Sharif Digital Repository

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a structured review framework for managing business performance. The framework entails the review of business performance, including the strategic relevance of the measures, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance measurement system itself. Design/methodology/approach – A range of approaches and tools are employed in the framework, which features a review card providing a highlevel view of the review process, showing the different types of review perspectives and their interactions. Findings – The performance measurement system of an organisation is a mechanism to manage and control the organisation. Maintaining the effectiveness... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop an exclusive review framework for the Performance Prism. Design/methodology/approach: An extensive literature survey on performance measurement is used to identify the main aspects of the review in such systems. Various dimensions related to the characteristics of Performance Prism are explored. All the findings are then rationally put together to develop the proposed conceptual framework. Findings: The paper presents a conceptual model to review performance measurement systems (PMS) which are designed based on Performance Prism. The presented framework categorizes review processes and tools into two main categories; Business Performance... 

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated dynamic model, based on empirical findings, which can be used in research centers for evaluating the performance of research projects by using multiple attribute utility theory. Design/methodology/approach-In developing the model, the measures by which the performance of research projects could be evaluated are identified by Delphi method and group decision making. These measures are categorized into three general success factors of time, cost and quality. Then a multi-attribute utility function is applied to integrate these dimensions to determine the utility resulting from the performance of the project. Findings-Through... 

Assembly line is the most well-known mass production system which was first used by Henry Ford in automobile industries. Malfunction of a station will have an impact on the whole assembly line. Having a great impact on the performance of the whole assembly line, Interaction of the stations on each other should be considered precisely. In this paper we will use discrete event simulation to improve performance of a station and the whole assembly line by smoothing the exit rate, which is the entrance rate to the next station. At the end of this article, the results for a case problem are illustrated and several conclusions are driven. © 2007 IEEE  

This paper proposes a novel multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework for performance measurement in higher education institutions (HEIs) using semi-structured interviews, expert panels, and questionnaires. The proposed method comprises the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and Best-Worst Method (BWM). Fuzzy set theory is used to address the vagueness and uncertainty of experts’ judgments, and the group decision-making process is handled by the Delphi method. The FDM filters out the criteria extracted from the literature, and BWM finds the relative weight of the criteria and indicators. A real-world case from a public university is employed to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness... 

The debate over innovativeness of large firms and SMEs, which was bolded by Schumpeter, still continues under mixed empirical evidences. There are several implications for this debate including policy orientation in support of large firms or SMEs. But there is a scarce of studies in developing countries and no such study in Iran yet. The present study has explored the proportionality of increase of innovation activity versus firm size within 522 Iranian knowledge-based firms categorized in 9 industries. Innovation activity was measured by R&D expenditure while firm size stood for number of employees. Using log-log regression in the first phase, it was found that R&D expenditure confirms a... 

This paper presents the results of the shared task with the aim of arousal level recognition for the competition held in conjunction with the 27th Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE 2019). A database annotated with arousal level labels released by Research Center for Development of Advanced Technologies. The contest was held on arousal database according to a defined protocol. Three teams were able to enter into the final stage of the competition according to compare their performance measure with the baseline method. The baseline method is proposed by the data owner. The aim of this paper is outlining the database, protocol design, and providing an overview of top-ranked... 

Rumor routing is a classic routing algorithm based on the random walk of agents. In this paper, a method to improve the performance of this routing algorithm is proposed. Here, we try to improve the latency and energy consumption of the traditional algorithm using propagation of query and event agents in straight lines, instead of using purely random walk paths. As our results confirm, this method improves the delivery ratio of the queries which is a drawback of traditional rumor routing. To compare the performance measures with traditional algorithm, a simulation framework is developed and extensive simulations are performed. ©2007 IEEE  

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to model the impact of customer knowledge on the performance of organization with a focus on information technology industry. Furthermore, it is intended to analyze the effect of customer knowledge investment on the performance measures, by reviewing investment policies. Design/methodology/approach: The relationship between customer knowledge and performance measures was specified using literature review and grounded theory method. The system dynamics approach was then applied to analyze the impact of the customer knowledge on the performance measures. Findings: This study provided a dynamic model on the causal relationship between customer knowledge... 

Iran is a country in a dry part of the world and extensively suffers from drought. Drought is a natural, temporary, and iterative phenomenon that is caused by shortage in rainfall, which affects people's health and well-being adversely as well as impacting the society's economy and politics with far-reaching consequences. Information on intensity, duration, and spatial coverage of drought can help decision makers to reduce the vulnerability of the drought-affected areas, and therefore, lessen the risks associated with drought episodes. One of the major challenges of modeling drought (and short-term forecasting) in Iran is unavailability of long-term meteorological data for many parts of the... 

In this research, a bi-objective vendor managed inventory model in a supply chain with one vendor (producer) and several retailers is developed, in which determination of the optimal numbers of different machines that work in series to produce a single item is considered. While the demand rates of the retailers are deterministic and known, the constraints are the total budget, required storage space, vendor's total replenishment frequencies, and average inventory. In addition to production and holding costs of the vendor along with the ordering and holding costs of the retailers, the transportation cost of delivering the item to the retailers is also considered in the total chain cost. The... 

We consider M/M/1/∞ systems with inventory in which completing each service in the queueing system requires an on-hand inventory. Continuous review (r, Q) policy is considered for the inventory system, and lead times are assumed to be mixed exponentially distributed. During stockout, arriving demands get rejected from the queue and become lost (lost sale situation). We derive stationary distribution of product form of joint queue length and on-hand inventory. The resulting distribution is employed to compute performance measures which can be used to derive the optimal policy. Optimal order size for predetermined reorder policy is initially determined and finally, optimal reorder point and... 

The debate over innovativeness of large firms and SMEs, which was bolded by Schumpeter, still continues under mixed empirical evidences. There are several implications for this debate including policy orientation in support of large firms or SMEs. But there is a scarce of studies in developing countries and no such study in Iran yet. The present study has explored the proportionality of increase of innovation activity versus firm size within 522 Iranian knowledge-based firms categorized in 9 industries. Innovation activity was measured by R&D expenditure while firm size stood for number of employees. Using log–log regression in the first phase, it was found that R&D expenditure confirms a... 

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar is known for its superiority over conventional radar due to its antenna and waveform diversity. However, the increased hardware cost (due to multiple transmitters and receivers), power consumption (due to multiple transmitters and pulses), and computational complexity (due to numerous pulses) form the drawbacks of MIMO radar. On one hand, a higher estimation accuracy is required, but on the other hand, a lower number of active antennas/pulses is desirable. Therefore, in this paper, by proposing a convex optimization approach for the general case of transmitter-receiver-pulse selection, we will minimize the total number of active antennas/pulses in... 

An optimal algorithm based on branch-and-bound approach is presented in this paper to determine lot sizes for a single item in material requirement planning environments with deterministic time-phased demand and constant ordering cost with zero lead time, where all-units discounts are available from vendors and backlog is not permitted. On the basis of the proven properties of optimal order policy, a tree-search procedure is presented to construct the sequence of optimal orders. Some useful fathom rules have been proven, which make the algorithm very efficient. To compare the performance of this algorithm with the other existing optimal algorithms, an experimental design with various... 

In some applicable scenarios, such as community patrolling, mobile nodes are restricted to move only in their own communities. Exploiting the meetings of the nodes within the same community and the nodes within the neighboring communities, a delay tolerant network (DTN) can provide communication between any two nodes. In this paper, two analytical models based on stochastic reward nets (SRNs) are proposed to evaluate the performance of the epidemic content retrieval in such multi-community DTNs. Performance measures computed by the proposed models are the average retrieval delay and the average number of transmissions. The monolithic SRN model proposed in the first step is not scalable, in...