Creativity is one of the most important factors to increase the productivity of any organization. There are literally different factors influencing creativity such as physical and non-physical components of a system. There are different studies to confirm that both physical and non-physical issues could impact the efficiency, significantly. The study of this paper considers eleven physical and ten non-physical activities in working environment of six organizations with various business activities of educational, manufacturing and service business. The study summarizes the most and the least important physical and non-physical factors based on some statistical tests

A good facility layout plays an important role on increasing the profitability of a production unit. A good location needs to meet different criteria such as the distance between the plants and the places to reach raw materials, customers, etc. In this paper, we proposed a multi criteria decision making problem to locate a suitable dairy plant. We assume that all factors influencing the plant involves uncertainty and proposed fuzzy numbers to handle the uncertainty associated with all input parameters. We apply the method for a real-world case study of dairy production unit and analyze the results of our proposed model.

Critical path method plays an important role on managing medium to large-scale problems. It is often difficult to determine the critical path for different reasons such as the existing uncertainties in processing tasks. One alternative to handle the uncertainty associated with the processing time is to use fuzzy techniques. We present a new method to calculate the critical path method when the processing times follow trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The proposed model of this paper does not use any defuzzification technique to find the final processing time. The implementation of the proposed model is compared with other techniques using a well-known example from the literature.

Technical analysis has been one of the most popular methods for stock market predictions for the past few decades. There have been enormous technical analysis methods to study the behavior of stock market for different kinds of trading markets such as currency, commodity or stock. In this paper, we propose two different methods based on volume adjusted moving average and ease of movement for stock trading. These methods are used with and without generalized regression neural network methods and the results are compared with each other. The preliminary results on historical stock price of 20 firms indicate that there is no meaningful difference between various proposed models of this paper.

In this paper, we propose a multi criteria decision making technique to determine an efficient solution for quadratic assignment problem. The proposed method of this paper considers transportation cost, adjacency and separation as the most important criteria to find the efficient layout. A tabu search is used to generate a set of feasible solutions and for each solution, we evaluate various criteria. The proposed model of the paper uses DEA technique to choose the most efficient units among the feasible solutions. The implementation of the proposed method is demonstrated using some benchmark problems and the results are discussed in details.

Nowadays electronic commerce plays an important role in many business activities, operations, and transaction processing. The recent advances on e-businesses have created tremendous opportunities to increase profitability. This paper presents a multi-objective marketing planning model which simultaneously determines efficient marketing expenditure, service cost and product & apos; s selling price in two competitive markets. To solve the proposed model, we discuss a multi-objective geometric programming (GP) approach based on compromise programming method. Since our proposed model is a signomial GP and global optimality is not guaranteed for the problem, we transform the model to posynomial form. Finally, the solution procedure is illustrated via a numerical example and a sensitivity analysis is presented.

This paper presents a new mathematical model to select an optimal combination of productivity improvement techniques. The proposed model of this paper considers four-stage cycle productivity and the productivity is assumed to be a linear function of fifty four improvement techniques. The proposed model of this paper is implemented for a real-world case study of manufacturing plant. The resulted problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming which can be solved for optimality using traditional methods. The preliminary results of the implementation of the proposed model of this paper indicate that the productivity can be improved through a change on equipments and it can be easily applied for both manufacturing and service industries.

One of the most important issues on educational systems is to measure the relative efficiency of similar units based on non-financial factors. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become popular among many who wish to rank educational systems using different factors such as the rate of educational success or the number of employees, etc. However, one of the main concerns on implementing DEA methods is the uncertainty involved in input/output parameters. In this paper, a robust data envelopment analysis (RDEA) is developed to measure the efficiency of high schools considering uncertainty on output parameters. We present an empirical study on a set of high schools located in Tehran, which is the capital city of Iran. The study uses uncertain data for input/output information and the results are compared with an existing parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). The preliminary results indicate that the robust DEA approach is relatively a reliable method for efficiency estimating.

Earned Value Management (EVM) has been a well-known methodology used since the 1960s when the US department of defense proposed a standard method to measure project performance. This system relies on a set of often straightforward metrics to measure and evaluate the general health of a project. These metrics serve as early warning signals to timely detect project problems, or to exploit project opportunities. A key aspect of EVM is to estimate the completion cost of a project by considering both cost and schedule performance indices. However, good performance of cost and schedule performance indices does not necessarily guarantee cost effectiveness of the project regardless of the overhead costs. The reason is because, in most project-based organizations, overhead costs constitute a significant proportion of the total costs. However, EVM indices are usually calculated in the absence of the so-called overhead costs. This paper, first, seeks to remedy this problem by proposing a practical procedure of allocating overhead costs in project-based organizations. Then the traditional EVM indices are revised by consider-ing the allocated overhead costs. Finally, a case study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method for a real-life project.

Understanding mechanical properties of healthy and unhealthy cerebral vessels is a key element in the development of their science and the relevant clinical diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Thirteen healthy samples were obtained from 23 middle cerebral arteries. The changes of force and deformation until the vessel rupture were recorded using a biaxial device. Thereafter, the stress-strain curve was plotted and fitted with a hyperelastic five-parameter Mooney-Rivlin model and the model parameters (C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5) were determined according to the best fit. For statistical comparison, the samples were divided into three age and two gender groups and subjected to non-parametric statistical analyses. Comparison of obtained results for different age groups showed that there is a significant difference between the "old" group and the other two groups (middle-aged and young). There was no significant difference between male and female groups. Therefore, the results demonstrate the changes of blood vessel wall properties with aging. The results also depicted that the arterial wall is stiffer in the circumferential direction than the axial direction. Anisotropy of cerebral vessels was confirmed by all of the tests. Therefore, the significance of the biaxial tests is in the spot light in the derived data. Moreover, good fitting of data illuminated that the use of multiple-parameter constitutive models is useful for mathematical demonstration of cerebral vessel tissue behavior. In conclusion, good fitting of data illuminated that the use of multiple-parameter constitutive models is useful for mathematical demonstration of cerebral vessel tissue behavior.