in this ever-changing business scenario, the manufacturing product industries have to be in position to rec-ognize the ever changing pulse and demands of the market. customer satisfaction and quality management has become a strategic issue for companies in the new millennium. quality function deployment (qfd) lit-erature suggests that building up the house of quality (hoq) is not a difficult ta...

this paper proposes a novel decision making framework for an electricity retailer to procure its electric demand in a bilateral-pool market in presence of charging and discharging of electric vehicles (evs). the operational framework is a two-stage programming model in which at the first stage, the retailer and ev aggregator do their medium-term planning. determination of retailer's optimum sel...

background several empirical studies have shown the attitude of smokers to formulate judgments based on distortion in the risk perception. this alteration is produced by the activation of the optimistic bias characterized by a set of the unrealistic beliefs compared to the outcomes of their behavior. this bias exposes individuals to adopt lifestyles potentially dangerous for their health, under...

experiences from urban development plans and assessments of their concrete and tangible results in the past decades indicate lack of adequate success of our urbanization system to responding needs of our citizens. this has resulted in need to find a fundamental solution to transforming the centralized system into decentralized. recent changes in regard to a change of approach from master plan t...

Many patients have uncertain capacity to make decisions about their care. Determining whether a patient possesses decision-making capacity challenges even the most seasoned of physicians. We illustrate an algorithm devised by Miller and Marin (Emerg Med Clin North Am 2000; 18:233-241) that assesses the patient's understanding of his or her condition, ability to process information, and stabilit...