International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

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This paper offers an approach that could be useful for diverse types of layout problems or even area allocation problems. By this approach there is no need to large number of discrete variables and only by few continues variables large-scale layout problems could be solved in polynomial time. This is resulted from dividing area into discrete and continuous dimensions. Also defining decision variables as starting and finishing point of departments in area makes it possible to model layout problem so. This paper also provides new technique that models basic constraints of layout problems.

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Innovation & Prosperity Fund (IPfund) in Iran as a governmental organization aims to develop new technology-based firms (NTBF) by its available resources through financing these firms. The innovative projects which refer to IPfund for financing are in a stage which can receive both fixed rate facilities and partnership in the projects, i.e. profit loss sharing (PLS). Since this fund must protect its initial and real value of its capital against inflation rate, therefore, this study aims to examine the suitable financing methods with considering risk. For this purpose we study on risk assessment models to see how to use risk adjusted net present value for knowledge based projects. On this basis, the NPV of a project has been analyzed by taking into account the risk variables (sales revenue and the cost of fixed investment) and using Monte Carlo simulation. The results indicate that in most cases for a project, the risk adjusted NPV in partnership scenario is more than the other scenario. In addition to, partnership in projects which demand for industrial production facilities is preferable for the IPfund than projects calling for working capital.

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Sustainability performance assessment is a significant aspect of making sustainable decisions for organizations. Measuring sustainability performance of firms in a time span, covered in several periods, leads to more rational decision-making and planning by managers. Furthermore, in many application fields, there are discrete and bounded measures. However, there has been no systematic effort to analyze sustainability performance of Decision-Making Units (DMUs) in multiple periods of time when discrete and bounded factors are presented. Therefore, approaches based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are proposed in this paper to tackle this problem. To illustrate this issue in more detail, the performance of systems is measured for all dimensions, including economic, social, and environmental ones and for each period. Moreover, the overall multi-period sustainability performance and sustainability performance of each period are estimated using the suggested one-stage methods. Then, the sustainability performance is investigated for conditions in which internal relationships among economic, social, and environmental indicators are presented. Moreover, sustainability performance changes and performance changes of dimensions are addressed. An example and a case study are provided to explain our proposed approach. Results show that the introduced ideas are practical and effective.