No abstract

Type 2 diabetes has an increasing prevalence and high cost of treatment. The goal of type 2 diabetes treatment is to control patients’ blood glucose level by pharmacological interventions and to prevent adverse disease-related complications. Therefore, it is important to optimize the medication treatment plans for type 2 diabetes patients to enhance the quality of their lives and to decrease the economic burden of this chronic disease. Since the treatment of type 2 diabetes relies on medication, it is vital to consider adverse drug reactions. Adverse drug reaction is undesired harmful reactions that may result from some certain medications. Therefore, a Markov decision process is developed in this article to model the medication treatment of type 2 diabetes, considering the possibility of adverse drug reaction occurring adverse drug reaction. The optimal policy of the proposed Markov decision process model is compared with clinical guidelines and existing models in the literature. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to address the manner in which model behavior depends on model parameterization and then therapeutic insights are obtained based on the results. The satisfying results show that the model has the capability to offer an optimal treatment policy with an acceptable expected quality of life by utilizing fewer medications and provide significant implications in endocrinology and metabolism applications.

Product pure bundling is an effective marketing strategy in real successful businesses, which has been extensively discussed in the economics and marketing areas. While investigating the theoretical and empirical aspects of operational and supply chain implications of pure bundling is essential, this paper determines the optimal pricing decisions in a centralized three‐level supply chain that consists of multiple raw material suppliers, a manufacturer and a retailer, and analyzes the impact of raw material suppliers and manufacturer operations and market characteristics on selecting the best pricing strategy. A general supply chain structure is considered, in which the manufacturer receives different raw materials from the suppliers, produces two different products, and then sells them separately, called no bundling strategy, and sells two products in a package, called pure bundling strategy, with uniformly distributed customer valuations. The proposed model finds the optimal pricing decisions of the mentioned supply chain under pure and no bundling strategies and derives the closed‐form solutions to explore the impact of each strategy on the performance of the chain due to its profit. Computational results and sensitivity analysis explain how pure bundling can be utilized as an operational strategy to improve the integrated supply chain profit through a case study. Accordingly, the final results indicate that small market size, low costs, and small amounts of required raw materials, bundling basic products with the premium ones makes the pure bundling strategy profitable even when the cost of the packages is more than the sum of the costs of two products.

No abstract

PurposeThe construction industry is a key driver of economic growth. However, the adverse impacts of construction and demolition waste (CDW) resulted from the active construction projects on the economy, environment, public health and social life necessitates an appropriate control and management of this waste stream. Developing and promoting the construction and demolition waste management (CDWM) hierarchy program at the strategic level is essential.Design/methodology/approachThis study aims to propose a hybrid decision model that hybridizes the Integrated Determination of Objective Criteria Weights (IDOCRIW) and weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS) under a fuzzy environment.FindingsThe proposed method ranks the potential strategic alternatives by the sustainable development criteria to improve the performance of CDWM. As indicated in the results, the fuzzy approach in the decision-making process enables the transformation of linguistic variables into fuzzy numbers that show uncertainty and ambiguity in real-world systems. Moreover, the close correlation between the final ranking of the proposed methodology and the average priority order of the strategic alternatives obtained by five different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods implies the validity of the model performance.Practical implicationsThis proposed model is an appropriate tool to effectively decide on the development of CDWM from a strategic point of view. It aims to establish an MCDM framework for the evaluation of effective strategies for CDWM according to the indices of sustainable development. Implementing proper operational plans and conducting research in CDWM has the highest priority, and enacting new and more stringent laws, rules and regulations against the production of CDW has secondary priority. This study contributes to the field by optimizing the CDWM by applying the top-priority strategies resulted from the proposed fuzzy hybrid MCDM methodology by the decision-makers or policy-makers to reach the best managerial strategic plan.Originality/valueIn the proposed methodology, the IDOCRIW technique is utilized and updated with the triangular fuzzy numbers for the first time in the literature to derive the weights of sustainable development criteria. The fuzzy WASPAS method is utilized for evaluation and providing a final ranking of the strategic alternatives.

No abstract

A Markov decision process (MDP) is an appropriate mathematical framework for analysis and modeling a large class of sequential decision-making problems. Real-world applications necessitate the evaluation of the value of a decision according to several conflicting objectives. This paper presents an extended -constraint method for a multiobjective finite-horizon MDP. This study integrates the -constraint method with the Kbest policies algorithm to find the nondominated deterministic Markovian policies on the Pareto-optimal frontier. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on biobjective maintenance scheduling and machine running speed selection problems, and its performance is compared with a classic approach in the literature (weightedsum, WS, method). Satisfying results show that the proposed algorithm obtains a good-quality Pareto frontier and has advantages over the WS method.

The hub location problem involves a network of origins and destinations over which transportation takes place. There are many studies associated with finding the location of hub nodes and the allocation of demand nodes to these located hub nodes to transfer the only one kind of commodity under one level of service. However, in this study, carrying different commodity types from origin to destination under various levels of services (e.g. price, punctuality, reliability or transit time) is studied. Quality of services experienced by users such as speed, convenience, comfort and security of transportation facilities and services is considered as the level of service. In each system, different kinds of commodities with various levels of services can be transmitted. The appropriate level of service that a commodity can be transmitted through is chosen by customer preferences and the specification of the commodity. So, a mixed integer programming formulation for single allocation hub covering location problem, which is based on the idea of transferring multi commodity flows under multi levels of service is presented. These two are applied concepts, multi-commodity and multi-level of service, which make the model's assumptions closer to the real world problems. In addition, a differential evolution algorithm is designed to find near-optimal solutions. The obtained solutions using differential evolution (DE) algorithm (upper bound), where its parameters are tuned by response surface methodology, are compared with exact solutions and computed lower bounds by linear relaxation technique to prove the efficiency of proposed DE algorithm.