Customer service is increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive advantage. The keys to provide effective customer service are determining the customer needs, accurately, and meeting and exceeding the needs in a consistent manner. Companies should adapt a strategic, proactive focus on customer service based on understanding logistic processes and designing the logistics system to meet their needs. This paper proposes an approach based on the quality function deployment (QFD), for ranking strategic actions to improve logistics service. The paper addresses the issue of how to deploy the house of quality (HOQ) to effectively and efficiently improve logistics processes and thus customer satisfaction. For data collection, fuzzy logic is used to deal with the ill-defined nature of the qualitative linguistic judgments required in the proposed HOQ. The methodology has been tested by means of a real case application, which refers to an Iranian company operating in the manufacturing industry.

The way orders are accepted or rejected is the most important factor in customer satisfaction and success of make-to-order systems. The incoming orders to such organizations have certain delivery date in which the customer expects the order to be fulfilled and delivered. In some cases, unexpectedly increased orders exceed the existing capacity for on time fulfillment. In addition to rejection of order, as a typical choice, other options like outsourcing and capacity expansion are available to compensate for capacity shortage and deliver incoming orders according to schedule. However, each of the proposed options is superior in one or more criteria and so selecting the best one is not simply possible. The main goal of this study is to provide managers with a comprehensive, systematic, and applicable approach to evaluate and select the best of the existing options. For this purpose, a model comprised of some multi-criteria techniques is delivered. Our proposed model is a blend of FAHP and FTOPSIS methods. In this model, FAHP is first used to determine the weight of criteria and then Fuzzy-TOPSIS (FTOPSIS) is employed to rank the options. Finally, the proposed model is applied on an actual case to assess and examine its efficiency.

Quadratic assignment problem (QAP) has been considered as one of the most complicated problems. The problem is NP-Hard and the optimal solutions are not available for large-scale problems. This paper presents a hybrid method using tabu search and simulated annealing technique to solve QAP called TABUSA. Using some well-known problems from QAPLIB generated by Burkard et al. (1997) [Burkard, R. E., Karisch, S. E., & Rendl, F. (1997). QAPLIB–a quadratic assignment problem library. Journal of Global Optimization, 10(4), 391-403.], two methods of TABUSA and TS are both coded on MATLAB and they are compared in terms of relative percentage deviation (RPD) for all instances. The performance of the proposed method is examined against Tabu search and the preliminary results indicate that the hybrid method is capable of solving real-world problems, efficiently.

Since independence, India has been one of the few developing countries to invest extensively in both science and technical education. In India, technical education plays a pivotal role in human resource development while creating skilled manpower, increasing industrial productivity and enhancing the quality of life. If a technical institute means to be effective in developing learned and qualified engineers, then it would be useful to know the performance of that technical institution. However, measuring the performance of a technical institution has received very little attention because it is very difficult to measure its output. Thus, this paper focuses on assessing the performance of eight Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) using a combined approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and technique of order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). In the first phase, DEA is applied to shortlist the efficient IITs having the desired characteristics from the stakeholders’ point of view, and TOPSIS method is then employed to rank those efficient IITs while also identifying the best performing IIT. It is observed that IIT Kharagpur outperforms all the considered IITs which exactly corroborates with the findings of the recently published surveys/reports.

The software architecture plays essential role for the development of the complicated software systems and it is important to evaluate the software architecture efficiency. One way to evaluate the software architecture is to create an executable model from the architecture. Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams are used to describe the software architecture. UML has made it easy to use and to evaluate the necessary requirements at the software architecture level. It creates an executable model from these diagrams; yet, since the UML is a standard semi-formal language for describing the software architecture, evaluating the software architecture is not directly possible through it. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the software architecture, one needs to turn the actual model into the formal model. In this study, first we describe the architecture using the UML. Then, some properties of the software architecture are mentioned using the UML sequence diagram, deployment diagram, use case diagram, and component diagram. The necessary information associated with the qualitative characteristic of efficiency will be margined as clichés and labels to these diagrams. The independent and dependent components will be extracted from the component diagram. Finally, the resulted semi-formal model will be mapped into a formal model based on the colored Petri net and finally the evaluation will take place.

The purpose of this article is to consider system safety and reliability analysts to evaluate the risk associated with item failure modes. The factors considered in traditional failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) for risk assessment are frequency of occurrence (O), severity (S) and detectability (D) of an item failure mode. Because of the subjective, qualitative and dynamic nature of the information and to make the analysis more consistent and logical, an approach using fuzzy logic and system dynamics methodology is proposed. In the proposed approach, severity is replaced by dependency parameter then, these parameters are represented as members of a fuzzy set fuzzified by using appropriate membership functions and they are evaluated in fuzzy inference engine, which makes use of well-defined rule base and fuzzy logic operations to determine the value of parameters related to system’s transfer functions. The fuzzy conclusion is then defuzzified to get transfer function for risk and failure rate. The applicability of the proposed approach is investigated with the help of an illustrative case study from the automotive industry.

During the past few years, there have been growing interests in using email for delivering various types of messages such as social, financial, etc. There are also people who use email messages to promote products and services or even to do criminal activities called Spam email. These unwanted messages are sent to different target population for different purposes and there is a growing interest to develop methods to filter such email messages. This paper presents a method to filter Spam email messages based on the keyword pattern. In this article, a multi-agent filter trade based on the Bayes rule, which has benefit of using the users’ interest, keywords and investigation the message content according to its topic, has been used. Then Nested Neural Network has been used to detect the spam messages. To check the authenticity of this proposed method, we test it for a couple of email messages, so that it could determine spams and hams from each other, effectively. The result shows the superiority of this method over the previous ones including filters with Multi-Layer Perceptron that detect spams.

The Ad hoc network is one of the multistep-based self-organizing networks, which are dynamically changing and are taken more into account as the ways of connecting the terminals through the development of wireless communication terminals. We are faced with numerous challenges in designing a wireless network such as the dynamic topology, common and limited bandwidth, and the limited energy. The nodes are moving according to the continuous changes in the topology and the source-to-destination paths are completely broken. Therefore, the repeated route discovery enhances the delay and overload of routing. Thus, it is essential to consider the link stability while designing the path in order to choose the routing protocol. Providing the multiple paths may lead to the better performance than a path. The transmission energy control in the wireless Ad hoc networks is the option for the level of transmission energy in order to transmit each node packet in this system. Therefore, transmission energy control affects the wireless medium interface. Because of choosing the appropriate protocol, the routing operation can be improved and the energy consumption can be controlled properly as well as enhancing the durability and longevity of network. The main objective of this study is to enhance the network longevity. The proposed algorithm in this research considers the combination of 2 parameters including the rate of node energy and number of steps in Fuzzy System applied on AOMDV Protocol, which is a Multipath Routing Protocol. The results of simulation also indicate the improved performance of proposed algorithm (AOMDV-F) compared to AODV and AOMDV Protocols in NS2 simulator.

This study examines how preferences for honesty affect two-period audit policy. We categorize the audited as either fully honest (i.e. the ethical) or self-interested and rational (i.e. the economic) to deal with the issue of audit policy. As a result, we find the conditional audit policy will be an optimal audit policy only if the incentive for the economic to cheat is sufficiently large and the proportion of the ethical in all audited is relatively moderate,. Otherwise, the conditional audit policy will be dominated by other audit policy. These results suggest that firms are likely able to design a more efficient audit policy if they take into account the honesty preferences of the audited.

In today’s climate of fierce competition, there is a necessity to pay especial attention on customer demands either in manufacturing or service sector. Managers in service sector are under pressure in terms of environmental factors, they focus on customers’ satisfaction and this has led to the continuous improvement in the performance of service organizations. Meanwhile, customers’ expectations should be properly understood and measured. There have been various efforts to measure the quality of services using the SERVQUAL model. In this study, we try to investigate the concepts and factors influencing the quality of services according to modified SERVQUAL model and then utilize the proposed model of Grey Analytic Hierarchy Process (G-AHP) and Multilevel Grey Evaluation in order to evaluate the quality of services in the framework of Grey Systems Theory (GST). In order to propose our method, we will conduct a case study of the performance of service quality in higher education institutions of Isfahan-Iran.