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Aims: Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women in both high- and low-resource settings. Conventional breast cancer therapies were inefficient and had low patient compliance. Stimuli-responsive hydrogels possessing similar physicochemical features as soft tissue facilitate diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for breast cancer subtypes.Scope: Polysaccharides and polypeptides are major natural polymers with unique biocompatibility, biodegradability, and feasible modification approaches utilized frequently for hydrogel fabrication. Alternating the natural polymer-based hydrogel properties in response to external stimuli such as pH, temperature, light, ultrasonic, enzyme, glucose, magnetic, redox, and electric have provided great potential for the evolution of novel drug delivery systems (DDSs) and various advanced technologies in medical applications. Stimuli-responsive hydrogels are triggered by specific cancer tissue features, promote target delivery techniques, and modify release therapeutic agents at localized sites. This narrative review presented innovation in preparing and characterizing the most common stimuli-responsive natural polymer-based hydrogels for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the breast cancer area.Conclusion: Stimuli-responsive hydrogels display bioinspiration products as DDSs for breast cancer subtypes, protect the shape of breast tissue, provide modified drug release, enhance therapeutic efficacy, and minimize chemotherapy agents’ side effects. The potential benefits of smart natural polymer-based hydrogels make them an exciting area of practice for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Objective(s): Human T leukemia virus type one (HTLV-1) causes two life-threatening diseases in around five percent of infected subjects, a T cell malignancy and a neurodegenerative disease. TAX and HBZ are the main virulence agents implicated in the manifestation of HTLV-1–associated diseases. Therefore, this study aims to produce these HTLV-1 factors as recombinant Fc fusion proteins to study the structures, their immunogenic properties as vaccines, and their capability to produce specific neutralization antibodies.Materials and Methods: TAX and HBZ sequences were chosen from the NCBI-nucleotide database, then designed as human Fc chimers and cloned into Pichia pastoris. Produced proteins were purified by HiTrap affinity chromatography and subcutaneously injected into rabbits. Rabbit Abs were purified by batch chromatography, and their neutralization activities for the HTLV-1-infected MT-2 cell line were assessed. Furthermore, the protective abilities of recombinant proteins were evaluated in Tax or HBZ immunized rabbits by MT-2 cell line inoculation and measurement of HTLV-1-proviral load.Results: Specific Abs against Tax and HBZ can eliminate 2 million MT-2 cells in 1/1000 dilution in vitro. In challenging assays, the immunization of the animals using Tax or HBZ had no protective activity as HTLV-1 PVL was still positive.Conclusion: The result suggests that recombinant TAX and HBZ: hFcγ1 proteins can produce a proper humoral immune response. Therefore, they could be considered a passive immunotherapy source for HTLV-1-associated diseases, while total TAX and HBZ proteins are unsuitable as HTLV-1 vaccine candidates.

Introduction Asking questions about the nature of a rural area, attempting to identify its traits, and construing the rurality realm are some of the discussions in rural studies. The concept of rurality has remained ambiguous and concentrating on its different magnitudes and grades is necessary. In scientific discussions, different definitions and categorization methods have been proposed for measuring rurality differences. The population density, population decrease and increase rates, size of habitat, structure of local economy, accessibility, and landscape are some of the studied parameters in this area. The most operational definition, which is used in quantitative studies, is based on spatial and demographic theories as they present a simple definition for geographic categorization. Most of rural areas have undergone population growth regarding their continuous developments. It seems that there is a population stability in some of these areas even if they have not got an enhancement. This article aimed to structurally review and analyze temporal and spatial evolutions of demographic rurality in Isfahan Province. Materials & Methods Isfahan Province as the study area has got 88 and 12% of urban and rural populations according to the census of 2016. The village was the unit of analysis in this research. The statistical community included all villages with more than 4 households (totally 768 villages) based on the databases of two latest housing and population censuses conducted in 2006 and 2016. Considering the mentioned censuses and taking several correction steps, the research data and variables included the number of households, male and female populations (6 years, over 6 years, 10 years, over 10 years, under 14 years, 14-64 years, and over 65 years), total population, number of literate persons, and number of employees. The processed indicators for modeling and analyzing demographic rurality and its evolutions in the studied time sections could be mentioned as family size, sex ratio, youth rate, aging rate, aging ratio, dependency ratio, dependency burden, literacy rate, employment rate, and population growth rate. These indicators were operationalized and calculated cross-sectionally at the beginning and end of the period and longitudinally for evolutions over the period. Discussion of Results & Conclusions After studying nearly 800 villages during the decade, a slight decrease in family size was observed. The sex ratio had averagely increased by 17/3 people. There was a slight decline of the youth (25/0) in the villages. However, there was an extreme range from decreasing by 32 to increasing by 36 in this regard. The aged population had also increased slightly by 76%. Also, the indicator of aging ratio almost showed a similar changing procedure. The dependency ratio had nearly remained unchanged. There was only 22 units of increase in the dependency burden, ranging from 58 to 10. The average literacy rate had undergone an overall increase of 28.3%, but there was a vast variation after considering the villages separately. The employment rate had decreased 86.1% in return. There was not a considerable change in the total population of the villages. It had only decreased to 192 people, which showed a growth rate of 0.004 with the variation of 21 to 6/20% among the villages. Overall, the structural components for rural population in the province had nearly remained unchanged during the studied decade. A significant structural model was found in the province based on the statistical modeling performed for analyzing demographic rurality and its evolutions with the indicators of family size, sex ratio, literacy ratio, aging ratio, dependency ratio, and youth ratio in 2006. The indicators of aging and dependency ratio were compatible with the family size, literacy rate, and youth ratio with a negative impact on demographic rurality, while aging ratio played an intense negative role in it. Spatial analysis was regionally and separately done for 3 types of villages in Isfahan Province based on the developments of population configurations in the rural mountainous, plain, and desert areas. The positive changes in the rates of population growth, household dimension, and literacy and negative changes in the aging rate were observed to be similar in all the studied areas. There was more similarity in the structural changes of rural population in the plain and desert areas, which were weakened by changes in the dependency ratio and strengthened by changes of the sex ratio, thus remaining in equilibrium. In return, the negative changes of employment rate and more appropriate position of the young population within the age composition had caused more weakening and strengthening in the structural changes of rural population in the mountainous areas, respectively

Rural areas have experienced various evolutions in terms of structure and function, causing some vagueness regarding rural conceptions and identities. Agriculture, as the most fundamental rural activity, has had severe evolutions. This paper aims to structurally analyze the spatio-temporal evolutions of agricultural rurality in Isfahan province by conducting a comparative study considering villages consisting of more than four households during two agricultural censuses in 2003 and 2014. The same variables were extracted and two series of cross-sectional and one series of longitudinal indicators of agricultural rurality and its evolutions were calculated. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal evolutions were modeled using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedure. Rate of employment in agriculture, stakeholders’ per capita land, irrigated lands and irrigated cultivation were the indicators affecting agricultural rurality in both years. Results generally showed that water as input and its sub-indicators have a more determinant role in agricultural functionality than land; also, this functionality has mainly been based on farming rather than gardening. Regional analysis on the mean structures of agricultural rurality indicated the negative impact of the changes in employment rate in agriculture and farming stakeholders and contrarily the positive impact of the changes in farmers’ literacy rate and gardening stakeholders on the evolution of agricultural rurality among three groups of mountainous, plain and desert rural regions. This impact has been more influential in terms of employment and literacy rates. The changes of irrigated lands have only affected the evolution of agricultural rurality in desert rural regions.

Abstract Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been widely used to produce high quality 2D transitional metal dichalcogenides (2D TMDCs). However, violent evaporation and large diffusivity discrepancy of metal and chalcogen precursors at elevated temperatures often result in poor regulation on X:M molar ratio (M = Mo, W etc.; X = S, Se, and Te), and thus it is rather challenging to achieve the desired products of 2D TMDCs. Here, a modified spatially confined strategy (MSCS) is utilized to suppress the rising S vapor concentration between two aspectant substrates, upon which the lateral/vertical growth of 2D WS2 can be selectively regulated via proper S:W zones correspond to greatly broadened time/growth windows. An S:W‐time (SW‐T) growth diagram was thus proposed as a mapping guide for the general understanding of CVD growth of 2D WS2 and the design of growth routes for the desired 2D WS2. Consequently, a comprehensive growth management of atomically thin WS2 is achieved, including the versatile controls of domain size, layer number, and lateral/vertical heterostructures (MoS2‐WS2). The lateral heterostructures show an enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction performance. This study advances the substantial understanding to the growth kinetics and provides an effective MSCS protocol for growth design and management of 2D TMDCs.

Control of the phases associated with the metal-insulator transition in VO2 underpins its applications as a phase change material. Here, the authors report phase management by means of oxide inhibitor-assisted growth and present high-performance VO2 actuators based on asymmetric phase transition routes.

Abstract High crystallization and conductivity are always required for inorganic carrier transport materials for cheap and high‐performance inverted perovskite solar cells (PSCs). High temperature and external doping are inevitably introduced and thus greatly hamper the applications of inorganic materials for mass production of flexible and tandem devices. Here, an amorphous and dopant‐free inorganic material, Ni3+‐rich NiOx, is reported to be fabricated by a novel UV irradiation strategy, which is facile, easily scaled‐up, and energy‐saving because all the processing temperatures are below 82 ℃. The as‐prepared NiOx film shows highly improved conductivity and hole extraction ability. The rigid and flexible PSCs present the champion efficiencies of 22.45% and 19.7%, respectively. This work fills the gap of preparing metal oxide films at the temperature below 150 °C for inverted PSCs with the high efficiency of >22%. More importantly, this work upgrades the substantial understanding about inorganic materials to function well as efficient carrier transport layers without external doping and high crystallization.

Abstract Objective Equivocal association the contribution of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) and the well-accepted role of vitamin D-binding protein (VDBP) on bioavailability of 25(OH)D or its independent roles, has led to possible association of the VDBP in glucose metabolism. This study was conducted to evaluate the relationships among 25(OH)D, VDBP, glucose/insulin metabolism and homeostatic model assessment (HOMA-IR). Blood samples were collected from 236 obese and overweight women. VDBP and 25(OH)D levels, and biochemical parameters were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). An impedance fat analyzer was utilized to acquire the body composition. Results Using the multivariate linear regression, a reverse relationship was observed between VDBP and (HOMA-IR), such that women with higher VDBP displayed lower insulin resistance. The relationship was independent of age, body mass index, standardized energy intake and physical activity (p = 0.00). No significant relationship between 25(OH)D levels, FBS, body composition or insulin resistance were observed (p > 0.2). Current study observed that higher level of VDBP may be associated with lower levels of insulin and HOMA-IR, thus the evaluation of VDBP in diverse population groups seems to have significant clinical value in evaluating the prevalence of DM or early stage of glucose intolerance.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The research is a study on rural areas of Bamposht district from Saravan County in Sistan and Baluchestan province and assesses the impact of the borderline situation of rural settlements upon their developmental status. The statistical population consisted of the villages’ households. Totally 342 householders from 25 villages of more than 20 households were selected as a statistical sample by stratified random sampling. Data gathered via field operations. The dependent variable of the research is the level of development of studied villages, which has been measured comparatively by using the multi-criteria evaluation methods. Moreover, independent variables were contained population and the distance between village’s border and district center, economic status, border economies, border exchanges, exchange security and accessibility. Data has been collected at the level of the household heads and has been summarized in order to change the measurement level by averaging the relevant sub-samples at the village level. According to the results, the developmental level of 84% of the studied villages was moderate and lower, and the border economy has not have any effect on rural development, despite the high role played by the livelihoods of the studied communities. In addition, border economic activities has have a significant negative relationship with security of exchange and accessibility. Because of it, these activities are performed without structural backbones, mainly from unofficial channels and smuggling; and if they are beneficial activities, they are completely personal and will have no interest for developing the region or improving the situation of the community.

Graph theoretic techniques have been widely applied to model many types of links in social systems. Also, algebraic hypercompositional structure theory has demonstrated its systematic application in some problems. Influenced by these mathematical notions, a novel semihypergroup-based graph (SBG) of G=H,E is constructed through the fundamental relation γn on H, where semihypergroup H is appointed as the set of vertices and E is addressed as the set of edges on SBG. Indeed, two arbitrary vertices x and y are adjacent if xγny. The connectivity of graph G is characterized by xγ*y, whereby the connected components SBG of G would be exactly the elements of the fundamental group H/γ*. Based on SBG, some fundamental characteristics of the graph such as complete, regular, Eulerian, isomorphism, and Cartesian products are discussed along with illustrative examples to clarify the relevance between semihypergroup H and its corresponding graph. Furthermore, the notions of geometric space, block, polygonal, and connected components are introduced in terms of the developed SBG. To formulate the links among individuals/countries in the wake of the COVID (coronavirus disease) pandemic, a theoretical SBG methodology is presented to analyze and simplify such social systems. Finally, the developed SBG is used to model the trend diffusion of the viral disease COVID-n in social systems (i.e., countries and individuals).

Objective: Nowadays, coastal areas and the cities in it are considered as the most important components and elements of the urban system. Coastal cities are always vulnerable to damages from the environmental hazards and ignoring them will be problematic. Methods: This is a applied research and it is done by descriptive-analytical method that is based on library and statistics information. At first, factors affecting the social vulnerability of cities were identified and then all cities were classified in homogeneous groups and then were evaluated by GWR model. Results: The results showed that factors of lack of access to energy and fuel resources, social, physical, economic, dependent population, lack of access to healthy drinking water sources and population flotation had the most impact on social vulnerability of the studied cities. Also, the results of the cluster analysis model revealed that cities are classified in five clusters. Conclusion: It can be said that the resulting factorscovers almost all the underlying causes of social vulnerability. Also, according to the results, the most investment is needed to address the vulnerability of the lack of access to energy and fuel resources, as the vulnerability of households is more in this area. Also, due to the similar socioeconomic status of households in the cities of Bushehr province, the social vulnerability of most cities in this province is close to each other. Finally, it can be concluded that due to the inappropriate economic and social conditions of households who are living in coastal cities as well as the occurrence of natural hazards in the area, people living in these cities have a high social vulnerability.

Land use intensification refers to the increase of land productivity and yield through human activities. Despite the potential challenge of unsustainability, land use intensification is the main approach of de-veloping agriculture and meeting the increasing food demand. It also serves as a measure for the eval-uation of agricultural efficiency. This study is an attempt to evaluate and analyze the intensification of legume cultivation in Khorramdasht rural areas of Khomain County. The statistical sample of the study consisted of 183 stakeholders, and the data were gathered primarily via field work with a question-naire whose validity was confirmed formally and its reliability was statistically assessed with a pretest. Land use intensity, as the main variable, was quantitatively operationalized and measured based on a normalized weighted linear combination of the components, specialized cropping, proportioned mean farm area, productivity level, machinery coefficient and fallow period intensity. The relative weights were calculated through factor analysis followed by the normalization of the first component’s factor loadings. Despite the large area under legume cultivation, the results revealed that nearly 98 percent of the farms are intensified below the average level while only 2.2 percent are above it. The increment of land-use intensity is technically easier to achieve in systems that are currently at a low intensifica-tion levels, but low land-use intensities do not necessarily imply strong development and yield in-crease in the future. In this regard, the process of land use intensification has led to a marked diver-gence of the economic performance in the study area. At the same time, poor agricultural policies and management practices call for more attention and deliberate planning procedures in the future.

The emerging soft robots have attracted increasing interests and gotten rapidly developed, but it is still challenging to substantially promote their response speed and work density. In addition, the wireless way to conveniently trigger the devices, especially for the centimeter‐scale ones, is highly desired. Herein, the multistimuli‐responsive insect‐scale soft robotics is reported based on a super‐aligned VO2 nanowire arrays (NAs)/carbon nanotube (CNT) bimorph film, comprehensively addressing aforementioned problems. The as‐prepared VO2 NA/CNT bimorph shows improved actuation performance, anisotropic behavior, rapid response to various stimuli (heat, light, and electricity), and multiple movement modes (bending and torsion). Consequently, diverse untethered, insect‐scale soft robots, serving as biomimetic crawler, lifter, gripper, wing of flying robots, torsional robot, and so on are successfully demonstrated. The findings provide an effective strategy to develop high‐performance macroscopic mechanical devices by assembling functional nanostructures.

Graphene, a two dimensional carbon allotrope, has been appeared as an interesting material of the 21st century, and received world-wide attention due to its extraordinary thermal, optical, and mechanical properties. Graphene and its derivatives are being studied in different field of science from medicine and pharmaceutics to engineering and industries. Graphene materials have mainly been explored in electronics, clean energy devices, biosensors and environmental remediation also in biomedicine field, their antimicrobial activity and their capacity as drug delivery or gene delivery platforms and tissue engineering scaffold have been reported. This article provides an overview of graphene and its recent advances in different fields including biomedicine and industries.

Introduction Evaluation and perception of villagers from their rural life is influencing by several tangible and intangible factors, as well of the reality of their own living. This self-evaluation images the objective circumstances and subjective reflection on their life. By measuring this self-evaluation, it is possible to assess their settlement conditions and development level, and their attitudes toward rural life and its contingences, especially compared to urban life, as well. By defining and operationalizing a close comprehensive rural self-evaluation scale for measuring the quality of life, it can be evaluated both the living and thinking sphere of villagers, reflecting the physical and objective conditions of settling rural environments as well of their mentalities and attitudes towards rurality and ruralism especially compared to urbanization and urbanism. Materials and Methods The present study aims to assess the villagers’ self-evaluation quality of life and casually analyze its determinants in some rural areas of Isfahan and Kerman provinces of central Iran, based on a sample of 239 household heads size, stratified proportionally and selected randomly to primarily gather the needed data by field operations. Providing a conceptual framework for measuring the self-evaluation quality of life and scaling its comprehensive set of determinants has been a major part of the study. The scale has comprised two ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions, including sub-scales of “state of existential balance”, “realizing of life potential”, “fulfillment of needs” and “objective factors” measuring the ‘objective’ dimension and “well-being”, “satisfaction with life”, “happiness” and “meaning in life” measuring the ‘subjective’ one. Based on literature reviewed, the set of independent variables has also contained age, socioeconomic situation (SES), housing situation, environmental properties, facilities, social capital, recreational activities, relative deprivation and stressful factors. The analysis procedures performed using advanced statistical methods of structural equation modeling (SEM) and path analysis in order to evaluate and interpret the interrelationship and causality structure among the variables. Results and Discussion Exception of some neglects, description of the variables showed no difference in quality of life evaluation between the twin age, gender, marriage and geographic region groups of respondents. The complex and multiple interrelation of the variables and their direct and indirect effects on the quality of life evaluation has casually analyzed and interpreted using the advanced path analysis and structural equation modeling statistical procedures. In addition to the main structural model for analyzing the quality of life evaluation, five casual path models have also analyzed in detail for assessing the interrelations of independent variables, based on the identification and configuration of conceptual-analytic framework of the study. Referring to the total direct and indirect effects, the socio-economic status (SES), dwelling situation, recreational activities and facilities have respectively been the most positive and then, the sense of relative deprivation, stressful affaires and age the negative factors influenced the villagers’ evaluation of quality of life. Model fit indices and some future recommendations have represented finally. Conclusion Among the measured and studied determinant variables of rural quality of life, two non-significant variables of environmental situations and social capital are collective ones in nature, in contrary of others. This indicates and reveals that the self evaluation of rural peoples from quality of their lives do not correlates with their attitudes on collective affaires. Contrarily, the personal view points and their families’ situation have been the main determinants of this evaluation. Accordingly, the individual needs and problems are nowadays more important determinants and preferred apprehensions than collective affaires in view of villagers for their quality of life. This individualism is in the contradiction with the old and long lasting collectivist properties and determinants of rural communities in the past and seems be due to the deep and widespread technological evolutions and especially the information and communication revolution in recent century, apprised local communities the gap and inequalities between the urban societies and them.

جامعه روستایی ایران پس از ورود معنادار نفت به اقتصاد ملی و تجربه ناموفق اصلاحات ارضی، مرحله جدیدی از مهاجرت جمعیت خود به شهرها را آغاز و تجربه نمود که بعد از انقلاب اسلامی دهه پنجاه و متعاقب آن وقوع جنگ تحمیلی، همچنان ادامه دارد. از منظر جهانی نیز انقلاب صنعتی و رویکرد غالب توسعه صنعتی برآمده از آن و سپس انقلاب اطلاعات و ارتباطات در عصر حاضر، به نابرابری‌های بین جوامع پیشروتر شهری و جوامع کم‌توسعه روستایی در کشورهای جهان سوم شدت بخشید. رویکرد غالب جامعه روستایی در مواجهه با چنین شرایط نامطلوب ملی و بین‌المللی و تعامل گسترده و پیچیده بین آنها، افزودن بر دامنه مهاجرت‌های روستاشهری به شکل گریز از روستا به شهر بوده و در این گریز، ناگزیر هر دو جامعۀ مبدأ و مقصد را با نارسایی‌هایی مواجه ساخته است. هدف مطالعه حاضر، واکاوی علل و انگیزه‌های مهاجرت و گریز جمعیت از منطقه روستایی پادنای سفلی از توابع شهرستان سمیرم به شهرها، از منظری جامعه‌شناختی است. جامعه آماری پژوهش را دو بخش ساکنان روستاهایِ بیشتر در معرض مهاجرت منطقه و همچنین مهاجران این روستاها به شهرهای مختلف کشور (شهرضا، عسلویه، اصفهان، شیراز و مشهد) تشکیل می‌دهد. تحلیل داده‌های به‌دست آمده از عملیات گسترده میدانی در روستاهای مبدأ و شهرهای مقصد نشان داد که به ترتیب متغیرهای اجتماعی و اقتصادیِ احساس محرومیت نسبی، فقدان زیرساخت‌های اشتغال و درآمد غیر زراعی و ضعف و کمبود امکانات و تسهیلات، دارای تأثیر معنی‌دار مثبت و نقش برانگیزاننده در تمایل و اقدام افراد به ترک روستا بوده و متغیرهای سن و سرمایه‌های اجتماعی نیز تأثیر معنی‌دار منفی و نقش بازدارنده در روستاگریزی افراد داشته‌اند. متغیر جمعیت‌شناختی تحصیلات، متغیر اقتصادی ضعف بنیان‌های بخش کشاورزی و متغیر محیطیِ دورافتادگی و موقعیت جغرافیایی نیز فاقد تأثیر معنی‌دار در این رابطه بوده‌اند.

Controlled drug release is one method for Stabilization of the drug concentration and its gradually releasing during the period of cure to make the most desire cure effect with decreasing the drug dose consumption. The application of polymers has been extended in this filed. This study includes the synthesis of p-styrene sulphonyl sulfametazine as monomer from p-styrene sulfonyl chlorid, and then the monomer is polymerized with AIBN (Azobis isobutyro nitrile) by free-radical polymerization mechanism, at the temperature 80 °C. The prepared products were characterized by 1H NMR and IR spectra. Then, the drug release ability of the polymer was test in buffer solution with PH = 1.4 at the temperature of 37°C. The results from the UV absorption of polymer established that, the polymer is able to release drug.

We performed structure-activity studies upon an extended series of 36 compounds of chalcone derivatives with anti cancer biological activities in LNCaP prostate cancer cell line, using QSAR methods that imply analysis of correlations and multiple linear regression a significant collection of six molecular descriptors was used, e.g. Edge adjacency indices, Atom-centered fragments, GETAWAY and 3D-MoRS descriptors. The obtained multi-parametric model when a different class of molecular descriptors was used led to correlation coefficient closed to 0.922 which indicate that the model was satisfactory for prediction of the anti-cancer activity of substituted chalcones and the same compounds.

Controlled drug release is one of the most important methods to increase the therapeutic effects and decrease side effects of drug. In this research, three drugs (piperazine, 8-aminoquinoline, N-phenyl piperazine) were attached chemically to the p-styrene sulphonyl chloride (as monomer), and they were polymerized by AIBN ( Azobis isobutyro nitrile) at 80 °C. Finally, release ability of three polymer-drugs were tested in buffer solution with pH= 1.3 at the temperature 37 °C. The GPC spectra of the polymers showed that polymerization of monomers containing drugs were carried out. The results established that, these polymeric systems are able to release drugs.

Most of data in Multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problems are changeable rather than constant and stable. Therefore, sensitivity analysis after problem solving can effectively contribute to making accurate decisions. In this paper, we offer a new method for sensitivity analysis in multi-attribute decision making problems in which if the weights of one attribute changes, then we can determine changes in the results of the problem. These changes involve changes in the weight of other attributes and the change in the final rank of alternatives. This analysis was conducted for Technique for order-preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) technique, one of the most frequently used multi-attribute decision making techniques, and the formulas were obtained. The paper continues with a numerical example and at last conclusions and suggestions for future researches are offered.

Most of data in a multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problem are unstable and changeable, then sensitivity analysis after problem solving can effectively contribute to making accurate decisions. This paper provides a new method for sensitivity analysis of MADM problems so that by using it and changing the weights of attributes, one can determine changes in the final results of a decision making problem. This analysis applied for SAW technique, one of the most used multi-attribute decision making techniques, and the formulas are obtained.