Journal of Advances in Industrial Engineering
Volume:53 Issue: 3, Summer 2019

One way to control the quality of products is to inspection the lot inputs. The focus of this paper is on a non-linear integer programming model for determining an optimal single sampling plan for inspecting different parts so that the total cost of the quality control is minimized and we try to improve the quality of inputs to the assembly line by applying a rectifying inspection policy. The optimization model includes the cost of inspection, the cost of non- conforming items entering the assembly line and the cost of rejecting the items. In this research, it is assumed that the inspection is perfect and zero acceptance number policy is employed for inspection. If a non- conforming item is found in the sample, the total lot is rejected. Each part is different in the risk of non- conforming items, the cost of non- conforming items, the size of the lot and the cost of inspection. In the practical example, it can be seen that the rate of defective items, followed by the cost of defective items and the cost of lot rejection, have been greatly reduced following the proposed methods and minimized the cost of quality control.

The main purpose of this study is to design a privatized proposal model for Tavanir regional electricity distribution and transmission companies. This proposed model is based on Tobit regression, GANN-DEA and PSOGA to evaluate the efficiency and modeling of efficient and inefficient units. This three-step process is benefited a hybrid data envelopment analysis model with a neural network optimized by a genetic algorithm to evaluate the relative efficiency of 16 Tavanir regional electricity companies. To measure the effect of environmental variables on the average efficiency of companies, two-stage data envelopment analysis and Tobit regression were used. Finally, with a hybrid model of particle mass algorithm and genetic algorithm, we have modeled for efficient and inefficient units. The average of efficiency of regional electricity companies during the years 2012 to 2017 has increased from 0.8934 to 0.9147. And companies in regions 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 13 and 16 have always had the highest efficiency average (one). And the power companies in regions 10 and 11 with the average efficiency values of 0.7047 and 0.6025 had the lowest efficiency values.

This paper presents an inventory-routing problem (IRP) for Red Blood Cells (RBCs) distribution, in which -to avoid shortage- supplying the demand with compatible blood groups (substitution) and the RBC transshipments between hospitals (transshipment) are considered. The mentioned problem is investigated in four conditions: 1- Allowing the transshipment and substitution, 2- Allowing the transshipment, but no substitution, 3- Allowing the substitution, but no transshipment, 4- No allowing the transshipment and substitution. Since the mentioned problem is NP-Hard, the adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm (ALNS) has been used to solve all conditions. The cost in the first condition is the least one, because the feasible solution space is the largest. Also, the results show that the transshipment has a more active role than the substitution in reducing the shortage. Moreover, in the first and third conditions, the O+ blood group is used more than the other blood groups to meet the other compatible blood groups' demands.

Supply chain management plays an important role in creating competitive advantages for companies. One of the most important factors in supply chain management is the control of physical flow for materials and products. Cross dock strategy is an effective way to synchronic control of materials flow, logistic costs, distribution operations, and tuning customer service level. Today's use of this strategy, to reduce inventory holdings and reduce the time spent in the supply chain is increasing. Perishable items supply chain is more complicated than many others. In this supply chain,changing the quality of items because of the nature of perishability is very important for customers, so distributors face a lot of logistical challenges. Distribution management of these products through the cross-dock center is very efficient for delivering items to customers in appropriate quality, and at the right time, and right place. In this research, we provide a multi-objective mathematical model for truck scheduling and routing in a cross-dock for perishable items by considering the perishability rate based on distribution time and condition by two types of trucks that are effective on product quality in distribution. The objective functions are minimizing the cost of delivery, including transportation costs, the penalty costs of shortage, and perishable items in distribution time and the total spent time. The VRSP system is modeled as a mixed-integer non-linear program in GAMS and an NSGA-II algorithm is provided.

Existence of behavioral barriers in employees is not a subject to be easily ignored in implementation of strategic transformational plans, but it is often neglected or less addressed because in this process the preparation of technical and feasibility aspects of transformational plans is the focal point and implementation steps and evaluation of these plans are ignored. Therefore, this research seeks to identify and classify behavioral barriers in implementation of strategic transformational plans by reviewing previous researches and based on qualitative meta-Synthesis analysis method. Statistical population includes papers and researches related to implementation of strategic transformational plans and the sampling method is also meaningful. The data analyzed in the present study are extracted from (secondary data) researches published from 1985 to 2019 from two ISI and Scopus databases, the subject of which is “strategy implementation”. The method of data analysis is open source coding based on which selected papers have been reviewed and the initial codes have been extracted and the results are classified in 112 initial codes, 14 concepts and 5 categories. Finally, five categories including Inefficiency of managers, Inefficiency of leaders, Inefficiency of employees, Cultural inefficiencies and Systems Inefficiency, were identified and introduced as behavioral barriers in implementation of strategic transformational plans.

Free trade zone has attracted significant attention, especially in developing countries. It facilitates attracting foreign capital and skilled workforce and experts to achieve economic development, which is its ultimate goal. An efficient free trade zone has different features, most of which are related to its location. Therefore, location selection has an important role in its success. Facility location planning is a strategic decision that is very expensive, but can decrease future costs. This paper aims to find the optimal location for establishing a free trade zone. The current paper applies multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) to capture all the features and essentials of a thriving free trade zone. To this end, a novel hybrid MCDM method is developed to obtain the optimal solution with fewer paired comparisons and less reliance on estimations. Then, to assess the applicability of the developed method, a real case study was conducted in Mazandaran Province, Iran. Finally, the results of the proposed method were evaluated by comparison with the results of the AHP method.