return on his or her investment with a small risk of incurring a loss; an oncologist prescribes radiotherapy to a cancer patient so as to destroy the tumor without causing damage to healthy organs; an airline manager constructs schedules that incur small salary costs and that ensure smooth operation even in the case of disruptions. All three decision makers (DMs) are in a similar situation—they...

The concept of biodiversity, its introduction in conservation biology, and its evolution in the framework of systematic conservation planning, are analyzed. Attempts to quantify biodiversity and to find surrogate measures for it are described. It is shown that biodiversity originated as and remains a fundamentally normative concept. However, while attempts to reduce biodiversity conservation to...

The increased competition in the domestic and international market has posed excessive pressure to the manufacturing organizations to successfully implement the ISO 9001 quality standards. The implementation process becomes more challenging when it is surrounded by numerous barriers. Though the presence of barriers makes it more difficult but certain factors (hereby known as enablers) makes it ...

Outsourcing is a good strategy for firms that need to reduce operating costs and improve competitiveness, but it remains important for firms to scientifically select the appropriate outsourcing providers. Some efforts have been made regarding outsourcing problems, but these efforts incorrectly assumed that the criteria in the decision process are independent, which is not true in the real world...

This paper presents a formal model that characterizes the political mechanisms of demographic change, establishing a critical link in economic development. We demonstrate that fertility decisions are determined by three fundamental political variables: political stability, political capacity and political freedom. Modeling strategic multi-objective policy setting by the government, we derive a ...

Like any other resources planning and management, groundwater management is performed in a stochastic environment in which the system itself involves a number of random elements. Consequences as a result of decisions made based on analyses are not certain. This paper presents a management model using the chance-constrained framework which explicitly considers the random nature of aquifer proper...

This paper introduces a multi-factory scheduling problem with heterogeneous factories and parallel machines. problem, as major part of supply chain planning, includes the finding suitable factory for each job assigned jobs at factory, simultaneously. For first time, this studies multi-objective in production network which has its customers demands can be satisfied by itself or other factories. ...

Decision Neural Network is a new approach for solving multi-objective decision-making problems based on artificial neural networks. Using inaccurate evaluation data, network training has improved and the number of educational data sets has decreased. The available training method is based on the gradient decent method (BP). One of its limitations is related to its convergence speed. Therefore,...