systems thinking is not a new concept to health system strengthening; however, one question remains unanswered: how policy-makers, system designers and consultants with a system thinking philosophy should act (have acted) as potential change agents in actually gaining opportunities to introduce systems thinking? development of comprehensive multi-year plans (cmyps) for immunization system is on...

The existing studies about regional R&D efficiency measurement in a specific period have not considered the dynamic interdependence between regional R&D activities over different periods. This paper offers a solution to this problem in multi-period regional R&D efficiency measurement with a novel application to China’s regional R&D systems. This solution can present a systemic measurement for t...

today, due to the direct and reverse logistics plays an important role in reducing the costs in supply chain. in this paper, in order to provide a closed-loop supply chain network including supply centers, production, distribution, collection, recycling and disposal of a used linear mixed integer programming. this paper to consider multi-period and multi-product in multi-level supply chain and ...

a comprehensive and integrated study of any supply chain (sc) environment is a vital requirement that can create various advantages for the sc owners. this consideration causes productive managing of the sc through its whole wide components from upstream suppliers to downstream retailers and customers.  on this issue, despite many valuable studies reported in the current literature, considerabl...

Nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed to compute the maximum relative input energy per unit mass for 21 multi-degree-of-freedom systems (MDOF) with preselected target fundamental periods of vibration ranging from 0.2 to 4.0 s and 6 target inter-story ductility demands of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 subjected to 40 the earthquake ground motions. The efficiency of the several intensity measures as an ind...

The optimization of investment portfolios is the most important topic in financial decision making, and many relevant models can be found in the literature.  According to importance of portfolio optimization in this paper, deals with novel solution approaches to solve new developed portfolio optimization model. Contrary to previous work, the uncertainty of future retur...

A surge in hospital consolidation is fueling formation of ever larger multi-hospital systems throughout the United States. This article examines hospital prices in California over time with a focus on hospitals in the largest multi-hospital systems. Our data show that hospital prices in California grew substantially (+76% per hospital admission) across all hospitals and all services between 200...