The low cycle fatigue (LCF) resistance of two different metal matrix composite (MMC) of AA6063 with 2% and 8% by volume silicon carbide (SiCp) particles having particulate size of 37 micron (400 mesh) at room temperature condition has been evaluated under fully reversed strain control testing. The influence of volume fraction (2 and 8 vol%) and strain ratio (R= -1) are examined. Increasing the content of SiCp results in the degradation of strain control fatigue properties while the transition fatigue life increases. Fatigued samples are examined using scanning electron microscopy in order to understand the failure mechanism (SEM). Microstructural features and failure mechanisms studied through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) confirmed low cycle fatigue failure nature.

This paper presents a new multi-objective model for a vehicle routing problem under a stochastic uncertainty. It considers traffic point as an inflection point to deal with the arrival time of vehicles. It aims to minimize the total transportation cost, traffic pollution, customer dissatisfaction and maximizes the reliability of vehicles. Moreover, resiliency factors are included in the model to increase the flexibility of the system and decrease the possible losses that may impose on the system. Due to the NP-hardness of the presented model, a meta-heuristic algorithm, namely Simulated Annealing (SA) is developed. Furthermore, a number of sensitivity analyses are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Lastly, the foregoing meta-heuristic is compared with GAMS, in which the computational results demonstrate an acceptable performance of the proposed SA.

Search for lost or hidden things is a very interesting and complicated issue. This problem concentrates on the study of how to exploit resources to discover a target with unknown location. On the other hand, search problem may be formulated as a difficult decision problem because it is affected by various crucial decision factors such as search cost, search time, the probability of discovering, etc. In this paper, a new multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach on the basis of best-worst method (BWM) and simple additive weighting (SAW) is suggested to rank potential locations of lost or hidden targets. BWM is a novel subjective weighting technique and compared to the most common subjective method, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), requires fewer comparisons and gives more trustworthy outcomes. In this paper, BWM is used to gain the criteria weights and SAW is employed to rank the locations regarding the decision factors. This study demonstrates that BWM is easier and works better than AHP, also perfect agreement in the results of COPRAS, TOPSIS and SAW is observed. The suggested approach is very easy as well as flexible and provides an efficient method which can be developed to tackle other decision problems.

Inconel 825 is high nickel-chromium-based superalloy which retains its mechanical properties and exhibits good corrosion and oxidation resistance at elevated temperature. Inconel 825 is extensively used for making aircraft engine parts like combustor casing and turbine blades in aero space industry. This research proposed the Response Surface Methodology with GRA to optimize multiple responses during Wire-cut EDM of Inconel 825. At optimum combination of input parameters i.e. A4B1C1D5E4F2, increase in MRR from 36.13 mm2/min to 41.822 mm2/min, decrease in SR from 2.842μm to 2.445μm and decrease in WWR from 0.01832 to 0.01758 was obtained. Experimental results showed that pulse-on time, wire feed, pulse-off time, and peak current significantly affected the MRR, and surface integrity of specimen and electrode with the formation of craters, pockmarks, debris, micro cracks, and recast layer. The optimal parametric combination obtained from the present study will be advantageous for working on high strength; high thermal conductivity and low melting point materials like nickel alloys.

Tourism industry is one of the most important parts of economic development. It can create job either directly or through stimulating other economic sectors. Therefore, it is important for policy makers to determine the best places with good potentials for tourism development. Fars province has been the center of civilization and the origin of the Iranian literature and mysticism celebrities and could be a potential investment of tourism. However, this province does not have the infrastructure required to accommodate tourists, especially during holiday seasons. This study ranks different cities located in the Fras province having the necessary potential for investment in the tourism sector by using the numerical taxonomy in terms of 12 indicators. The research population includes 29 cities in this province based on the devision of 2016. The necessary data are collected from Directorate General of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts, and Tourism in Fars province. It is found that the cities of Shiraz, Marvdasht, Firouzabad, Sepidan, and Kazerun were the best cities for tourism investment, respectively.

The growth in renewable energy study has resulted in the expansion of mini-grids projects across different communities in developing countries. However, there is a need to ensure that a suitable business model is selected during the provision of mini-grid services in developing countries. This study presents a framework for ranking mini-grid business models. The proposed framework is a multi-criteria multi-decision (MCMD) making tool. The framework combines Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC), TOPSIS (Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and WASPAS (weighted aggregated sum product assessment) methods. An interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) is used to convert the responses from decision-makers into crisp values. The applicability of the proposed framework was tested using Nigeria as a case study. Four potential mini-grid (private, government, community-based and public-private) business models for the case study were ranked using twelve criteria. The average values for the subjective and objective weight methods showed that electricity traffic and energy demand were the least and the most important criteria, respectively, for selecting a mini-grid business model. The results obtained showed that the best mini-grid model was a private model using a TOPSIS framework. A WASPAS framework ranked the community-based business model as the best model. This study results showed mini-grid business models in developing countries should be either private or community-based business models.

Created opportunities are refered as the opportunities in which none of the supply and demand parties exists clearly and obviously one or both of them must be created. Therefore, several economic inventions should take place in marketing, franchising, etc. so that opportunity can be created. This perception of opportunity deals with the creation of new markets. In the meantime, identifying some entrepreneurial actions influencing on the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities can provide backgrounds for the formation and empowering the opportunity creation. In this paper, some basic ideas about the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities and the evolution of opportunity creation theories are examined. Then effective actions on the opportunity creation are identified. Finally, the structure of the investigated actions is examined using the DEMATLE Method. The results which were according to the opinions of 15 experts of entrepreneurship showed that leadership, decision making, and strategy actions influence other entrepreneurial actions.

The present study aimed at identifying and evaluating the factors affecting the service experience at the touch points of banking services. These factors were prioritized to help the managers understand the most important factors for achieving the favorable service experience. In this study, the theoretical foundations and interviews with customers were used to identify the factors forming the service experience at touch points. Then, the Best-Worst method (BMW) was used to evaluate and determine the significance of each identified factor. Sixteen customers participated in the interview and ten customers participated in the study by the BMW method. Six touch points and 34 factors forming the service experience were created at these points of interview analysis. The research findings showed that ‘service process’ and ‘interaction customer-employees’ for creating a favorable experience are significant in banking services. In addition, the findings showed that bank managers should allocate their resources for improving them to achieve the competitive advantage.

In today's competitive world, Six Sigma can serve as a corporate strategy to improve quality and reduce costs. Six Sigma is a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, maintaining and maximizing organizational success, through an improved performance of processes. However, this tool can only be successful in organizations which are already prepared for Six Sigma implementation. This study investigated the readiness of an Iranian company, Tabarestan Steel Co., in terms of Six Sigma projects. In doing so, the study proposed a model designed for assessing the readiness of Six Sigma in organizations. To this end, primarily Six Sigma readiness indicators were identified through Fuzzy Delphi, by recourse to the experts’ opinions. Next the interrelationships between the indicators were examined through the Fuzzy DEMATEL method. The internal links between the indicators were determined after the examination, and the degree of importance and the weights of the indicators were decided. Ultimately, three highly important dimensions were discovered that had a significant function in Six Sigma implementation (leadership and perspective, corporate strategy, and focus on the customer).

The international strategic alliance is an inevitable solution for making competitive advantage and reducing the risk in today’s business environment. Partner selection is an important part in success of partnerships, and meanwhile it is a complicated decision because of various dimensions of the problem and inherent conflicts of stockholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical approach to the problem of partner selection in international strategic alliances, which fulfills the gap between theories of inter-organizational relationships and quantitative models. Thus, a novel Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is proposed for combining the benefits of two complementary theories of inter-organizational relationships named, (1) Resource-based view, and (2) Transaction-cost theory and considering Fit theory as the perquisite of alliance success. The Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is a novel development of Interval-AHP technique employing robust formulation; aimed at handling the ambiguity of the problem and let the use of intervals as pairwise judgments. The proposed approach was compared with existing approaches, and the results show that it provides the best quality solutions in terms of minimum error degree. Moreover, the framework implemented in a case study and its applicability were discussed.