Railroad maintenance engineering plays an important role on availability of roads and reducing the cost of railroad incidents. Rail is of the most important parts of railroad industry, which needs regular maintenance since it covers a significant part of total maintenance cost. Any attempt on optimizing total cost of maintenance could substantially reduce the cost of railroad system and it can reduce total cost of the industry. The paper presents a new method to estimate the cost of rail failure using different cost components such as cost of inspection and cost of risk associated with possible accidents. The proposed model of this paper is used for a real-world case study of railroad transportation of Tehran region and the results have been analyzed.

Measuring the relative efficiency of similar units has been an important topic of research among many researchers. Data envelopment analysis has been one of the most important techniques for measuring the efficiency of different units. However, there are some limitations on using such technique and some people prefer to use other methods such as analytical hierarchy process to measure the relative efficiencies. Besides, uncertainty in the input data is another issue, which makes some misleading results. In this paper, we present an integrated robust DEA-AHP to measure the relative efficiency of similar units. The proposed model of this is believed to capable of presenting better results in terms of efficiency compared with exclusive usage of DEA or AHP. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated for a real-world case study of Airport industry and the results are analyzed.

Budgeting plays an important role on increasing efficiency of organizations. It helps determine targets and possible future chaos a head of time. A good budgeting plan can create motivation among workers and managers. There are different budgeting plans such as traditional and operational. In this paper, we analyze the effects of executing budgeting plan on governmental organizations. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire consists of various questions and selects 94 people out of 125 financial managers who work for various governmental organizations in province of Zanjan, Iran. The results indicate that the operational budgeting could help provide better performance measurement of governmental organizations, it helps us provide a more precise cost of products and services, and it helps government allocate the necessary budget proportion to performance measurement. The results of our survey also indicate that operational budgeting redirect costs towards our objectives and make the overall budgeting crystal clear.

Nowadays organizational excellence is regarded as the world’s most effective and progressive issue and many countries and organizations are attempting in the way of applying excellence. In this way, they attempt to improve such models and according to culture and sociopolitical conditions of each country, they attempt to design several models. The present research has been conducted with principal goal of designing organizational excellence model at cellulose industry of Iran. The study determines its components and aspects, priorities the aspects and components and analyzes relationship among different aspects of organizational excellence model at cellulose industry of Iran. The present research is an applied research with respect to goal and it is a descriptive-analytical method in terms of method. Statistical population of the present research covers all experts in the field of cellulose industry of Iran in which on this basis, the number of statistical sample was 207 people from managers to specialists. Results of research indicate that organizational excellence pattern of cellulose industry is a mixture of different aspects of technical, economic, inner environment, outer environment, motivation and behavioral processes.

Marriage is one of the most important events of people & apos; s lives and when it happens, it could have both positive and negative consequences. There are different types of marriage such as traditional and modern ones. In traditional marriage, there are some marriage arrangements where man and woman can meet and talk for a short time and in case both parties are interested, marriage is initiated. There is also another type of marriage where girl and boy meet each other for a while, in some events, they may have some limited or unlimited relationships, and once they are interested in each other, they may marry each other. This relatively new type of marriage is popular in many western countries but it is still a controversial type of marriage in eastern countries. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the effect of pre-marriage relationship on long-term marital status. The results indicate that pre-marriage relationship can reduce after marriage conflicts. The people who had pre-marriage had less aggressive behavior compared with the people who did not.

Drug addiction has become serious problem among many developing countries. Many young people become addicted to different toxicated materials and, as a result, they cannot contribute to their society. They lose any employment opportunity, cannot continue their education and lose their healthcare. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure emotional intelligence among different groups of people who were addicted to drugs. The study distributes a questionnaire among three groups consists of 117 questions and 15 scales. The first group of the survey is under community-based treatment, the second group includes the people who are members of a community with unknown identification and the third group covers outpatient patient who receive medication. The results of our survey indicate the level of emotional intelligence among the first group of our study is much more than the other groups.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between employees’ of East Azarbaijan Melli bank (zone 10) self-esteem and pertinacity. For this reason, employee’s self-esteem was arranged in two dimensions, which are consistency solidity, emotional inconsistency and pertinacity. The questionnaire is based on Kobasa theory including three sides including commitment, control and defiance. There are two basic and three subsidiary theories. Employee of East Azarbaijan Melli bank (zone 10) is statistical society of this research, which includes 80 people. Reference to restricted volume of statistical society, total statistical society is concerned as under evaluation society. The tool of data gathering is two questionnaires, which are Aizenc’s self-esteem questionnaire and Kobasa’s pertinacity standard questionnaire, which are delivered for evaluating society after perpetuity and justifiability determination. The descriptive statistical methods are used for collected questionnaires analyze. Thus, the descriptive statistical method was used to summarize, to categorize and to interpret statistical data’s. In addition, statistical tests such as Pearson and Freidman’s coherency R are used to test the hypothesis of research. The results indicate that there is a meaningful relationship between self-esteem and pertinacity and its sides on employees of East Azarbaijan Melli bank (zone 10). They present maximum relationship between self-esteem and pertinacity control and minimum relationship between pertinacity commitment dimensions.

E-learning has recently attracted many people specially those who cannot attend traditional educational programs for different reasons such as busy schedule, long distance, etc. There is also a growing interest among many public universities to develop such programs in addition to their regular business activities. The primary question is to know how much a program cost and what is the most important factors affecting the cost of e-learning. In this paper, we present an empirical study the measure the effects of different items on the cost of e-learning programs. The proposed study of this paper gathers the necessary cost components of three governmental universities located in city of Tehran/Iran. We choose ten different cost items for our analysis and using some statistical test determine the most important ones. The preliminary study of this paper indicates that seven cost items play essential role on determining the cost of e-learning, which includes utilities, internet connection and network, employee payment, software & licensing, payments of instructors and their assistants, hardware equipments and other overhead expenditures. This could help us determine the precise cost of e-learning using activity cost method.

In the current competitive environment, managers have been making attempts to convert organizations under their supervision into competitive and responsive through creating capability of timely delivery of quality products and services. In line with this, maintenance as a system plays an important role in achieving these goals. The maintenance strategy selection is a kind of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which requires considering a large number of complex factors as multiple evaluation criteria. A robust MCDM method should consider the interactions among criteria. The analytic network process (ANP) is a relatively new MCDM method, which can deal with all kinds of interactions systematically. Moreover, the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) not only can convert the relations between cause and effect of criteria into a visual structural model, but also can be used as a way to handle the inner dependences within a set of criteria. Hence, this paper proposes an effective solution based on a combined ANP and DEMATEL approach to help vehicle companies that need to evaluate and select maintenance strategies.

Location-routing problem (LRP) is established as a new research area in the context of location analysis. The primary concern of LRP is on locating facilities and routing of vehicles among established facilities and existing demand points. In this work, we address the capacitated LRP which arises in many practical applications within logistics and supply chain management. The objective is to minimize the overall system costs which include the fixed costs of opening depots and using vehicles at each depot site, and the variable costs associated with delivery activities. A novel heuristic is proposed which is based on variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm to solve the resulted problem. The computational study indicates that the proposed VND based heuristic is highly competitive with the existing solution algorithms in terms of solution quality.