فائزه اسدیان اردکانی

The tourism industry is one of the most important factors creating wealth and employment in the world. Religious tourism is one of the main types of tourism in Iran. This kind of tourism can be a source of knowledge, development and sustainability for communities. This study provides a comprehensive framework for identifying and investigating the direct and indirect effects of each of the factors affecting the development of religious tourism in the Islamic Republic of Iran. For this purpose, at first factors affecting the development of religious tourism in Iran is identified by comprehensive review of the literature and opinions of experts in the field and then these factors were rated using Interpretive Structural Modeling(ISM). According to the results “Formulating rules and regulations” and “Having systematic thinking”, is the most basic elements in the development of religious tourism of Iran that must be taken into serious consideration by executives in the industry. The results of this research will help policy makers so that they can choose a better path for the development of religious tourism.

Religious tourism is a form of tourism receiving more attention nowadays, whose development is on the agenda. This research is conducted with the aim of designing a theoretical model of the development of religious tourism in Iran, through a qualitative grounded theory. To collect data, profound and unstructured interviews were conducted with 18 experts familiar with the subject. These interviews were analyzed through open, pivotal and selective coding. Some components were extracted from these basic concepts. These components were then classified under the heading of causal factors, pivotal phenomena, grounding conditions, interventional factors, strategies and outcomes of religious tourism development. The causative factors affecting the development of the country's religious tourism were identified in the form of "management of attractions and events", "management of advertisement" and "development of the infrastructure and services fulfilling the needs of religious tourists", and interventional factors including "rules and regulations" and "planning of Religious tourism grand policies" were identified. Grounding conditions included indicators of "cultural conditions" and "economic conditions", and strategies include "marketing", "improving the environmental conditions, "human resource and training", " public-private interaction for the development of religious tourism", "systemic outlook ", and" attraction of investors". The identified consequences included "increasing the remaining of religious tourists", "reinforcing the basic motivations of religious tourists", "increasing the number of religious tourists," and "increasing the revenue from religious tourist’s visit of the country."

Tourism industry is considered as one of the main parts of the global economy. Development of tourism as a cultural phenomenon can provide opportunities for cultural exchange between tourists and host communities. Tourism can have direct and indirect effects on host society culture. This study was aimed to examine the cultural effects of tourism in city of Yazd using Fuzzy DEMATEL. Results of this study confirm that, achieving new ideas by contacting with other cultures and their lifestyle, changing in behavior patterns of society, leaving cultural beliefs in imitation of tourists, revitalizing national and cultural pride, providing opportunity for identifying and organizing regional cultural resources, and cross-cultural interactions are direct cultural effects of tourism in city of Yazd. Results of this study can be useful in providing strategies for comprehension and management of the cultural effects of tourists in the city of Yazd.

Today, the tourism industry is one of the most important service industries which competes closely with other industries in the world. In recent years, information technology has had a significant effect on all sectors of the industry. Electronic Tourism is the link between tourism and information technology. Capability and competitive advantages of E-tourism are important factors in creating economic leap in the tourism industry. This study intends to employ the benefits of electronic tourism towards traditional tourism. So, this study offers comprehensive framework to identify and assess direct and indirect effects of each factor affecting the development of electronic tourism in Yazd province. For this purpose, first, factors affecting the development of electronic tourism in Yazd province were identified by comprehensive review of the literature and opinions of experts in the field. And then, these factors were rated using Interpretive Structural Modeling(ISM). The population of the research are academic tourism experts and professionals which are active in the tourism industry in Yazd province. Also interviews and questionnaires were used to gather data. The content validity of the questionnaire was approved by the experts. According to the results, "operating and financial possibilities", are the most basic factors in the development of electronic tourism of Yazd province that must be taken into serious consideration by executives in the industry. The results of this research will help policy makers, so that they can choose a better path for the development of electronic tourism.

In recent years, following the rapid industrialization of communities is of great interest to environmental deficiencies and governments have started to enforce environmental laws. According to requirements of today's world, Green supply chain management is inevitable. This study was aimed to identify and prioritize the factors affecting green supply chain in the automotive industry companies, and provide the benefits and disadvantages of greening the supply chain in mentioned companies. In this study, after identifying the factors affecting green supply chain, we tried to propose some proper strategies to help managers of the industry for a better environmental management.

Before we start it is worth noting that the role of mass media in the development of tourism industry is obvious. It is also true that in the age of information and communication, media are considered as one of the most important means of achieving societal goals. Tourism industry is one of the Industries that the media and its proper management can play a crucial role in its development. We have, therefore, set the aim of this study to be a contribution to the tourism literature, especially on how the media can promote more effective tourism. This paper will also try to provide applicable suggestions for authorities so that they can choose a medium which is ranked here to be most effective. It should also be mentioned that due to various influences that the media can have on audiences, they can cause various reactions from the audience. Therefore, the selection of appropriate media for the purpose of promoting more flourishing tourism is an important factor. And, appropriate media is defined here as those media which are more influential on their audience. Proper use of mass media such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and the Internet, in addition to paving the way for the development of tourism growth areas, also helps growing the tourism Industry.Statement of the Research Problem: We believe not much literature exists in Iran that can offer a rank-ordered media usage in tourism industry; consequently there is confusion over what medium is more influential in promoting tourism in Iran. Here, factors that are affecting the choice of media in various fields of tourism are identified both by literature review and experts’ opinions. Then, we use these factors to show how they can be used to rank the media in various fields of tourism such as health tourism, sport tourism and educational tourism. This is all done by fuzzy VIKOR method and we think this rank-ordered media can solve the problem. To meet the objective of this research required us to study it by applying a survey method. In order to do that, those experts who were involved in tourism and knew how to connect tourism to the media were considered as the research’s units of analysis. Those experts who had a five years experience in the field or at least had a bachelor degree in tourism and/or in media studies were chosen for further studies. In order to collect data, designed a questionnaire and distributed among a sample of tourism experts. Since health tourism, sport tourism and education tourism showed to be most important areas for Iranian tourism industry, we studied those media which more active in these three types of tourism.The first step was taken to choose the factors that affected the use of media in tourism. In order to do that, we studied tourism literature and previous surveys to determine such factors. Then and after weighing these factors, the questionnaire was designed in which questions were inserted based on these factors. Then the VIKOR approach in fuzzy environment was used for ranking three media types and their involvement in health tourism, sport tourism and tourism. Here we make an attempt to show how the fuzzy VIKOR method is used to identify the factors that affect the selection of media. Also, we will indicate how the media rankings in various fields of tourism are.In order to identify the ranking of these factors, the questionnaires were distributed among experts. These people expressed their opinions in the form of fuzzy numbers, and then the normalized matrix was calculated.In the next step, the values of the positive and negative ideal solution (and) for each criterion were calculated. To calculate the values of S, R and Q we needed to calculate the weight of each factor that affected the selection of media in the areas of health tourism, sport tourism and educational tourism.Based on the fuzzy VIKOR method, we had to allocate the ranking of alternatives based on the values of Q and Q value of the item and then the best option was selected (Table. 1). Then we selected the item which had a minimum value of Q in the ranking list. It should be noted that in order to come up with a decisive ranking, the methodology of identifying such rankings require an assessment under certain conditions that has been evaluated and approved.

Health tourism, due to its capability and competitive advantages has attracted a lot of attention among the various areas in tourism. The purpose of this study was to provide a comprehensive framework to identify and assess the direct and indirect effects of the factors affecting health tourism development in Yazd province. After a literature review, the most important factors affecting health tourism were determined by fuzzy TOPSIS technique using interpretive structural modeling (ISM). The results of this study showed that factors associated with information update of hospital personnel and the relevance of physicians’ specialty to their duties are fundamental factors in the development of health tourism. The results of this study indicated that the development of health tourism in Yazd province was associated with patient satisfaction from the services. In this regard this objective could be met through the investment in updating hospital facilities and improving personnel’s skills.

In recent decades، information technology systems and tools play an essential role in improving the method for responding the requests from managers. Decision support system as an important tool has the fundamental role in organizations. In the team of Software project allocating people to tasks has a noticeable effect on profits. A decision support system can help managers in making appropriate decisions. In this research the DSS was designed by integrating Dynamic Programming and Goal Programming method. Usually there are different goals and even contradictory ones in Software project. Such goals would complicate the decision making process. Decision support system proposed in this study defines the goal for each criterion. The deviation from the goal is for evaluating the answers. The advantage of decision support systems is combining goals that are different in nature. The proposed algorithm compared with other methods requires less computation.

One of the solutions for solving cutting stock problem in different industries, such as sheet metal, lumber, glass, paper and textile, is applying, Particle Swarm Optimization to minimize the waste of rawmaterials. This article is intended to solve two-dimensional cutting problem. In these problems, larger rectangular plates, divided into smaller rectangularsegments, aim to minimizing the number of used plates or the waste of plates by considering demand. In this article PSO is used. To enhance the efficiency of lgorithm, and preventing overlap in cutting problem, the CUL algorithm is used. In order to investigate the results of algorithm, new software has been designed. This software has two ways for solving the problem. First, it ends up with optimized cutting pattern considering the number and dimension of segments and, length and width of main plate. Also, there is a possibility to give different width to software, in this case, the software gives the user the optimum cutting pattern and optimum length of main plate in addition to optimum width.

By increasing complexity، level of uncertainty and risk in the chain goes up. Hence supply chain risk management has become a major issue in the organization. In this study، Supply Chain Risk from this perspective will be investigated. This study utilizes a grey relational analysis and Fuzzy VIKOR to establish a complete and accurate evaluation model for ranking factors affecting on supplier risk. Innovation of this research is combining fuzzy Delphi method، the grey relational analysis and fuzzy VIKOR to identify and ranking factors affecting on suppliers risk and was conducted for the first time in alloy steel industry. After the analysis «single sourcing» and «available capacity» were identified as important factors. For this purpose، factors affecting on the risks incurred by the supplier on Alloy Steel industry were identified using Fuzzy Delphi. Then these factors evaluated and ranked using Grey Relation Analysis and fuzzy VIKOR. After the most important risk factors that need to be improved، identified and more appropriate strategies is offered.

Six sigma is one of the most popular tools to eliminate waste in organizations, reduce the cost and improve quality. The process of creating and evaluating projects is an initial activity in implementing six sigma. This paper aims at proposing a comprehensive methodology for the evaluation and selection of the six sigma projects based on level of sigma and productivity. So, this research provides the identification of important inputs and outputs for six sigma projects that are then analyzed using Artificial Neural Networks which are capable to consider non-liner interrelations among criteria. In order to evaluate the projects, six criteria have been identified. For deriving the overall utility of projects, we designed an adaptive two neural networks with 6 inputs and one output and multilayer perceptron with 5 and 4 hidden layers for forecasting production and level of sigma respectively. Finally, we use sensitive analysis for identification effect of every inputs on outputs.

This article is intended to solve two dimensional cutting problem. In these problems, larger rectangular plates, divided into smaller rectangularsegments. Aim of these problems is minimizing the number of used plates or the waste of plates by considering demand. Cutting problem is a NP-Hard problemthat optimization methods will not be able to solve them. For this reason, inthis article the meta-heuristic algorithm, Particle SwarmOptimization (PSO) is proposed. To enhance the efficiency of algorithm and preventing overlap in cutting problem, the CUL algorithm is presented. In order to investigate the results of algorithm, new softwarehas been designed, according to the developed Algorithm. The best cutting pattern is Output of this software. Inputs are length and width of main plate and number and dimension of segments.