دل کی بات نہیں سنتا ہے
میں نے کہا اجازت ہو تو
دل کی بات کہوں اک تم سے
اُس نے کہا نہیں رہنے دو
Dr Ghulam Mustafa Khan [d. 2005] can truly be said to be a teacher of teachers [ustadh al-asatadha]. In his long and distinguished academic career spanning over six decades, he brought into existence literally hundreds of teachers in his subject Urdu and also created in many of them a taste for critical research that resulted in the existence of a whole corpus of standard critical material. This will endure in academic circles for a long time. It was his common habit to encourage his students, especially those of an academic bent of mind, to enrol for a Ph.D. In the course of which he would proffer them all kinds of assistance even if he were not their research supervisor. As such, the names of Dr Najmul Islam, who succeeded him as Chairman, Department of Urdu, University of Sindh, stands out. Dr Najmul Islam was the editor of a scholarly research journal, Tehqiq, which appeared in over 20 volumes in his own lifetime. Each issue contained scores of critical essays of a very high academic standard including his own [Dr N. Islam’s]. There is also the name of Dr Hasrat Kasganjvi, who emerged as a creative artist and critic of merit later on authoring dozens of books of high academic standard. The list is long and distinguished and contains the names of the major teachers of Urdu language and literature at the main Pakistani universities. Apart from Urdu teachers, the thousands of persons who had the benefit of attending his lectures and courses are also evidence of his intellectual wide-ranging scholarship. Then there is the select circle of his murids who formed his circle of spiritual knowledge and who had proffered their religious devotion at his hands. To these he gave the benefit of his spiritual counsel and advice as well as the vast knowledge he possessed of the Islamic sciences in his table-talk. Among these persons, the name of ex-President Ziaul Haq is most prominent.
The globalization and saturated domestic markets force international firms to gradually expand their businesses across the borders to capture potential markets. Global Facility Location (GFL) is a crucial and irreversible decision for top management of the global business firms, searching for potential countries in global markets. It, therefore, requires a broader analysis of a large number of influencing criteria. There are hardly any GFL studies focusing on the real world uncertainties, future dynamics and interaction of GFL stakeholders. . This work is about establishing a new platform for dynamic analysis of GFL problems by screening out the most critical influencing parameters and establishing an initial pattern of Agent Based Modeling (ABM), an ecological modeling approach which considers all the individual components of a system as interacting agents. Models using conventional approaches are developed which showed the need for developing hybrid approaches particularly due to many limitations associated with conventional modeling (like dynamic priorities and stochasticity etc.).Using a hybrid Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP), the parameters initially explored from literature are prioritized and rankings in terms of objective-functions are calculated for a selected set of countries for Global Cement Plant Location Problem (GCPLP). The results of F-AHP models in terms of screened out parameters and Country Objective Functions (COF’s) are used as inputs to the ABM platform. The investor agent senses the country objective-functions (COF’s) in agent-set of countries and moves for plant installation to one with highest COF value. One of the difficulties in working with ABM’s has been the lack of a structured documenting and validation procedure to transparently record and present the detailed procedural steps of Agent Based Modeling and Simulations. This difficulty can be overcome by adopting one of the latest approaches called TRACE which is a format for TRAnsparent and Comprehensive model “Evaludation” (Evaluation + Validation) of ecological/ABM models. A case of four different cement plant locations are selected and modeled using conventional and hybrid modeling approaches. Routines are coded in respective software of each methodology (e.g. NetLogo®). A real world data from different global databases including the World Bank are used to solve the models. The model solutions are in the form of priority weights calculated for different parameters and the country rankings. However the results of hybrid ABM-GFL are more flexible and comprehensive than other methodologies as it not only considers the mutli-objective nature of the GFL problem but also takes into account the real world ambiguities in data pools and expert opinions and deals with dynamic priorities and stochastic country ratings which are changing over the time span of simulation. The methodology is validated using recommended ABM steps as required in the TRACE format. Moreover statistical tests are also applied to the generated data which not only validate the methodology but also provide more meaningful conclusions. In the end a comparative evaluation of conventional and hybrid methodologies highlights different aspects of the modeling approaches with respect to practical observations and generated results. It has been learnt in this particular study that the factors specifically related to cement industry and the sub-factors of cost are the most sensitive while legal regulations and economic conditions are relatively less critical. The countries having strong lime stone reserves, cheaper fuel costs and good internal marketing positions are, therefore, higher in ranking. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is mostly at the top most position due to its cheaper fuels while China is only marginally lower than KSA because of the lowest initial investment costs. India is also a good competitor mainly because of its stability. Pakistan has strong limestone reserves and a good marketing position. It is noteworthy that results of the hybrid approach are much flexible and more practical than others.