Supply chain coordination from supplier selection stages to customer delivery is among the issues creating the most challenges for supply chain management, especially for short-lived and perishable foodstuffs. The current study aims to identify and rank the factors involved in sustainable supply chain in the dairy industry. In this qualitative research, by reviewing the theoretical literature and surveying specialists and experts, the factors affecting supply chain sustainability and the sustainable supply chain dimensions (i.e., economic, social, and environmental) were identified. The determined factors were then ranked. To this end, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used as a decision-making technique and the targeted snowball sampling method was used for sampling. In the qualitative stage, factors were extracted from open interviews with 15 academic experts active in the field of sustainable development and experts in the dairy industry. The social dimension with a weight of 0.493 was recognized as the most important dimension of the sustainable supply chain according to the researchers and experts in the dairy industry. After that, the economic dimension with a weight of 0.314 was in the second rank, and finally, the environmental dimension with a weight of 0.193 was third in rank. Manuscript profile

The imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is one of the recent meta-heuristic algorithms proposed to solve optimization problems. The Imperialist Competitive Algorithm is based on a socio-politically inspired optimization strategy. This paper presents an Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to optimize the performance of a surface grinding operation. Moreover, the multi-objective optimization of a surface grinding process is suggested by using an evolutionary algorithm. Factors like depth of dressing, lead of dressing, workpiece speed and wheel speed are considered to minimize the production cost, surface roughness and to maximize the production rate. The suggested approach presents two constraints handling techniques: constraints handling strategy of ICA and penalty function method. The effectiveness of this algorithm for grinding operation is investigated by comparing the results to other algorithms available in the literature. Results show that the proposed algorithm in this work gives a better performance in a shorter time for the optimization of machining parameters in comparison to other works. Manuscript profile

One of the most important methods to reduce metal corrosion and improve erosion resistance is to use strip cladding with electro slag welding. Applying the strip electrode (E316l), cladding performed on the layer of steel (5A-516) with this process. With changes in the thickness of cladding layers and the number of these layers, the percentages of ferrite and carbon in samples obtained by WRC equipment were analyzed. The optical microscopy is used to investigate the microstructure of different cladding layers in this research work. Hence, with the increase in the percentage of carbon, the sensitivity of stainless steel to grain boundary corrosion increases. With the reduction of ferrite percentage, the sensitivity to hot cracking increased too, so the overall results indicate that with an increase in the thickness of the first cladding layer, the amount of carbon in this layer increases, this phenomenon reduces the percentage of ferrite in it. Hence, by increasing the number of cladding layers, the amount of carbon percentage reduces considerably while the ferrite percentage reaches the desired amount. Manuscript profile