In reality, the flipped classroom has gained popularity as a modern way of structuring teaching, where lectures move from in-class procedures to digitally-based assignments, freeing up the debate, and practice exercises class time. Therefore, it is essential to implement and analyze a way of teaching that will improve student performance. The paper aims to develop a model of the method of teaching science in Iraqi schools, and to assess whether teaching flipped classroom affects the achievement, motivation, and creative thinking of students by using the methodology of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP approach includes several steps, including setting assessment criteria and their weights, and by assessing the methodology of the flipped classroom as compared to the conventional cognitive learning process. An experiment was carried out in Iraqi secondary schools to examine the attitude of the students towards the subject of Chemistry. The findings have indicated that the students and teachers favored flipped classroom learning more than conventional cognitive learning. The study took the following parameters compared to the traditional approach: teaching techniques, learning flexibility, teaching aids effectiveness, student participation and working environment. This paper indicates that the teachers in Iraqi schools will be able to improve and do more preparation to shift towards flipped learning in the classroom.

The inland transportation takes a significant portion of the total cost that arises from intermodal transportation. In addition, there are many parties (shipping lines, haulage companies, customers) who share this operation as well as many restrictions that increase the complexity of this problem and make it NP-hard. Therefore, it is important to create an efficient strategy to manage this process in a way to ensure all parties are satisfied. This paper investigates the pairing of containers/orders in drayage transportation from the perspective of delivering paired containers on 40-ft truck and/or individual containers on 20-ft truck, between a single port and a list of customer locations. An assignment mixed integer linear programming model is formulated, which solves the problem of how to combine orders in delivery to save the total transportation cost when orders with both single and multiple destinations exist. In opposition to the traditional models relying on the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickups and deliveries and time windows formulation, this model falls into the assignment problem category which is more efficient to solve on large size instances. Another merit for the proposed model is that it can be implemented on different variants of the container drayage problem: import only, import-inland and import-inland-export. Results show that in all cases the pairing of containers yields less cost compared to the individual delivery and decreases empty tours. The proposed model can be solved to optimality efficiently (within half hour) for over 300 orders.

A significant portion of the total cost of the intermodal transportation is generated from the inland transportation of containers. In this paper, we design a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for combining orders in the inland, haulage transportation of containers. The pickup and delivery process of both 20 and 40 foot containers from the terminals to the customer locations and vice versa are optimized using heterogeneous fleet consisting of both 20 ft and 40 ft trucks/chasses. Important operational constraints such as the time window at order receivers, the payload weight of containers and the regulation of the working hours are considered. Based on an assignment problem structure, this MILP solves efficiently to optimality for problems with up to 120 orders. To deal with larger instances, a decomposition and aggregation heuristic is designed. The basic idea of this approach is to decompose order locations geographically into fan-shaped subareas based on the angle of the order location to the port baseline, and solve the sub problems using the proposed MILP model. To balance the fleet size amongst all subgroups, column generation is used to iteratively adjust the number of allocated trucks according to the shadowprice of each truck type. Based on decomposed solutions, orders that are "fully" combined with others are removed and an aggregation phase follows to enable wider combination choices across subgroups. The decomposition and aggregation solution process is tested to be both efficient and cost-saving.

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