International Journal of Research in Industrial Engineering
Volume:3 Issue: 2, Spring 2014

Blood supply chain network design isanessentialpart of the total blood management systems.In this paper, a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model for the concerned problem is developed. Optimizing the facility location and flows between each echelon of the considered supply chain is our main focus in this study. Also, in order to handle uncertain nature of model parameters, a mix robust stochastic programming approach is applied to the model. Finally, to test the applicability of the proposed model, a numerical example is proposed using random generated data and then sensitivity analysis is done on a model parameter which play a rolein making trade-off between model robustness and optimality robustness.

Every organizational entity, whether operated for profit or not, must purchase goods and/or contract for services to meet the needs of its customers, clients, and stakeholders. As a result of the dynamics that occur in this process, the potential for buyer-supplier conflict is extremely high and is in fact a very common occurrence. Proper identification, assessment, and management of buyer-supplier conflict can lower the cost of conflict and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an alliance. The costs associated with buyer-supplier conflict include lost productivity, strained relationships, poor resource utilization, and unfulfilled potential of the joint activities undertaken by the buyer and supplier in support of the relationship. This paper applying a methodology, extending the concept of TRIZ (XTriz), to discover supply chain conflict before they occur and cause detrimental effects to system performance. The approach involves specifically focus on extending TRIZ with Root Conflict Analysis, which allows us to extract and map the contradictions arising in supply chain that are the root cause of certain problems. We applied the proposed methodology on new product development (NPD) to illustrate the validity of the tool. Although, further research is needed to fully explore this method of conflict detection, we believe that this research does indeed provide some much needed insight into the daunting task of conflict discovery and therefore proactive handling of these potentially negative occurrences in the supply chain.

Shop floor performance has great influence on performance of a manufacturing system. Traditionally, shop floor operational policies concerning maintenance scheduling, quality control and production scheduling have been considered and optimized independently. Anyway, these aspects of operations planning have an interaction effect on each other significantly and hereupon for improving the system performance; they need to be considered commonly. The main objective of this study is to provide a new approach in the quality control process. x control chart has been used in previous models, but in this study to improve the quality and increase the accuracy, cumulative sum control chart which is useful for detecting small changes by considering previous information of process is used and causes 5% improvement in objective function in the case that x control chart was used.

The importance of Customer Satisfaction is quite evident to any business or organization mainly because it plays a vital role in any industry. But unfortunately when it comes to health care and more specifically, hospitals, clinics and health systems, enormous rate of failure related to quality and reliability of services which is consequently followed by customer dissatisfaction is reported[1, 2]. And that’s because hospital “customers” are very different than those in any other industry for one important reason, they don’t want to be there. This paper aims to investigate the failure data related to Customer Satisfaction on account of quality and reliability. Number of failures and severity were used to model the quality related satisfaction, while reliability related satisfaction is modeled based upon number of visits to hospital (including its clinic), delays before receiving treatments and time interval between visits. Eventually the model is constructed on basis of quality and reliability related satisfaction values.

MDOVRP is a variant of classical VRP, which seeks to find a set of non-depot returning vehicle routes dispatching form several depots. A new integer linear programming model is presented considering limited number of vehicles at each depot. Randomly generated smallsized MDOVRPs are solved for validation and verification of the proposed model. Due to the complexity of the problem, a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) is developed for medium and large-sized MDVRPs’ benchmarks.