abstract background: participation of woman in decision-making processes is one of the key indicators of an appropriate relationship between a woman and the health care professionals. this study aimed to recognize the factors facilitating respect for woman’s decision-making in spontaneous birth. materials and methods: this paper employed a meta-synthesis on articles published in four biomedical...

supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing departments. this importance is increased even more by new strategies in a supply chain, because of the key role suppliers perform in terms of quality, costs and services which affect the outcome in the buyer’s company. supplier selection is a multiple criteria decision making problem in which the objectives are not equall...

background: the increasing number of cesarean section is a great concern in many countries. in iran cesarean section rate has been steadily rising from 35% in 2000 to 40% in 2005. preferences for cesarean are often associated with some factors. objective: to investigate factors associated with preference for cesarean delivery, with special emphasis on pregnant women’s preferences in first pregn...

Patient waiting times and service quality problems characterize emergency departments worldwide. The purpose of this research is to develop a reliable decision support system using the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) triage method to drive improvements in the care delivery process, as part of a hospital Emergency Care Delivery System. Models were developed using first a relatively low fidelity s...

in this paper, the problem of determining the quality level, lead time for order delivery and price of a product produced by a manufacturer is considered. in this problem the demand for the product is influenced by all three decision variables: price, lead time and quality level. to formulate the demand function, a fuzzy rule base that estimates the demand value based on the three decision vari...

Effective human teams use overlapping shared mental models for anticipating information needs of teammates and for offering relevant information proactively. The long-term goal of our research is to empower agents with such “shared mental models” so that they can be used to better simulate, train, or support human teams for their information fusion, interpretation, and decisions. Toward this go...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of capacity investment decisions in duopoly models with demand uncertainty. Firms make capacity investment, production, delivery and pricing decisions. Capacity investment decisions are always made ex-ante demand whereas price decisions always ex-post. The interplay between the timing of demand information and the decision of production and delivery endows fi...

In this paper, the problem of determining the quality level, lead time for order delivery and price of a product produced by a manufacturer is considered. In this problem the demand for the product is influenced by all three decision variables: price, lead time and quality level. To formulate the demand function, a fuzzy rule base that estimates the demand value based on the three decision vari...

Long-term planning is a challenging process for dealing with problems in big industries. Quick and flexible process of responding to the existing variable requirements are considered in such problems. Some of important strategic decisions which should be made in this field are, namely the way that manufacturing facilities should be applied as well as assignment and design the system of delivery...