International Journal of Industrial Engineering and Productional Research
Volume:25 Issue: 2, Jun 2014

An equitable risk allocation between contracting parties plays a vital role in enhancing the performance of the project. This research presents a new quantitative risk allocation approach by integrating fuzzy logic and bargaining game theory. Owing to the imprecise and uncertain nature of players’ payoffs at different risk allocation strategies, fuzzy logic is implemented to determine the value of players’ payoffs based on the experience and subjective judgment of experts involved in the project. Having determined the players'' payoffs, bargaining game theory is then applied to find the equitable risk allocation between the client and contractor. Four different methods including symmetric Nash, non-symmetric Nash, non-symmetric Kalai–Smorodinsky and non-symmetric area monotonic are implemented to determine the equitable risk allocation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, it is implemented in a pipeline project and the quantitative risk allocation is performed for the inflation risk as one of the most significant identified risks.

The set covering problem (SCP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. This paper investigates development of a local branching approach for the SCP. This solution strategy is exact in nature, though it is designed to improve the heuristic behavior of the mixed integer programming solver. The algorithm parameters are tuned by design of experiments approach. The proposed method is tested on the several standard instances. The results show that the algorithm outperforms the best heuristic approaches found in the literature.

Considering the major change occurred in business cells from plant to “chain” and the critical need to choose the best partners to form the supply chain for competing in today’s business setting, one of the vital decisions made at the early steps of constructing a business is supplier selection. Given the fact that the early decisions are inherently strategic and therefore hard and costly to change, it’s been a point of consideration for industries to select the right supplier. It’s clear that different criteria must be investigated and interfered in deciding on the best partner(s) among the alternatives. Thereupon the problem might be regarded as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. There are a variety of techniques to solve a MCDM problem. In this paper we propose a novel technique by combination of decision making trial and evaluation laboratory and graph theory and matrix approach techniques. Eventually, the results are compared to SAW technique and discussed to come to a conclusion.

Nowadays, in turbulent and violate global markets an Agile Supply Chain (ASC) network is frequently considered as a dominant competitive advantage for survival. To achieve the competitive advantage, companies must align with suppliers and customers to streamline operations, as well as agility beyond individual companies. There are many definitions and models about agile supply chain and most of them have emphasized on capabilities and enablers, and their sub attributes, as two critical factors, but regardless of time and its effect on the main attributes. This paper tries to present the role of time on predicting the agility of supply chain, by studying effect of intervention time on enablers and eventually predict the progress trend of agility in supply chain. To gain this end we use ANFIS output to assess agility and compare the effects of agile enablers in period of time on capabilities in Iran Khodro manufacture. This recognition helps managers to consider time as leverage factor and focus on this factor to enhance existent agility level and achievement the desired one.

Having a comprehensive evaluation model with reliable data is useful to improve performance of supply chain. In this paper, according to the nature of supply chain, a model is presented that able to evaluate the performance of the supply chain by a network data envelopment analysis model and by using the financial, intellectual capital (knowledge base), collaboration and responsiveness factors of the supply chain. At the first step, indicators were determined and explained by explanatory Factor Analysis. Then, Network Data Envelopment Analysis (NDEA) model was used. This paper is the result of research related to supply chain of pharmaceutical companies in Tehran Stock Exchange and 115 experts and senior executives have been questioned as sample. The results showed that responsiveness latent variable had the highest correlation with supply chain performance and collaborative, financial and intellectual capital (knowledge base) latent variables were respectively after that. Four of the twenty eight supply chains which were studied obtained 1 as the highest performance rate and the lowest observed performance was 0.43.

periodic vehicle routing problem focuses on establishing a plan of visits to clients over a given time horizon so as to satisfy some service level while optimizing the routes used in each time period. This paper presents a new effective heuristic algorithm based on data mining tools for periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP). The related results of proposed algorithm are compared with the results obtained by best Heuristics and meta-heuristics algorithms in the literature. Computational results indicate that the algorithm performs competitive in the accuracy and its small amount of solving time point of views.

Purpose of this paper: The purpose of this article is to review some of the most prominent applications of RFID in industries and to provide a comprehensive review of the work done from 1985 through 2007 and the research trend on that. The effectiveness of RFID and the challenges that it is facing with are also discussed. Some applications of radio frequency identification in supply chain are briefly reviewed and three large cases of radio frequency identification implementation in supply chain are discussed. Design/methodology/approach: Provides some background on radio frequency identification, and a deep look at the researches conducted from 1985 through 2007. Articles are classified by the year of publications and each case is discussed very briefly. To obtain a good understanding of the level of the researches completed up to the end of 2007 a table and graph are used to demonstrate the summary of results. In this research, author came up with 401 articles on RFID as all are listed in a table. The findings point to this fact that research on RFID has started to pick up on year 2002 with 16 publications and then reached to its pick at year 2005 with 112 publications, and then trend went down to 42 and then up to 51 publications for years 2006 and 2007, respectively. Practical implications (if applicable): What is original/value of paper: Due to the fact that a better management of a system is related to the full understanding of the technologies implemented, sufficient background on the radio frequency identification technology is provided and the types of researches conducted so far on this matter are briefly discussed.