Industry 4.0 is a concept that represents a whole new vision of the factory where components and machines are becoming intelligent and are part of a network based on a heterogeneous integration of ...data and knowledge. This is what we tend to designate today as the factory of the future or the intelligent factory. Nowadays, industries in developed countries are experiencing this revolution and are achieving a very high level of performance. On the other hand, for emerging countries, they are beginning to enter this industrial era. Morocco is one of the countries that adopt an industrial acceleration plan to create an efficient industry, and to increase the industrial share in the national GDP (gross domestic product). The aim of this paper is to study the opportunities and challenges of the industry 4.0 in Moroccan firms. Based on the use of data from a large-scale survey of 11 industrial sectors representing 1200 companies of the industry in Morocco, we studied what technologies 4.0 are most used by these companies and according to which sectors, and what are the benefits that 4.0 technologies can bring to these industries. We show also the internal and external obstacles that hinder these industries in achieving and implementing these digital technologies. This work contributes by in providing a background to advance research on real benefits of the industry 4.0.
Microfinance refers to the provision of financial services like saving, microcredit, and insurance to the poor who have limited access to traditional banking services with the aim of reducing their ...poverty. However, in the last decade, the literature stresses that the microfinance institutions focus more on their profit rather than the customer. Numerous methods have been used to model customer satisfaction in microfinance. However, a large majority of these methods is unable to take into account complex interactions and dependencies between variables. They may also find difficulties in handling limited and uncertain knowledge. The objective of this article is to model the effect of microfinance-lending process operations on overall customer satisfaction. We managed to develop a fuzzy Bayesian networks model; such an approach is widely required for modeling complex systems characterized by sparse or uncertain information as well as for conducting the cause and effect analysis.
The rolling element bearing is the leading cause of failures in rotating machinery; on that account, the accurate prediction of its remaining useful life (RUL) using sensor data is an important ...challenge to improve the reliability and decrease the maintenance costs. Classical data-driven approaches rely on manually extracted features from raw sensor data followed by an estimation of a health indicator, the degradation states and the prediction of RUL using a failure threshold.
Based on the recent success of deep neural networks in various artificial intelligence domains, we propose an end-to-end deep framework for RUL estimation based on convolutional and long-short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent units. First the neural network extracts the local features directly from sensor data using the convolutional layer, then an LSTM layer is introduced to capture the degradation process, finally the RUL is estimated using the LSTM outputs and the prediction time value. Experiments are conducted on the ball bearing data provided by FEMTO-ST Institute. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our approach.
Human Resource (HR) takes a dominate place in the life of an organization knowing that it becomes one of the competitive factors, it is also considered an important preoccupation of governments who ...try to control the wage bill and the HR structure evolution. The current trend in HRM is to enhance it to the strategic level.
The HR field is a complex system, its management is affected by the HR behavior in the way that it is very tough to predict or analyze the preferences and decisions of an employee; HRM is a dynamic discipline highly linked with people behavior, which interact freely without anyone's guidance. This analysis named bottom-up starts by focusing on the characteristics of each agent at a micro-level, because the agents behaviors and interactions each other and with the external environment lead to new laws and changes that occur on the macro-level.
For this reason an Agent Based Modeling (ABM) is proposed in this paper to integrate this property (behaviorism) in modeling the HR structure evolution. This approach takes into consideration the endogenous conditions of an employee in his work and the exogenous shocks that can affect his behavior; the goal is to get closer to the HRM aspects reality and predict the future patterns of the HR structure.
Critics concerning the real impact of traditional microfinance as a tool for poverty alleviation are becoming frequent. In contrast, the financial crisis brought out interest for Islamic finance, ...whose models have been increasingly studied. Today, the real challenge lies in evaluating the impact of microfinance in a complex environment, where both Islamic and conventional microfinance institutions exist and address evolving clients in constant interaction. New methods and models are therefore needed in order to test the efficacy and assess the impact of introducing Islamic microfinance products, compared to the conventional system. In this context, this paper proposes an approach to build an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) framework, which is aiming to test the effects of such products implementation using Islamic interest-free group loans. It also helps assess the impact of the behavioral biases as well as agents’ interactions within the repayment process.
In this study, we address the topic of sustainable and responsible portfolio investments (SRI). The selection of such portfolios is based, in addition to traditional financial variables, on ...environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. The interest of our approach resides in allowing socially responsible (SR) portfolio investors to select their optimal portfolios by considering their individual preferences for each objective and simultaneous definition of the degrees of acceptance and rejection. In particular, we consider socially responsible portfolio selection as an optimization problem with multiple objectives before applying interactive intuitionistic fuzzy method to solve the portfolio optimization. The robustness of our approach is tested through an empirical study on the top 10 Stocks for ESG values worldwide.
In this research the authors tried to solve the adverse selection problem in the Mudaraba contracts with respect to the projects privately known prospects. The authors introduced a model of two ...contracts characterized by an adverse selection index for each contract. They have managed to find that a case of market breakdown can occur because the efficient agent might mimic the inefficient agent. The authors, then, managed to develop a ‘Mimicking Likelihood Index’ whereby one can infer whether a type of an agent has a tendency to mimic the other type. In the same context, the authors developed a “Relative Adverse Selection” index to measure which type of agents has more tendencies to select a specific type of contracts. These findings should help Islamic financial institutions in their agent selection process and hedge its risky Mudaraba contracts
Improving the efficiency and performance of microfinance investments is essential to achieve its objectives in terms of economic and social development. One parameter that influences such a ...performance is the kind of the activity exercised by the micro-entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to provide a decision-making guide to help both microfinance institutions and investors to choose the appropriate Islamic banking contract with respect to each sector of activity. To attain this goal, an Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS evaluation is conducted in collaboration with Moroccan Islamic finance experts and practitioners. The proposed approach has the advantage to deal with the lack of quantitative historical data, as well as the uncertainty of the decision makers’ judgments. The suggested work will be helpful for the Moroccan participative banks and for the future Islamic microfinance institutions as well.
Managing operational risk efficiently is a critical factor of microfinance institutions (MFIs) to get a financial and social return. The purpose of this paper is to identify, assess and prioritize ...the root causes of failure within the microfinance lending process (MLP) especially in Moroccan microfinance institutions. Considering the limitation of traditional failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) method in assessing and classifying risks, the methodology adopted in this study focuses on developing a fuzzy logic inference system (FLIS) based on (FMEA). This approach can take into account the subjectivity of risk indicators and the insufficiency of statistical data. The results show that the Moroccan MFIs need to focus more on customer relationship management and give more importance to their staff training, to clients screening as well as to their business analysis.
In this paper, we analyze the attitudes of taxpayers regarding tax system. We propose an approach which combines between theory and practice. In the first step, we present a normative approach; based ...on a theoretical study. In order to produce an empirical knowledge of an aspect of reality we present a descriptive approach; based on a survey of different categories of taxpayers. We have released some conditions of the model of Expected Utility (EU) and we have introduced a new parameter reflecting the efficiency of tax control. Previous studies are based on a maximal efficiency tax control (100%) which is a particular case of our model. We found that for Moroccan case, the fraud is related to the size of companies; it's more important in the big companies than small and medium enterprises. The findings will help tax authorities to achieve their goals in fighting tax fraud.
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