During the past few years, there have been different changes in global market due to fast development of science and technology. These changes have increased competition among all existing companies and it has made it difficult for new rivals to gain market share. This paper tries to identify the opportunities and threats of technology transfer in one of world’s fastest growing gas development regions called Pars Special Economic Energy Zone. The proposed model of this paper first identify important factors influencing both opportunities as well as threats and then uses analytical hierarchy process to rank all factors. The results show that the threats were more important than the existing opportunities and among the most important threats, embargo and sales of oil were the most important ones.

Branding in food industry has been a major concern among food suppliers. During the past few years, there have been strong competitions among business developers to gain market share through increasing the value of their brand. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to learn more about the relationship between brand experiences on consumer purchase experiences. The study selects a sample of 206 people who are regular customers of two well-known suppliers, Shahrvand and Hyperstar, in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study examines six hypotheses and the results confirm that an increase on brand loyalty, brand attribute, pricing factors, product performance attributes, brand associate and brand position will increase purchasing intention, significantly.

Developing an Enterprise Architecture is a complex task and to control the complexity of the regulatory framework we need to measure the relative performance of one system against other available systems. On the other hand, enterprise architecture cannot be organized without the use of a logical structure. The framework provides a logical structure for classifying architectural output. Among the common architectural framework, the C4ISR framework and methodology of the product is one of the most popular techniques. In this paper, given the existing uncertainties in system development and information systems, a new version of UML called Fuzzy-UML is proposed for enterprise architecture development based on fuzzy Petri nets. In addition, the performance of the system is also evaluated based on Fuzzy sequence diagram.

Understanding customers’ behavior normally helps planning better marketing strategies, which could lead to an increase in market share and profitability. Loyal customers are always considered as the most important assets for any firm. This paper presents a survey to detect factors influencing the formation of loyal customers’ mental image. The proposed study uses factor analysis to determine these factors by designing a questionnaire and distributing among some loyal customers who do banking business in Bank Melli Iran located in city of Tehran, Iran. The results indicate that there were eight important factors influencing customer loyalty including social status, business identity, brand strength, the contract role, organizational benefit, consumer rights, organizational image and supporting power.

Brand loyalty is one of the most important factors influencing on the success of retail stores. Many retail stores in the field of sport shoes in city of Tehran, Iran are facing tight competition and there seems to be that only stores with loyal customers could survive. In this paper, we present an exploration study to find out important factors influencing retail stores selling one of well-known sport shows such as Adidas, Nike, etc. in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes among 265 regular customers of these stores and analyze them using factor analysis. The results indicate that there were four important factors influencing customer loyalty including brand identification, brand promotion, brand loyalty and characterization of stores.

A very challenging issue in robot navigation or path planning in an unknown environment is to find a globally optimal path from the start to the target point at the same time avoid collisions. This paper presents a new sensor-based online method for generating collision-free optimal path for mobile robots to take a target amidst static obstacles. It is assumed that, target is static and the location of obstacles is completely unknown for robot and all of these materials will be calculated online. Although the area that is under vision of robot’s sensor is confined, we have to consider an inevitable assumption that target is detectable by robot in everywhere. Proposed algorithm to avoid colliding the obstacles in its way toward target, detects a short and feasible paths by utilizing an innovative and effective method. Following that, shortest of them to will be chosen for navigation. There are different important factors which are considered in robot motion planning problems. First, required time for robot’s action in unpredicted circumstances that the running time of the used algorithm plays a major role in this term. Second, the length of traveled path from start point to target point that represents the efficiency of exploited algorithm for leading the robot. The presented algorithm of this paper has proved its efficiency in both of mentioned issues. Simulation results show that traveled path has the least length and the running time is remarkably less than other presented algorithms until now. In addition, the effectiveness of presented algorithm in complex situation is discernible. These results prove that the presented novel and effective robot navigation algorithm is very suitable for real-time navigation in complex environments.

This paper derives a deterministic inventory model for deteriorating items with inventory dependent demand rate. This study develops an order level inventory model with single warehouse where shortages are allowed and it is completely backlogged. The planning horizon is finite. This paper shows that there exists a unique optimal cycle time to minimize the total inventory cost per cycle. Truncated Taylor’s series expansion is used for finding closed form optimal cycle time, optimal time to finish positive inventory and optimal total inventory cost per cycle. The numerical example is given to validate the proposed model. The sensitivity analysis of the solution with the changes of the values of parameters associated with the model has also been discussed.

The improvement in manufacturing process is never ending effort, which is being derived by the culture of the organization. Therefore, an attitude of perfection, innovation and devotion is an essential part for the process improvement of an organization. Recently, innovations in the field of engineering help an entrepreneur sell the products through competitive environment. Moreover, the timely delivery of goods and cost effective product is the yardstick, which contributes to the performance index. These improvements resulted from continued performance enhancement efforts, helps in producing right quality in the right times which means providing stability to the organization performance. The role of lean thinking and supply chain characteristics is to create an effective marked on the organizational performance including bonding of all the participants where-so-ever possible. The purpose of this work is to examine the challenges, which integrate the Lean Principles to Supply Chain Characteristics for the real world situation to achieve better utilization of resources, timely delivery to the customer, and deletion of non-value added items including the control on all type of wastages as linked with supply chain systems.

Global supply chains have to manage production over the whole world. Therefore, production plants are needed to supply the demand of products and parts. Due to complication and uncertainty of production market, portfolio selection is one of the most challenging problems. Type-2(T2) fuzzy is a model, which provides the ability to handle the effect of uncertainty. Aiming at this problem, we propose a T2 supplier management system operation scheme, which not only employs fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm by dynamically increasing cluster center, but also it achieves good classification performance. The key result is that fuzzy classification applications improve the planning and operating of supply and demand in a distributed production and global supply chain.

The objective of this study is to measure the performance improvement of supply chain (SC) stages through implementing the national standardization system (NSS) in an innovative way. There are many studies on the positive effects of standardization system on supply chain performance (SCP), but very few studies have measured and prioritized the impact of this system on SCP. This paper introduces a new approach to the performance improvement of each stage of SC through implementing the NSS. First, we use fuzzy analytical hierarchical process method to measure the relative importance of each stage and determine the characteristics of SC. Then, the amount of SC stages improvement after implementing the NSS is determined. Finally, using a combination of results, the stages of SC are ranked according to the effectiveness of NSS implementation. In order to validate the proposed approach, the case analysis of Iran NSS is carried out on broiler SC. The stages of SC are ranked according to the performance improvement through implementing standardization system, subsequently. This approach can be generalized to other standardization systems and SCs.