compete to stay in business environment. Hence, they must be innovative. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of knowledge management on employee's innovation in organizations through empowerment as a mediator for a case study of the Agricultural Bank of Qazvin province of Iran. Required information was gathered by a self-made questionnaire adapted and based on conceptual model adapted from previous studies. The population of this study consists of 369 employees of the Agricultural Bank of Qazvin. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed, in which 188 valid questionnaires were collected. These questionnaires were distributed randomly among the male and female employees in branches of Agricultural Bank. The questionnaire is conducted by factor analysis and the reliability is measured by Cronbach's alpha. The structural equation modeling is used for data analysis. The results reveal the fact that empowerment will lead to employee's innovation. However, other variables did not have any significant and direct or indirect effect on employee's innovation.

To date, the use of three key aspects together has received little attention in studies on sustainable business models (SBMs). These aspects are a) the qualitative design of SBMs based on a valid sustainable business model canvas presented so far, b) the dynamic quantitative analysis of the designed SBMs, and c) the identification of appropriate business policies for different future scenarios, not just for one. Therefore, in this research, an attempt is made to study all three aspects by proposing a new practical framework based on one of the latest SBMs, called value triangular business model canvas (VTBMC), and system dynamics. To evaluate the proposed framework in the real world, it was implemented as a case study in Farassan Industrial and Manufacturing Company, one of the companies producing composite pipes. The results showed that the proposed framework helps business owners and managers identify the proper policies to achieve their key business objectives in the future under critical uncertainties and also create appropriate balanced values for a wide range of stakeholders, rather than just for shareholders.

Supply chain management in oil and gas industry plays an important role for the success of these companies in most countries. A reliable supply chain helps on time delivery of goods and services and leads to better performance of the firms and yields higher profitability. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of different oil distribution companies in Iran. The proposed study uses a five-stage Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) technique to measure the relative efficiencies of 40 distribution oil companies. The study designs a questionnaire based on four balanced scorecard perspectives and distributes it among various experts who were familiar with supply chain issues. The results indicate that the network performed relatively efficient since the study did not detect any unit with low performance and most of them maintained relatively high scores.

In this paper, an exploration investigation is presented to determine entrepreneurial marketing factors influencing on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are active in Iranian food industry. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 27 questions in Likert scale and distributes it among 249 experts who were involved in in food industry. KMO Bartlett test Sphericity and Cronbach alpha are 0.811 and 0.892, respectively. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined five factors including innovative approach, flexible marketing, customer, product strategy and resources, which are influencing the most on entrepreneurial marketing factors.

In this paper, a supply chain inventory model is developed in inflationary environment by incorporating some realistic features such as ramp type demand, deterioration, partial backlogging, inflation, and trade credit. Here, rate of deterioration is linear and partial backlogging rate is variable and dependent on the waiting time for the next replenishment. Depending on the trade credit period, three different situations arise. For each model the optimal replenishment policy is determined. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed inventory model and sensitivity analyses of optimal solutions are given for each case of trapezoidal demand function.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of retail brand on organizational competitiveness. The study has accomplished among 247 randomly selected retail stores located in city of Tehran, Iran. We have designed a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributed the questionnaires among some managers of retail stores. Bartlett KMO and Cronbach alpha have been calculated as 0.7 and 0.863, respectively, which are within the desirable levels. Using principal component analysis, the study has detected five factors influencing on organizational competitiveness including effective brand, distribution management, customer strategy, retail location and competitive tools. The highest value belongs to retail location (B = 1.196) followed by distribution management (B = 0.825), effective brand (B = 0.47) and competitive tools (B = 0.470).

In the past, different methods for asset depreciation have been defined but most of these procedures deal with certain parameters and inputs. The availability of certain parameters in many real world situations is difficult and sometimes impossible. The primary objective of this paper is to obtain methods for calculating depreciation where some of the defined parameters are under uncertainty. Hence, by using the fuzzy science basics, extension principle and ?-cut technique, we rewrite some classic methods for calculating depreciation in fuzzy form. Then, for comparing the methods of fuzzy depreciation under uncertain conditions by using the formula of calculating the Fuzzy Present worth (FPW), the Present worth of Tax saving (PWTS) of any aforementioned methods has been obtained. Finally, since the amount of tax savings achieved for each of the methods is a fuzzy number, one of the fuzzy prioritization methods is used in order to select the best depreciation technique.

Over time, the number of unexpected earthy, oceanic and atmospheric events is rising each year. Hence, disaster management is considered as one of the most important scientific and practical issues in developed and developing countries. Therefore, in this study, we review and develop the problem of locating the emergency units with constraints including the number of available ambulances, limited budget for deployment of ambulances and the minimum acceptable level of covering. The proposed model improves the spatial queuing model (SQM) and Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP) by considering the cost of the deployment of the emergency units, which makes it closer to real-world conditions. Because the proposed model is NP-hard, the model is solved using three heuristics including Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a hybrid of both. The preliminary results indicate that the hybrid method had better performance to achieve the optimal or close to optimal solution.