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This study aims to design a national innovation capability appraisal model. This would indicate Iran’s competitiveness situation among regional countries and suggest factors influencing Iran’s performance promotion.

The methodology included four sections: bibliometric analysis to discover intellectual evolution of innovation capability and related concepts; construction of a multi-division structure of national innovation capability according to the clusters extracted from bibliometric results, and experts’ opinions; creating dynamic network data envelope analysis (DEA) according to designed structure, and analysis of Iran’s performance among regional countries; identification and prioritization of the factors extracted from experts’ opinions that improve Iran’s performance in created network using Fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method.

The contemporary bibliometric analysis by its extracted clusters proved the necessity of a multi-division for measuring national innovation capability performance that each division and indicators of each step were designed according to clusters concepts. In designed structure, dynamic network DEA results revealed the weakness of Iran’s performance in the third division in the transformation of patents and high-tech imports to high-tech and creative exports, which led to proposing improving factors by getting experts’ opinions to enhance Iran’s performance in this division by prioritizing them.

One of the limitations of this research was that the indicators used in three phases of national innovation capability in DEA were extracted only from the World Intellectual Property Organization database. Another limitation was the number of experts in focus group sessions because due to the difficulty of gathering them in one session, the researchers lost the participation of some of these recognized experts. Also, the research concentration was on the improvement of the third phase of national innovation capability, in which Iran’s performance was weak.

Creating a relationship between the divisions of dynamic network DEA, as a national innovation capability appraisal model, and the concepts of clusters extracted from reviewing the intellectual structure and evolution of innovation capability and related concepts.

Since late 1980s there has been a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions in which brands have played the primary role. It is no longer rare to find offers at a multiple of more than 25 times company earning, or two or three times its share value. In this paper we attempt to reach several objectives. First, the marketing and finance perspectives of brand equity are presented, and their interrelationships are shown. Second, the different measurements of brand equity are presented. Next, a comprehensive model of global brand equity, which we believe is capable of both estimating the brand equity more accurately and show the sources of the equity will be proposed.

Brand awareness is a pivotal, but often neglected, aspect of consumer-based brand equity. This paper revisits brand awareness measures in the context of global brand management.

Drawing on the method of Laurent et al. (1995), this cross-sectional longitudinal study examines changes in brand awareness over time, with sample sizes of approximately 300 whisky consumers per wave in three countries: United Kingdom, Taiwan and Greece.

There is consistency in the underlying structure of awareness scores across countries, and over time, extending the work of Laurent et al. (1995). Results show that a relevant operationalisation of brand awareness needs to account for the history of the brand. Furthermore, the nature of the variation of brand awareness over time interacts with a brand’s market share.

When modelling the impact of brand awareness researchers need to consider two factors – the brand’s market share and whether a more stable or volatile measure is sought. This avoids mis-specifying the country-level contribution of brand awareness.

Global brand managers should be wary of adopting a “one size fits all” approach. The choice of brand awareness measure depends on the brand’s market share, and the desire for higher sensitivity or stability.

The paper provides one of the few multi-country investigations into brand awareness that can help inform global brand management.

Improvement of workflow scheduling in distributed engineering systems

The authors proposed a hybrid meta heuristic optimization algorithm.

The authors have made improvement in hybrid approach by exploiting of genetic algorithm and simulated annealing plus points.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents a novel theorem and novel hybrid approach.

This study aims to design a reliable multi-level, multi-product and multi-period location-inventory-routing three-echelon supply chain network, which considers disruption risks and uncertainty in the inventory system.

A robust optimization approach is used to deal with the effects of uncertainty, and a mixed-integer nonlinear programming multi-objective model is proposed. The first objective function seeks to minimize inventory costs, such as ordering costs, holding costs and carrying costs. It also helps to choose one of the two modes of bearing the expenses of shortage or using the excess capacity to produce at the expense of each. The second objective function seeks to minimize the risk of disruption in distribution centers and suppliers, thereby increasing supply chain reliability. As the proposed model is an non-deterministic polynomial-time-hard model, the Lagrangian relaxation algorithm is used to solve it.

The proposed model is applied to a real supply chain in the aftermarket automotive service industry. The results of the model and the current status of the company under study are compared, and suggestions are made to improve the supply chain performance. Using the proposed model, companies are expected to manage the risk of supply chain disruptions and pay the lowest possible costs in the event of a shortage. They can also use reverse logistics to minimize environmental damage and use recycled goods.

In this paper, the problem definition is based on a real case; it is about the deficiencies in the after-sale services in the automobile industry. It considers the disruption risk at the first level of the supply chain, selects the supplier considering the parameters of price and disruption risk and examines surplus capacity over distributors’ nominal capacity.

The purpose of this paper is to present green supply chain, resilient supply chain, agile supply chain, cold supply chain and lean supply chain (GRACL SC) procedures based on a detailed perspective, analyzing subjects in the past 19 years with a systematic literature review (SLR) of the papers reported from 2000 to 2019, and offering information and guidelines for further studies.

This research is based on 17 keywords in the title and topic of the articles and collects data from Web of Science (WOS) databases and objectively chooses 1,190 articles and performs meta-data analyses. Tables and statistical reports are based on the following three filters: publication year, authors and document type. At least, 39 publications from the ISI WOS has been examined for presenting information of categorization of the conducted research with regard to the content analysis, comprising the conceptual development and obstacles, cooperation with the supply chain elements, as well as mathematical and other optimization models.

Finally, this study answered three main questions in the research and demonstrates that the majority studies in the green supply chain (GSC) and a minimum number of studies on the cold supply chain have been conducted and 27 factors are chosen to achieve the 2000 to 2019 GRACL SCM model which robust and fit for Iranian food industries. The model shows that the agile, resilient and lean supply chain have direct effect on GSC and it can be said that all 27 groups which are selected for the final model of this research can be the main groups in the supply chain.

This paper was actually conducted by authors who reported it. To prevent plagiarized, redoubled efforts have been made and actually this paper is based on SLR methodology and the results are real and the researcher discusses the results appropriately. This investigation can have a positive impact within the field of expanding supply chain flexibility and lessening squander within the Iranian generation framework.

By analyzing urbanism products, development plans and the process of modernization in Iran, the purpose of this paper is to critically trace the effect of dictatorial control on urbanism and the emergence of government-imposed urban segregation.

The main body of this work is concentrated on studying the history of urbanism in Iran, of which collecting data and descriptions played a crucial role. To prevent the limitations associated with singular methods, the methodology of this research is based on methodological triangulation (Denzin, 2017). With the triangulation scheme, the data are gathered by combining different qualitative and quantitative methods such as library, archival and media research, online resources, non-participatory observation and photography. For the empirical part, the city of Tehran is selected as the case study. Moreover, individual non-structured interviews with the locals were conducted to gain more insights regarding the housing projects.

The results reveal that despite the intense propaganda, the regime policies barely mentioned the urban poor. With the rise of new principles of architecture and urban planning, the regime tried to promote the image of an updated society; restructuring of the urban space was part of this process. However, the majority of the urban projects disregarded the financial ability of low-income groups and eventually benefited only the middle and upper classes. Also, by imposing a physical distance, low-income neighborhoods were located in the south in order to marginalize the urban poor who were in contrast with the idea of a modern city. Under these circumstances, severe economic inequality was provoked, which to this day has transformed into a complex socio-spatial segregation.

The works of general historical studies are not concentrated on urbanism and urban researchers have mostly focused on urbanism products during different periods, regardless, of the importance of urbanism as a tool in the service of hegemony. In other words, the majority of existing research investigates the evolution of urbanism and architecture in modern Iran, by questioning “what has been built?” and has ignored to trace the beneficiaries of the urban projects and to question “built for whom?”. Moreover, urbanism under the government of Mossadegh (1951–1953) has been largely overlooked, which could be due to his short time as Prime Minister of Iran. Mossadegh’s government was the first democratic government in Iran; hence investigating the policies used in this period has a great importance.

The purpose of this study is to analyse various risks associated with third-party logistics (3PL) in the coffee supply chain and to present a framework that computes the influence of these risks on the critical success factors of the coffee supply chain.

The risks have been identified through a comprehensive literature review and validation by industry experts. The paper utilises an interpretive structural modelling (ISM) methodology for developing a hierarchical relationship among the CSFs. Furthermore, fuzzy MICMAC analysis is carried out to categorise these CSFs based on their driving power and dependence value. The fuzzy technique for order preferences by the similarity of an ideal solution (fuzzy-TOPSIS) approach has been applied to prioritise the risks associated with 3PL based on their ability to influence the CSFs of the coffee SC. Furthermore, we performed a sensitivity analysis to analyse the stability of the results obtained in this study.

This study illustrates ten risks associated with 3PL and five CSFs in the coffee supply chain. The analysis revealed that coffee enterprises need to develop a balanced pricing strategy to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage, whereas the lack of direct customer communication is the most dominant 3PL risk affecting the CSFs.

This research provides coffee enterprises with a generalised framework with set parameters that can be used to attain a successful coffee supply chain in any developing nation.

The study contributes to the literature by being the first kind of study, which has used fuzzy ISM-MICMAC to analyse the CSFs of the coffee supply chain and fuzzy-TOPSIS for analysing the impact of various risks associated with the 3PL in the coffee supply chain. Thus, this work can be considered a benchmark for future research and advancement in the coffee business field.