Sharif Digital Repository

Natural earthquake disasters are unprecedented incidents which take many lives as a consequence and cause major damages to lifeline infrastructures. Various agencies in a country are responsible for reducing such adverse impacts within specific budgets. These responsibilities range from before to after the incident, targeting one of the main phases of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, and response). Use of OR in disaster management and coordination of its phases has been mostly ignored and highly recommended in former reviews. This paper presents a formulation to coordinate three main agencies and proposes a heuristic approach to solve the different introduced sub-problems. The... 

We formulate an integrated mathematical model for distribution of the injured on a three-type transportation network with destroyable independent links and with actual travel times considering two different groups of the injured. The aim is to find the temporary locations for aid stations and their capacities, the percentage of the injured with various severities allocated to each station and to different routes and the number of vehicles so that the total relief time is minimized. For this, we present a new approach, called circle-based approach, in which the effects of the disaster are considered as a number of concentric circular regions. The original problem is formulated as an integer... 

The great potential of natural and unnatural events in many countries like Iran along with the strategic role of transportation networks in a country's economic, disaster management in Iran's transportation network, especially in its capital, Tehran, has a great importance. Also transportation networks play an important role in various stages of response to disasters, such as evacuation, search and rescue, and reconstruction missions. Hence, special attention must be paid to transportation networks in any disaster management system. Reliability measures are critical in judging the performance of a transportation system and it is very important to evaluate the performance of the network after... 

Tabriz city in NW Iran is a seismic-prone province with recurring devastating earthquakes that have resulted in heavy casualties and damages. This research developed a new computational framework to investigate four main dimensions of vulnerability (environmental, social, economic and physical). An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Model and a SWOT-Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM) were applied. Firstly, a literature review was performed to explore indicators with significant impact on aforementioned dimensions of vulnerability to earthquakes. Next, the twenty identified indicators were analyzed in ArcGIS, a geographic information system (GIS) software, to map earthquake... 

Tabriz city in NW Iran is a seismic-prone province with recurring devastating earthquakes that have resulted in heavy casualties and damages. This research developed a new computational framework to investigate four main dimensions of vulnerability (environmental, social, economic and physical). An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Model and a SWOT-Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM) were applied. Firstly, a literature review was performed to explore indicators with significant impact on aforementioned dimensions of vulnerability to earthquakes. Next, the twenty identified indicators were analyzed in ArcGIS, a geographic information system (GIS) software, to map earthquake... 

MANET, which stands for Mobile Ad-hoc Network, is composed of a group of self-organized and wireless nodes that do not possess any predictable and fixed infrastructure. When nodes want to communicate with each other, they have to pass on their messages directly or indirectly. In case the destination node is out of the transmission range, the source node has to rely on intermediate nodes, which, in this case, is called indirect transmission. On the other hand, if the destination node is the neighboring node, there is no need to employ intermediate nodes, which, in this case, is called direct transmission. Over the past years, security issues in MANETs have received a great deal of attention... 

The need to develop an integrated dynamic safety and risk analysis model for decommissioning offshore jacket structures is driven by the risky, expensive and complex nature of the operation. Many of the existing risk analysis techniques applicable to offshore assets failed to recognise and capture evolving risks during different stages of the decommissioning operation. This paper describes risk-based safety model to conduct quantitative risk analysis for offshore jacket decommissioning failure. First, a bow-tie technique is developed to model the accident cause-consequence relationship. Subsequently, a Bayesian belief network is used to update the failure probabilities of the contributing... 

Seismic performance of a representative single-story confined unreinforced masonry school building in Tehran, Iran is evaluated by means of incremental dynamic analyses according to FEMA P-58 framework. For this purpose, fragility curves are derived for each of the constituent walls of the building. The in-plane behavior of the walls is considered only. Both flexible and rigid diaphragm conditions are investigated. For comparison purposes, the corresponding unconfined building exactly duplicating the considered confined unreinforced masonry building is also studied. In order to analyze the effects of near-source seismic actions on the performance of masonry buildings, two separate far-field... 

We formulate an integrated mathematical model for distribution of the injured on a three-type transportation network with destroyable independent links and with actual travel times considering two different groups of the injured. The aim is to find the temporary locations for aid stations and their capacities, the percentage of the injured with various severities allocated to each station and to different routes and the number of vehicles so that the total relief time is minimized. For this, we present a new approach, called circle-based approach, in which the effects of the disaster are considered as a number of concentric circular regions. The original problem is formulated as an integer... 

This article proposes a novel index along with a user-friendly platform for resilience evaluation of the urban water distribution networks (WDN). WDN is of great importance in preserving the safety and sustainability of communities and cities. Resilience of a given system results in its sustainability. In recent years, many studies have focused on resilient urban WDN. However, these studies did not provide a comprehensive evaluation index and platform that could simultaneously consider hydraulic analysis, resilience parameters, and significant uncertainties. In this study, a novel resilience index was defined, and a user-friendly and practical platform (REWAT) was developed to calculate the... 

Although collaborative distributed simulations and virtual environments (VE) have been an active area of research in the past few years, they have recently gained even more attention due to the emergence of online gaming, emergency simulation and planning systems, and disaster management applications. Such environments combine graphics, haptics, animations and networking to create interactive multimodal worlds that allows participants to collaborate in real-time. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), perhaps the most widely deployed practical application of distributed virtual environments, allows players to act together concurrently in a virtual world over the Internet. IP...