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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic feasibility of a three-echelon Halal Meat Supply Chain (HMSC) network that is monitored by a proposed radio frequency identification (RFID)-based management system for enhancing the integrity traceability of Halal meat products and to maximize the average integrity number of Halal meat products, maximize the return of investment (ROI), maximize the capacity utilization of facilities and minimize the total investment cost of the proposed RFID-monitoring system. The location-allocation problem of facilities needs also to be resolved in conjunction with the quantity flow of Halal meat products from farms to abattoirs and from abattoirs to retailers.

First, a deterministic multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model was developed and used for optimizing the proposed RFID-based HMSC network toward a comprised solution based on four conflicting objectives as described above. Second, a stochastic programming model was developed and used for examining the impact on the number of Halal meat products by altering the value of integrity percentage. The ε-constraint approach and the modified weighted sum approach were proposed for acquisition of non-inferior solutions obtained from the developed models. Furthermore, the Max-Min approach was used for selecting the best solution among them.

The research outcome shows the applicability of the developed models using a real case study. Based on the computational results, a reasonable ROI can be achievable by implementing RFID into the HMSC network.

This work addresses interesting avenues for further research on exploring the HMSC network design under different types of uncertainties and transportation means. Also, environmentalism has been becoming increasingly a significant global problem in the present century. Thus, the presented model could be extended to include the environmental aspects as an objective function.

The model can be utilized for food supply chain designers. Also, it could be applied to realistic problems in the field of supply chain management.

Although there were a few studies focusing on the configuration of a number of HMSC networks, this area is overlooked by researchers. The study shows the developed methodology can be a useful tool for designers to determine a cost-effective design of food supply chain networks.

In the present paper, the authors will discuss the solvability of a class of nonlinear anisotropic elliptic problems (P), with the presence of a lower-order term and a non-polynomial growth which does not satisfy any sign condition which is described by an N-uplet of N-functions satisfying the Δ₂-condition, within the fulfilling of anisotropic Sobolev-Orlicz space. In addition, the resulting analysis requires the development of some new aspects of the theory in this field. The source term is merely integrable.

An approximation procedure and some priori estimates are used to solve the problem.

The authors prove the existence of entropy solutions to unilateral problem in the framework of anisotropic Sobolev-Orlicz space with bounded domain. The resulting analysis requires the development of some new aspects of the theory in this field.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the existence of entropy solutions to unilateral problem in the framework of anisotropic Sobolev-Orlicz space with bounded domain.

We consider, as discretization in space, the nonconforming mesh developed in SUSHI (Scheme Using Stabilization and Hybrid Interfaces) developed in Eymard et al. (2010) for a semi-linear heat equation. The time discretization is performed using a uniform mesh. We are concerned with a nonlinear scheme that has been studied in Bradji (2016) in the context of the general framework GDM (Gradient Discretization Method) (Droniou et al., 2018) which includes SUSHI. We provide sufficient conditions on the size of the spatial mesh and the time step which allow to prove a W1,∞(L2)-error estimate. This error estimate can be viewed as an improvement for the W1,2(L2)-error estimate proved in Bradji (2016). The W1,∞(L2)-error estimate we want to prove in this note was stated without proof in Bradji (2016, Remark 7.2, Page 1302). Its proof is based on a comparison with an appropriately chosen auxiliary finite volume scheme along with the derivation of some new estimates on its solution.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.