Sharif Digital Repository

Caspian Sea - the largest enclosed body of water on earth - is the subject of one of the world's most intractable disputes, involving five coastal states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. The conflict over the legal status of this multinational water body emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then the parties have been negotiating without reaching an agreement on the ownerships of waters, and the oil and natural gas beneath them. As long as there is no new agreement on how to share the Caspian Sea among the five states, the two old Iran-USSR treaties may continue to govern the Caspian Sea. Based on these treaties, each state's territorial... 

Caspian Sea is currently a subject of one of the world's most intractable disputes, involving five coastal states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. The conflict over the legal status of this multinational water body emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then the parties have been negotiating without reaching an agreement on the ownerships of waters, and the oil and natural gas beneath them. Although different division methods have been suggested so far for sharing the Caspian Sea, the gains of the countries from sea area and valuable resources remain unclear as the proposed methods are either focused on the areal shares or on the oil and gas shares.... 

We study a location-allocation-routing problem for distribution of the injured in a disaster response scenario, considering a three-type transportation network with separate links. A circle-based approach to estimate the impacts of the disaster is presented. After formulating relations for computing the percentage of the injured, the destruction percentage and the damage-dependent travel times, the problem is formulated as an integer nonlinear program. We utilize a genetic algorithm and a discrete version of the imperialist competitive algorithm for solving large problems. An empirical study focused on earthquakes in Tabriz, Iran, illustrates applicability of the proposed model and... 

Iranian water authority has recently announced that one of the effective ways to avoid unprecedented high water consumption in Iran's agriculture sector is to increase water price. This paper analyzes the feasibility of this policy by using a hydro-economic approach with the aim to consider the role of water pricing in agricultural water management. Such an analysis was conducted through comparing price of water consumed for producing selected agricultural crops (i.e. wheat, sugar beets, onion, tomato, barley, potato, corn, alfalfa hay and watermelon) in a case study on two provinces (East Azarbaijan and West Azarbaijan) in Iran to that in the state of California (CA) in the USA. According... 

A method for construction of large underground spaces based on a new pre-supporting system is introduced. In this paper Mansour Station, in Line 1 of Tabriz Metro (Tabriz Urban Railway Organization, TURO); Iran has been studied using this method. Mansour Station have some special characteristics such as shallow depth, soft surrounding soil, wide span and heavy street traffic, thus requires a method of underground construction that can control the stability of the underground space and the ground settlement. This method includes a pre-supporting system that is called Concrete Arch Pre-supporting System (CAPS). Construction of CAPS is mainly based on construction method of old Iranian small... 

This paper represents a numerical study on the effects of landslide initial submergence and its geotechnical and rheological properties on the characteristics of landslide-generated waves (LGWs) and landslide deformation. A number of 117 numerical experiments are performed using a two-layer Coulomb Mixture Flow (2LCMFlow) model on a real-sized numerical flume as a simplified cross section of the Maku dam reservoir, located in the Northwest of Iran. Three different initial locations are considered for landslide representing a subaerial (SAL), a semi-submerged (SSL), and a submarine (SML) landslide. Based on the numerical results, the majority of SMLs and in some cases SSLs generate tsunami... 

Tabriz has experienced several large destructive historical earthquakes in the past. Due to the absence of ground motion records in this area, a simulation of future events based on a regional seismicity information and ground motion model is necessary. Based on a maximum likelihood method, earthquake magnitude is estimated for a 10% probability of exceedance within 50 years (475-year return period) and its corresponding strong ground motions have been simulated using stochastic finite fault modeling. Using different stress parameters, suites of ground motions have been simulated for a return period of £75 years and their spectral accelerations have been compared with the corresponding...