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This paper aims to establish an efficient maintenance management system tailored for healthcare facilities, recognizing the crucial role of medical equipment in providing timely and precise patient care.

The system is designed to function both as an information portal and a decision-support system. A knowledge-based approach is adopted centered on Semantic Web Technologies (SWTs), leveraging a customized ontology model for healthcare facilities’ knowledge capitalization. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is integrated to address decision-support aspects, including equipment criticality assessment, maintenance strategies selection and contracting policies assignment. Additionally, Semantic Query-enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL) is incorporated to streamline the retrieval of decision-support outcomes and other useful information from the system’s knowledge base. A real-life case study conducted at the University Hospital Center of Oran (Algeria) illustrates the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Case study results reveal that 40% of processed equipment is highly critical, 40% is of medium criticality, and 20% is of negligible criticality. The system demonstrates significant efficacy in determining optimal maintenance strategies and contracting policies for the equipment, leveraging combined knowledge and data-driven inference. Overall, SWTs showcases substantial potential in addressing maintenance management challenges within healthcare facilities.

An innovative model for healthcare equipment maintenance management is introduced, incorporating ontology, SWRL and SQWRL, and providing efficient data integration, coordinated workflows and data-driven context-aware decisions, while maintaining optimal flexibility and cross-departmental interoperability, which gives it substantial potential for further development.

This paper aims to enable the analysts of reliability and safety systems to evaluate the risk and prioritize failure modes ideally to prefer measures for reducing the risk of undesired events.

To address the constraints considered in the conventional failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) method for criticality assessment, the authors propose a new hybrid model combining different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to construct a criticality matrix and calculate the weights of different criteria based on five criticalities: personnel, equipment, time, cost and quality. In addition, a preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation (PROMETHEE) method is used to improve the prioritization of the failure modes. A comparative work in which the robust data envelopment analysis (RDEA)-FMEA approach was used to evaluate the validity and effectiveness of the suggested approach and simplify the comparative analysis.

This work aims to highlight the real case study of the automotive parts industry. Using this analysis enables assessing the risk efficiently and gives an alternative ranking to that acquired by the traditional FMEA method. The obtained findings offer that combining of two multi-criteria decision approaches and integrating their outcomes allow for instilling confidence in decision-makers concerning the risk assessment and the ranking of the different failure modes.

This research gives encouraging outcomes concerning the risk assessment and failure modes ranking in order to reduce the frequency of occurrence and gravity of the undesired events by handling different forms of uncertainty and divergent judgments of experts.

This paper aims to examine the impact of an open-plan office (OPO) space organisation on a user’s attitude in the Algerian context; more specifically, it investigates gender differences in the occupants’ perception of such working environment. It, principally, aims to explore the employees’ reaction towards OPO and sees how much such local office type complies with indoor environment quality (IEQ) and psychological comfort.

The theoretical framework of the study is mainly related to environmental psychology referring to the interaction between users and their environment. Post-occupancy evaluation was carried out using exploratory study and questionnaires, followed by statistical analyses. It was performed on a large-scale sample of employees (296 employees) working in recently built OPO situated in Oran (Algeria).

Fundamentally, women appear to show more concern regarding comfort. They do not show much reluctance to be mixed with men in a large office space as opposed to more conservative reaction towards mixing up in outdoor public space environment. As for environmental factors (IEQ), indicators have shown the inadequacy of most buildings in terms of thermal, light or noise comfort. The study has also revealed that a majority of users recognise the professional advantages of the OPO, although it is suggested that their preferred type would be the individual office.

The paper provides a concise starting point for future research interested in developing Algerian context OPO design in terms of both indoor environmental and psychological comfort.

The purpose of this paper is to make a scientific contribution to web information retrieval (IR).

A multiagent system for web IR is proposed based on new technologies: Hierarchical Small‐Worlds (HSW) and Possibilistic Networks (PN). This system is based on a possibilistic qualitative approach which extends the quantitative one.

The paper finds that the relevance of the order of documents changes while passing from a profile to another. Even if the selected terms tend to select the relevant document, these terms are not the most frequent of the document. This criterion shows the asset of the qualitative approach of the SARIPOD system in the selection of relevant documents. The insertion of the factors of preference between query terms in the calculations of the possibility and the necessity consists in increasing the scores of possibilistic relevance of the documents containing these terms with an aim of penalizing the scores of relevance of the documents not containing them. The penalization and the increase in the scores are proportional to the capacity of the terms to discriminate between the documents of the collection.

It is planned to extend the tests of the SARIPOD system to other grammatical categories, like refining the approach for the substantives by considering for example, the verbal occurrences in names definitions, etc. Also, it is planned to carry out finer measurements of the performances of SARIPOD system by extending the tests with other types of web documents.

The system can be useful to help research students find their relevant scientific papers. It must be located in the document server of any research laboratory.

The paper presents SARIPOD, a new qualitative possibilistic model for web IR using multiagent system.

This paper aims to enable the analysts of reliability and safety system to assess the criticality and prioritize failure modes perfectly to prefer actions for controlling the risks of undesirable scenarios.

To resolve the challenge of uncertainty and ambiguous related to the parameters, frequency, non-detection and severity considered in the traditional approach failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA) for risk evaluation, the authors used fuzzy logic where these parameters are shown as members of a fuzzy set, which fuzzified by using appropriate membership functions. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system process is suggested as a dynamic, intelligently chosen model to ameliorate and validate the results obtained by the fuzzy inference system and effectively predict the criticality evaluation of failure modes. A new hybrid model is proposed that combines the grey relational approach and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to improve the exploitation of the FMECA conventional method.

This research project aims to reflect the real case study of the gas turbine system. Using this analysis allows evaluating the criticality effectively and provides an alternate prioritizing to that obtained by the conventional method. The obtained results show that the integration of two multi-criteria decision methods and incorporating their results enable to instill confidence in decision-makers regarding the criticality prioritizations of failure modes and the shortcoming concerning the lack of established rules of inference system which necessitate a lot of experience and shows the weightage or importance to the three parameters severity, detection and frequency, which are considered to have equal importance in the traditional method.

This paper is providing encouraging results regarding the risk evaluation and prioritizing failures mode and decision-makers guidance to refine the relevance of decision-making to reduce the probability of occurrence and the severity of the undesirable scenarios with handling different forms of ambiguity, uncertainty and divergent judgments of experts.

This paper aims to propose a new qualitative indicator for the evaluation of the productions of researchers in any discipline.

Based on the study of existing quantitative indicators, the authors’ approach consisted of the hybridization of two indicators. This hybridization is based on the individual H_index (Hi_index) and H_index contemporary (Hc_index) weighted by qualitative factors. The initial sources of the data are online bibliographic databases, such as Google Scholar and Publish or Perish.

A new scientometric indicator was used to compare the scientific production quality of researchers and their classification (as part of a research community) as the classification of national and international research institutions. The authors have applied a new indicator to compare and classify the members of their laboratory, RIADI, according to their quality of scientific production.

The indicator is an improvement of the H_index. It is a measure that can have an impact on society (influencing research attitudes, affecting quality of research). By this contribution, the authors measure more than one aspect by involving all the external factors that can affect the quality of research.

This paper fulfils a gap in the literature concerning the absence of a qualitative indicator among the set of existing quantitative measures. Additionally, this paper addresses the limitations of the existing qualitative practices, such as peer review and citation analysis. In the new qualitative indicator, the authors involve all of these qualitative aspects: the influence of the age of the paper, the number of co-authors, the order of the co-authors, the impact factor of journals and the conference rankings.

This study aims to analyze the pattern of deaths in detention in Northern Tunisia as well as the causes of death.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional retrospective study including all the casualties of death in detention examined in the legal medicine Department in the main teaching hospital from 2005 to 2019. The department covers 10 out of the 11 governorates of Northern Tunisia and 13 prisons.

Of a total of 197 casualties, only 2 were females. The mean age was 45.39 ± 14.43 years. A known medical history was reported in 63.5%, mainly cardiovascular disease, mental health disorders and diabetes. Half of the deaths occurred at the hospital. A total of 53 victims spent less than one year in custody before their death. Most deaths occurred due to disease-related causes (78.7%; n = 155); among these, 69 victims died from cardiovascular disease. Suicide accounted for 3.6% of the casualties and homicides for four cases.

Several missing data regarding the details of the detention circumstances as well as the absence in some cases of the toxicological and histopathology analysis results, which could bias the study findings.

Death in detention in Northern Tunisia involved mainly males between their 30s and their 50s who died mainly from cardiovascular or pulmonary disease. These results underscore the importance of empowering the penitentiary health system.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of largest studies with regard to the number of decedents and the number of prisons from the Arab countries allowing to draw a pattern of casualties of death in prison.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in-depth and explain the issues related to the experience of Tunisia, a developing country, in its attempt to move from Euro-Continental rule-based generally accepted accounting principles (GAAPs) to an accounting system adapted to international financial reporting standards (IFRS).

The study is conducted via a qualitative methodology based on a content analysis of primary data from interviews with key actors involved in financial reporting in Tunisia.

Findings reveal that local Tunisian GAAPs, adapted to IFRS in their 1996 version, failed to establish a financial reporting accounting culture and meet public-interest firms’ informational needs. This is mainly related to factors, such as the simplified methods adopted (generally adequate to the identified needs of users of small and medium-sized entity financial statements) and the hybrid aspect of the Tunisian accounting standards due to the co-existence of Euro-Continental and Anglo-Saxon parties. Moreover, the findings show that the lack of political willpower and the absence of updates to changes in IFRS have compromised the proper functioning of standardization and control structures.

The study’s results may interest regulators and policymakers of many developing countries that have not pursued the harmonization of their local GAAPs with IFRS. In addition, findings from the research provide insights into the rough road towards harmonization, the dysfunctions of the latter and delays in developing countries.

The research highlights the complexity for an emerging country with Euro-Continental accounting traditions to move to IFRS.

This paper aims to examine the effect of family ownership on the payment method of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals. It also investigates the market reaction around the announcement of these M&A deals.

Archival data of M&A deals of a sample of Taiwanese listed firms during 2008–2018 are collected and examined using probit, event study and OLS models. This study addresses the endogeneity concern using the two-stage least squares statistical technique and Heckman’s two-step estimation method.

This study finds that family firms are more likely to use cash as an exchange medium in M&A deals to avoid the problem of diluting control rights. This study further finds that family firms receive a positive market reaction around the announcement of M&A deals relative to non-family counterparts. The empirical results support the notion that family ownership is a value-creation structure.

The findings provide additional evidence-based insights into the debate about family ownership with the aim of informing policy and offering practical recommendations to expand the US-based literature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide empirical evidence on the impact of family ownership on payment method choice in M&A activities in Taiwan. It also provides novel evidence that family firms experience value gains when taking M&A investment decisions relative to non-family firms.