Sharif Digital Repository

This article deals with technology strategy and its linkage with overall strategy at multi-business, diversified groups. In the last two decades, the alignment of technology and business strategy has been one of the important research fields in strategy and technology management scopes. These researchs has been concentrated on single companies through which different frameworks, models & decision support tools have been developed and widely utilized by industries. Although multi-business and diversified groups play an important role in global and national economics and need a comprehensive and overall plan for the management of their diversified technological assets, there are few researchs... 

Outpatient appointment scheduling problems have recently gained increasing attention. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent analytical and numerical optimization studies that present decision-support tools for designing and planning outpatient appointment systems (OASs). A structure for organizing the recent literature according to various criteria is provided, including a framework that classifies decisions at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The OAS literature is evaluated from four perspectives: problem settings, environmental factors, modeling approaches, and solution methods. In addition, research gaps and areas of opportunity for future research are... 

Greenhouses are complex systems that require considerable amounts of energy. In order to optimize their performance, it is necessary to reduce the amount of energy per unit of crop produced. This requires a combined assessment of greenhouse energy balance and crop growth, as well as their interaction. In this work, more than 30 existing greenhouse models are reviewed and different algorithms are combined to propose an integrated energy-yield model. The physical model of greenhouse energy demand is based on the dynamic energy and mass balance while yield production is based on a physiological crop model. The integrated model is validated with observed energy demand and crop yield datasets... 

The aim of this paper is to investigate the application of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) as the prime mover of a combined heat and power (CHP) system. In this paper, four hybrid systems are proposed to improve the performance of CHP and compare with baseline condition. Capacity design and operation strategy of hybrid systems are applied to a case study of a greenhouse located in Mahabad, Iran and optimized by using technical, economic and environmental objective functions. Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and CO2 emission rate are considered as the objective functions. For LCOE optimization, three scenarios are considered to evaluate the impacts of future energy prices and CO2 tax. In scenario... 

The growing trend of electric vehicles (EVs) in recent years has led to the emergence of EV aggregators in electricity markets. Generally, the main goal of an EV aggregator is to buy electricity from the wholesale market in a cost-effective manner while satisfying the charging requirements of EV owners. Accordingly, this paper presents a decision support tool for EV aggregators which enables them to determine the optimal bidding strategy to effectively participate in the day-ahead and real-time energy, and frequency regulation markets. Indeed, the aggregator mainly obtains profit by selling energy during the high-price hours (via vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capability) and providing primary... 

The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of a combined cooling, heating, and power generation system with a micro turbine using biogas as the fuel to supply the heat and electricity demands in a real wastewater treatment plant. The plant is optimized using the system's total cost rate and the amount of the produced biogas as objective functions. The anaerobic digester is modeled using the ADM1 model. The optimization variables include digester hydraulic retention time, compressor pressure ratio, isentropic compressor efficiency, recuperator pinch time temperature, turbine isentropic efficiency, turbine input temperature, and the number of micro turbines. In the first scenario...