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As tourism development is an unquestionable part of every national growth policy, this study aims to introduce an integrated method employing MICMAC analysis for understanding the key strategic variables of Iran's tourism development system.

The structural analysis with MICMAC method was used to determine the classification of variables, aimed at structuring ideas to deal with complex decision-making and help planners and policymakers formulate future-based strategies.

The cross-impact matrix was used to identify the development variables having the greatest impact on the development of Southeast Asian tourism to Iran. The results showed that among 43 variables, 10 have great potential as key variables in the future of Iran's tourism development.

MICMAC, as a structural analysis technique, is regarded as being the most appropriate to identify the key variables in the development of the Iranian tourism system. The limitation was that the other tourism markets, apart from ASEAN tourists, and the tourism demand-side were excluded from this study.

The present study indicates that identifying key factors that influence the supply side of Iran's tourism system is worthwhile. Consequently, the findings show how these key factors can play a vital role in long-range economic sustainability and lead to the development of Iran's tourism market to enhance globally its competitiveness as a destination to attract international ASEAN tourists.

This study is one of the first papers to focus on the development of Iran's tourism market from a supply-side through structural analysis. Its findings are valuable as they can be used by the tourism authorities in the process of developing future tourism scenarios for Iran.

The purpose of this paper is the reliability analysis for systems with dependent gamma degradation process and Weibull failure time.

Consider a life testing experiment in which a sample of n devices starts to operate at t=0 and the data are available on failure time and failure-evolving process on each individual, called in some contents wear or degradation. Ignoring the between performance characteristics dependency structure may lead us to different reliability estimations, while the dependency justly exists. In previous research, dependency between the degradation process and hard failure time has been studied in limited detail (special closed form expression). Thereafter, the dependency between two degradation processes with the same structure (gamma process) in a system is considered using the copula function.

The results indicate that ignoring the dependency structure may lead us to different reliability estimations while the dependency justly exists.

This study gives some contributions that evaluate reliability metrics with more than one failure mechanism that may not be independent and possibly follow a different distribution function. The authors have used the copula function as a basis to develop a proposal model and analysis methods. In addition, the authors discussed the identifiability of the copula. Finally, simulation data were used to review the suggested approach.

The purpose of this paper is to propose multisensory integration for train positioning application, to support recent automatic train control systems and also moving block signaling systems.

Reducing the cost and at the same time improving the reliability and accuracy of the overall positioning system, are primary goals of the researches going on in this field.

This paper designs and evaluates two different algorithms of Kalman filtering (KF) and particle filtering (PF), on a set of low cost positioning systems, as tachometers, Doppler radar and balises.

This paper's research outcomes introduce considerable improvements upon the results when compared to the current utilization of the stand‐alone tachometer and Doppler radar sensors, and slight improvements in comparison with the KF algorithm, and also upon results in recent publications on the subject.

The purpose of this paper is to address the Internet of Things (IoT) service discovery problem and investigate the existing solutions to tackle this problem in many aspects.

This paper presents an overview of IoT services aiming at providing a clear understanding about their features because this term is still ambiguous for the IoT service discovery approaches. Besides, a full comparison study of the most representative service discovery approaches in the literature is presented over four perspectives: the IoT information model, the mechanism of IoT service discovery, the adopted architecture and the context awareness. These perspectives allow classifying, comparing and giving a deeper understanding of the existing IoT service discovery solutions.

This paper presents a new definition and a new classification of IoT services and citation of their features comparing with the traditional Web services. This paper discusses the existing solutions, as well as the main challenges, that face the service discovery issue in the IoT domain. Besides, two classifications of the approaches are adopted on the basis of their service description model and their mechanism of discovery, and a set of requirements that need to be considered when defining an IoT service are proposed.

There are few number works that survey the service discovery approaches in the IoT domain, but none of these surveys discuss the service description models in the IoT or the impact of the context awareness aspect in the service discovery solution. There are also few works that give a comprehensive overview of IoT services to understand their nature to facilitate their description and discovery. This paper fills this gap by performing a full comparison study of multi-category and recent approaches for service discovery in the IoT over many aspects and also by performing a comprehensive study of the IoT service features.

Iran is a country with substantial tourism potential. Iran’s tourism industry, however, was side-lined for decades due to international sanctions. The election of President Hassan Rouhani and the subsequent deal on Iran’s nuclear programme (reached on 14 July 2015) has resulted in softening of nuclear-related international sanctions and brought much needed relief to a struggling tourism industry in Iran. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the emergence of cruise tourism—as an attractive option for both domestic and international markets—with the introduction of the Iran’s first cruise ship, named “Sunny”, since the 1979 revolution.

This study is a short viewpoint piece based on the author’s interpretation of cruise tourism development in Iran and its future opportunities and challenges.

Following the nuclear deal, Iran has seen a substantial growth in inbound tourist numbers and attracted considerable investment in tourism-related infrastructure such as air transport and the hospitality sector. While cruise tourism is and remains an emerging phenomenon in Iran, it is evident that the country has a vested interest in developing this lucrative sector due to the country’s strong domestic market and potential to serve the international market.

This is an original topic which has never been investigated before. Cruise tourism is an emerging market in Iran and this study sheds new light on this new development. The paper focuses on the historical, current and future development of the tourism industry in Iran with a specific emphasis on cruise tourism.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that unsustainable revenues in municipalities are short term and may have an adverse effect on urban systems. Focusing on stable financial resources can reduce such adverse effects. According to the legal obligations of municipalities in the creation of sustainable revenue, developing tourism-based activities in municipalities can play a significant role in providing a sustainable income.

This study aims to assess the positive effects of economic opportunities related to tourism for the municipalities in Iran’s large-scale cities and to identify the hidden opportunities of tourism. Also, from interviews and analysis of themes based on the situation, task, action, result model, tourism opportunities have been extracted and classified.

As a result of this research, hidden income-generating opportunities of urban tourism have been identified for municipalities, including those depending on situation, tasks, actions and results. For each of these categories, strategies for the realization of tourism opportunities are presented. Tourism’s hidden opportunities include those relating to organizational aspects, tourism planning, tourism diplomacy, handicrafts, health tourism, event tourism and urban tourism marketing.

By taking advantage of these opportunities, income generation, employment and urban management will be improved in the municipalities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how internal marketing orientation affects balanced scorecard outcomes (financial performance, customer, internal process, learning and growth) in a small service businesses context.

Drawing from the small businesses, the relationship between internal marketing orientation and performance is hypothesized and tested. A structural equation modeling (SEM) test with maximum likelihood estimation was performed to test the relationship between the research variables.

The results obtained from the SEM analyzes revealed that internal marketing orientation positively impacts the levels of financial and non-financial performance. The results also indicate that non-financial performance measures (that is, customer, internal process, learning and growth) directly affect financial performance.

This study unpacks the mechanism between internal marketing orientation and balanced scorecard outcomes and contributes to the academic research of internal marketing orientation in the context of small businesses.

Nowadays, the tourism industry is considered the largest and most diverse industry in the world, which can play a significant role in the economic growth and development of a country as the main source of income and employment. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to focus on evaluating the competitiveness indicators of Shiraz city tourism destination based on a combined model.

For this purpose, a questionnaire with 78 questions was used to evaluate the indicators, in which a total of 1,432 tourists participated, including 927 domestic tourists and 505 international tourists. The collected data were analyzed to determine the hierarchical relationship between the indicators using equation structural modeling.

The research findings indicate that the most effective and influential indicators in the field of tourism competitiveness are natural and handmade resources, and the most influential factors are demand conditions and cultural and natural resources. In this hierarchy, each factor affects its previous level and influences the next level.

This study offers significant potential for uncovering credible and robust approaches to further investigate the contextualization of tourism competitiveness on both national and international scales, thereby generating valuable new insights. By conceptualizing the diverse dimensions of tourism competitiveness and delving into the variations in its impacts across multiple levels, this research not only challenges existing notions but also aids destinations in maintaining and enhancing their market position and share over time. This study offers valuable insights and practical implications for both researchers and practitioners in the field of urban tourism. It enhances the understanding of destination competitiveness, informs policy decisions, facilitates benchmarking and best practices, guides strategic decision-making and promotes sustainable tourism development.

This study is aims to identify and categorize the perceived risks of Chinese tourists (from mainland China) traveling to Tehran. In addition, this study investigates the relationship between these risks tourists’ information seeking behavior.

This study investigates the relationship between these risks tourists’ information seeking behavior. The research also tries to model the relationship between the explored perceived risks and tourists’ information-seeking behavior. To collect data, a researcher-developed questionnaire containing 24 questions was designed based on a literature review. Before collecting the data, the validity and reliability of the questionnaire were reviewed and confirmed. To do study procedure, one essential question and two hypotheses, including exploratory factor analysis, stepwise regression and independent samples T-test, are used.

The results showed that Chinese tourists perceived health, physical, political, cultural, social and economic risks before their trip (with political risk being the most prominent). Also, the results indicate that the tourists have used different ways to collect information about Iran in general and Tehran in particular. Those travelers who perceived a higher risk were more likely to use the information sources that provide them with detailed and accurate information before traveling to Tehran.

This study provides valuable insights for destination managers and tourism marketers to attract Chinese tourists by considering their perceived risks and information-seeking behavior. It should be noted that this study is not without its own limitations. These limitations include (but are not limited to) the timeframe in which the data was collected (prior to the outbreak of COVID-19) and the destination (Tehran, Iran). Therefore, it is advised that future researchers study the perceived risks and information sources in other parts of the world.

The concept of perceived risk was used in Chinese tourists’ behavioral seeking to predict their future behavior following their perceptions. Thus, the findings of this study will be necessary to local governments and other destination organizations when building successful strategies.

The main purpose of this numerical study is to study on entropy generation in natural convection of nanofluid in a wavy cavity using a single-phase nanofluid model.

The cavity is heated non-uniformly from the wavy wall and cooled from the right side while it is insulated from the horizontal walls. The physical domain of the problem is transformed into a rectangular geometry in the computational domain using an algebraic coordinate transformation by introducing new independent variables ξ and η. The governing dimensionless partial differential equations with corresponding initially and boundary conditions were numerically solved by the finite difference method of the second-order accuracy. The governing parameters are Rayleigh number (Ra = 1000-100000), Prandtl number (Pr = 6.82), solid volume fraction parameter of nanoparticles (φ = 0.0-0.05), aspect ratio parameter (A = 1), undulation number (κ = 1-3), wavy contraction ratio (b = 0.1-0.3) and dimensionless time (τ = 0-0.27).

It is found that the average Bejan number is an increasing function of nanoparticle volume fraction and a decreasing function of the Rayleigh number, undulation number and wavy contraction ratio. Also, an insertion of nanoparticles leads to an attenuation of convective flow and enhancement of heat transfer.

The originality of this work is to analyze the entropy generation in natural convection within a wavy nanofluid cavity using single-phase nanofluid model. The results would benefit scientists and engineers to become familiar with the flow behaviour of such nanofluids, and will be a way to predict the properties of this flow for the possibility of using nanofluids in advanced nuclear systems, in industrial sectors including transportation, power generation, chemical sectors, ventilation, air-conditioning, etc.