Sharif Digital Repository

Customer loyalty plays one of the most vital roles in business profitability. This concept gives special prominence to attaining new customers, which is by far less costly than attracting new ones. Therefore, investigating the impact of factors affecting customer retention is of precise significance. In the respect, corporate social responsibility, as an imperative factor impacting customer loyalty, gained more attention by various companies in the last decades.Over the past few months, the world has encountered the hazard of the Coronavirus pandemic. Most aspects of daily life in different parts of the globe have been affected by this disease. Companies are no exception. The coronavirus has... 

In the last decade, emergency department (ED) overcrowding has become a national crisis for the US healthcare system. Increasing mortality rates, decreasing quality of care, financial losses due to walkouts, and ambulance diversion are some of the consequences of ED overcrowding. Given the increasing demand in terms of ambulance utilization which we can see an instance of it in the COVID-19 pandemic, being able to allocate service requests to EDs efficiently, becomes a key function of emergency medical services. in this investigation, an algorithm of deep reinforcement learning called deep Q-learning is used to address this problem and to assign ambulances to ED's appropriately. under... 

In this study, providing home care services by hospitals in the epidemic situations such as COVID-19 is proposed for the first time. Moreover, a mathematical formulation is developed to provide simultaneous decision-making about serving patients without COVID-19, scheduling nurses in the non-COVID-19 wards of hospitals, and scheduling and routing for nurses to serve patients at home. This problem aims to develop essential compatibilities to keep people safe and help continue vital healthcare services during the COVID-19 and similar pandemics. Accordingly, nurses' preferences, the number of available hospital beds, the patient-to-nurse ratio, the Unavailability of some nurses due to COVID-19,... 

People's lives have been affected by the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Due to the high infectivity, governments have screened people, imposed curfews, mandated the use of masks, and so on to reduce the rate of transmission of the disease among people. Meanwhile, infected people are getting treatments: people who are slightly affected are quarantined at home, and those who are heavily affected are treated in hospitals. Hence there is an excessive increase in the hospital workload. On the one hand, this increased workload leads to physical fatigue and, on the other hand, to psychological problems, stress, etc. for the healthcare professionals. Therefore, it is very important to take care of... 

Among disasters, outbreaks of pandemics account for excessive human and material damages,including a significant number of deaths. During any pandemic and once an or a set of effective vaccines have been identified/produced, governments all around the world enter a crucial phase when a crucial demand for an effective global vaccination campaign arises to vaccinate the population to stop/avoid the disease, knowing that the vaccines are not immediately available and may even become available with considerable delays (i.e., delivery and validation delays). Therefore, such phase of a pandemic is very crucial to identify and produce effective vaccines as well as to globally and equitably... 

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased environmental risks due to widespread face mask use in production, consumption, and disposal. This study uses surgical single-use as a pyrolysis feedstock due to increased demand. This study investigates the conversion of valuable materials from waste through the recycling of surgical single-use masks in a fluidized bed. The first stage of this study focused on identifying and specifying the main components in the filter layers of disposable surgical masks, which were the compounds in the filter layers made of polypropylene. TGA curves investigated thermal behavior of disposable surgical mask layers, revealing pyrolysis feedstock can produce volatile...