Sharif Digital Repository

Over the last decade, there have been an increasing interest in the techniques of process monitoring of high-quality processes. Based upon the cumulative counts of conforming (CCC) items, Geometric distribution is particularly useful in these cases. Nonetheless, in some processes the number of one or more types of defects on a nonconforming observation is also of great importance and must be monitored simultaneously. However, there usually exist some correlations between these two measures, which obligate the use of multi-attribute process monitoring. In the literature, by assuming independence between the two measures and for the cases in which there is only one type of defect in... 

Efficient control of gas metal arc welding process enables us to have high quality products in consequence of achieving high quality weld. In this paper, an extended dynamic matrix controller is designed and applied on the gas metal arc welding process, which is considered as a nonlinear multi-inputs multi-outputs system. In order to reach a high quality weld, the outputs, welding current and arc length, are effectively controlled by open circuit voltage and wire feed speed. The structure and performance of the proposed controller are discussed in detail, and then a set of simulation results is presented to verify its efficiencies  

Efficient control of a gas metal arc welding (GMAW) process enables one to obtain high quality products as a consequence of achieving a high quality weld. Although control of the droplet detachment frequency in the welding process would play a great role in improving the welding quality, measuring this variable is difficult and expensive. In this paper, we attempt to control the frequency of droplet detachments without directly measuring it. To this end, we utilize the hybrid property of the GMAW process to indirectly control the frequency. Specifically, a mixed logical dynamical (MLD) model is obtained by considering the hybrid act of the process during droplet detachment. Then, a nonlinear... 

The special issue of the Journal of Supercomputers presents recent research results on multicore systems where contributions cover different topics such as architecture, programming tools and applications, as well as other related aspects of multicore systems design. Contributed papers include some of the high-quality papers accepted at the CADS 2013 conference that took place in Tehran, which were selected based on the evaluation scores and presentation quality at the conference. The review process required three rounds of diligent reviews and revisions resulting in the final accepted manuscripts for publication in the journal  

Speaker adaptive speech synthesis based on Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HSMM) has been demonstrated to be dramatically effective in the presence of confined amount of speech data. However, we could intensify this effectiveness by training the average voice model appropriately. Hence, this study presents a new method for training the average voice model. This method guarantees that data from every speaker contributes to all the leaves of decision tree. We considered this fact that small training data and highly diverse contexts of training speakers are considered as disadvantages which degrade the quality of average voice model impressively, and further influence the adapted model and synthetic... 

We present a modified examplar-based inpainting method in the framework of patch sparsity. In the examplar-based algorithms, the unknown blocks of target region are inpainted by the most similar blocks extracted from the source region, with the available information. Defining a priority term to decide the filling order of missing pixels ensures the connectivity of object boundaries. In the exemplar-based patch sparsity approaches, a sparse representation of missing pixels was considered to define a new priority term. Here, we modify this representation of the priority term and take measures to compute the similarities between fill-front and candidate patches. Comparative reconstructed test... 

Integrated on-chip inductors with high quality factors are demonstrated using a low loss artificial conductor technology. This concept is based on an artificial layered meta-material comprising a bi-layered Ni 80Fe 20/Cu superlattice. By properly tailoring the thickness ratio between the non-magnetic and magnetic metallic layers, the skin effects can be effectively suppressed within a wide frequency range, and can be tuned to a minimum at the frequency of interest up to 67 GHz. The quality factor has been increased by 41% of a 2nH inductor at 14.5GHz. The bandwidth of skin effect suppression is obtained between 10-18 GHz  

Morus Alba or mulberry is a wood species that is broadly used in making musical instruments in Eastern countries. However, the mechanical and acoustical properties of this type of wood are not investigated properly. In this study a set of features, previously examined for other species, are applied to this wood and its acoustic quality is evaluated. Setar, a Persian musical instrument made of mulberry wood, is selected as the test case of this experiment. Different samples of wood are gathered and categorized based on their appropriateness for Setar construction. The quality of each sample is identified based on the Perceptual knowledge of professional Setar makers. The most effective... 

High-quality measurements of seismic activities around the world provide a wealth of data and information that are relevant to understanding of when earthquakes may occur. If viewed as complex stochastic time series, such data may be analyzed by methods that provide deeper insights into their nature, hence leading to better understanding of the data and their possible implications for earthquakes. In this paper, we provide further evidence for our recent proposal for the existence of a transition in the shape of the probability density function (PDF) of the successive detrended increments of the stochastic fluctuations of Earth's vertical velocity Vz, collected by broadband stations before... 

In order to monitor auto-correlated processes, many kinds of model-free control charts have been recently proposed based on the methods used in simulation output analysis. However, these control charts always have a restricting assumption that a large volume of observations is available while defects within them are scarce (zero-defect or high-quality processes). In this paper, we develop a new type of model-free unweighted batch means control charts, called grouped batch means (GBM) to monitor autocorrelated processes. In addition to its better performance in some cases, the GBM control chart can be applied not only to high-quality processes but also to all kinds of auto-correlated... 

Many platforms exploit collaborative tagging to provide their users with faster and more accurate results while searching or navigating. Tags can communicate different concepts such as the main features, technologies, functionality, and the goal of a software repository. Recently, GitHub has enabled users to annotate repositories with topic tags. It has also provided a set of featured topics, and their possible aliases, carefully curated with the help of the community. This creates the opportunity to use this initial seed of topics to automatically annotate all remaining repositories, by training models that recommend high-quality topic tags to developers. In this work, we study the... 

Context: Software testing is a pivotal activity in the development of high-quality software. As software is evolving through its life cycle, the need for a fault-revealing criterion assessing the effectiveness of the test suite grows. Over the years, researchers have proposed coverage-based criteria, including statement and branch coverage, to solve this issue. In literature, the effectiveness of such criteria is attested in terms of their correlations with the mutation score. Objective: In this paper, we aim at proposing a coverage-based criterion named statement frequency coverage, which outperforms statement and branch coverage in terms of correlation with mutation score. Method: To this... 

Context: Software testing is a pivotal activity in the development of high-quality software. As software is evolving through its life cycle, the need for a fault-revealing criterion assessing the effectiveness of the test suite grows. Over the years, researchers have proposed coverage-based criteria, including statement and branch coverage, to solve this issue. In literature, the effectiveness of such criteria is attested in terms of their correlations with the mutation score. Objective: In this paper, we aim at proposing a coverage-based criterion named statement frequency coverage, which outperforms statement and branch coverage in terms of correlation with mutation score. Method: To this... 

In this paper, the effect of parametric amplifier pump phase noise on the cooling of a micromirror in an optomechanical system with an optical parametric amplifier inside the optical cavity is investigated theoretically. It has been demonstrated that the photon number distribution of a parametric amplifier near the threshold of instability leads to improved cooling of the micromirror. But due to the presence of the parametric amplifier, there is a resonance detuning frequency for transferring noise energy to the potential and kinetic energy fluctuations of the mirror which causes the mirror mechanical oscillation mode temperature to increase. In low quality factor cavities, this effect... 

Aircraft landing problem is to assign an airport's runways to the arrival aircrafts as well as to schedule the landing time of these aircrafts. In this paper, first a mixed integer goal programming model is developed. Then, due to the complexity of the problem, which is NP-hard, we design a hybrid meta-heuristic applying simulated annealing framework. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain the optimal solution for instances up to 100 aircrafts, and also it is capable of finding very high quality and comparable solutions for the problems with up to 500 aircrafts and 5 runways in a short time  

Controlling inverters with LC output filters in order to achieve a high quality desired output voltage or current is a challenging problem in power electronics. The LC filter and the binary nature of switch state variables increase the difficulty of achieving a single comprehensive model for the system. In this paper, a hybrid model is presented for a three-phase inverter with an LC output filter and a three-phase RL load. Then, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is applied to the model and a geometrical approximate method is used to fit the answers to the binary values. Simulation results for a sample system verify the usability of the method and the quality of the answers  

Clustering Web data is one important technique for extracting knowledge from the Web. In this paper, a novel method is presented to facilitate the clustering. The method determines the appropriate number of clusters and provides suitable representatives for each cluster by inference from a Bayesian network. Furthermore, by means of the Bayesian network, the contents of the Web pages are converted into vectors of lower dimensions. The method is also extended for hierarchical clustering, and a useful heuristic is developed to select a good hierarchy. The experimental results show that the clusters produced benefit from high quality  

Inpainting refers to the task of filling in the missing or damaged regions of an image in an undetectable manner. We have an image to be reconstructed in a user-defined region. We use a fast decomposition method to obtain two components of the image, namely structure and texture. Reconstruction of each component is performed separately. The missing information in the structure component is reconstructed using a structure inpainting algorithm, while the texture component is repaired by a texture synthesis technique. To obtain the inpainted image, the two reconstructed components are composed together. Taking advantage of both the structure inpainting methods and texture synthesis techniques,... 

This article studies the problem of locating fuel stations to minimize the extra cost spent in refueling detours, which belongs to a class of discretionary service facility location problems. Unlike many studies of similar problems in the literature, the proposed model considers capacity constraints and compares different ways to incorporate them in the formulation. Note that ignoring the capacity constraint results in nonoptimal and unrealistic solutions. The proposed models are solved using both an off-the-shelf solver (CPLEX) and a specialized meta-heuristic method (Simulated Annealing) developed in this study. The solution methods are tested and compared in two case studies; a test...