Designing an efficient supply chain for organ transplant networks which is intimately related to humans’ life plays a primary role in improving the network’s performance. This research is focused on proposing a new multi-period location-allocation modeling approach to make appropriate strategic decisions for designing organ transplant networks under supply and budget uncertainties. To serve this purpose, a bi-objective possibilistic programming model is formulated the aim of which is to maximize network responsiveness and minimize the total cost. A fuzzy goal programming approach is adopted to solve multiple objective function models and control their deviations from the corresponding aspiration levels. As an important contribution of this study, the chance of success of transplantation processes is taken into consideration by proposing appropriate utility functions according to transportation criteria. Moreover, for the purpose of coping with the inherent uncertainty of the input parameters, a possibilistic programming model based on Me measure converted to three optimistic, realistic and pessimistic models is developed. Three new formulations have also been developed to tackle equality chance constraints. Finally, the optimal solutions of the developed models are analyzed through conducting a real case study in Iran. According to the results, for the considered organ transplant network, the possibilistic programming model based on the realistic measure is better than the optimistic and pessimistic measure in most confidence levels.

Airport Collaborative Decision Making (ACDM) flight scheduling plans rely on accurate predictions of both optimal and reliable aircraft turnaround times, which is one of the most difficult things to complete. In order to account for the effects of randomness and fuzziness on the turnaround process duration, this paper deals with transforming the probability distribution of well-fitted sub-processes into a cumulative density function, which is equivalent to the fuzzy membership function (FMF), and then using goodness-of-fit to determine the fuzzy membership grade of each turnaround sub-process. The turnaround time is calculated using the fuzzy critical path method (FCPM), which is a combination of the Critical Path Method (CPM) and fuzzy set theory. In order to verify this estimate, we created the FMF using historical data and compared it to turnaround times based on FCPM. A linear regression model is used to examine the relationship between arrival delays and the FCPM-based turnaround process. We also use historical data to generate fuzzy sets of different arrival delays using Frankfurt airport data from the summer of 2017 and conclude that delays are positively correlated with the FCPM-based turnaround process.

One of the techniques, which are used for Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is the permutation. In the classical form of permutation, it is assumed that weights and decision matrix components are crisp. However, when group decision making is under consideration and decision makers could not agree on a crisp value for weights and decision matrix components, fuzzy numbers should be used. In this article, the fuzzy permutation technique for MCDM problems has been explained. The main deficiency of permutation is its big computational time, so a Tabu Search (TS) based algorithm has been proposed to reduce the computational time. A numerical example has illustrated the proposed approach clearly. Then, some benchmark instances extracted from literature are solved by proposed TS. The analyses of the results show the proper performance of the proposed method.

Service quality plays an important role in health care systems since hospitals are responsible for people & apos; s lives. This study presents an effective approach for evaluating and comparing service qualities of four hospitals. Service quality consists of different attributes and many of them are intangible and difficult to measure. Therefore, we propose a fuzzy method to resolve the ambiguity of the concepts, which are associated with human judgments. SERVQUAL model is used to evaluate the respondents & apos; judgments of service quality and multi attribute decision making approach is implemented for the comparison among hospitals. The paper use analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for obtaining criteria weight and TOPSIS for ranking the cases.

This paper addresses a bi-criteria scheduling problem with deteriorating jobs on a single machine. We develop a model for a single machine bi-criteria scheduling problem (SMBSP) with the aim of minimizing total tardiness and work in process (WIP) costs. WIP cost increases as a job passes through a series of stages in the production process. Due to the uncertainty involved in real-world scheduling problems, it is sometimes unrealistic or even impossible to acquire exact input data. Hence, we consider the SMBSP under the hypothesis of fuzzy L-R processing time's knowledge and fuzzy L-R due date. The effectiveness of the proposed model and the denoted methodology is demonstrated through a test problem.