Sharif Digital Repository

In the past decade, distribution network operators have been broadly engrossed toward automated distribution networks. The operators acknowledge network automation as an efficient investment toward a better service reliability. This paper aims to provide a new long-term cost/benefit analysis for an optimal level of distribution network automation. In the analysis, reduction in customer outage cost is considered as the benefit of implementing automation systems with capital investment, and annual operation and maintenance costs. In the Finnish regulation model, there is a special incentive based on customer outage cost reduction. As the main contribution of this paper, the impact of earth... 

Application of residential demand response (DR) programs are currently realized up to a limited extent due to customers' difficulty in manually responding to the time-differentiated prices. As a solution, this paper proposes an automatic home load management (HLM) framework to achieve the household minimum payment as well as meet the operational constraints to provide customer's comfort. The projected HLM method controls on/off statuses of responsive appliances and the charging/discharging periods of plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and battery storage at home. This paper also studies the impacts of different time-varying tariffs, i.e., time of use (TOU), real time pricing (RTP), and... 

Planning of distribution networks is usually accomplished using a cost-based conventional model that minimizes the total cost of construction and reinforcement of substations and feeders. The resulted expansion plan designed by this cost-based model is not necessarily the best choice for an electrical distribution company (DISCO) in the nowadays deregulated structure. This happening is mainly due to the fact that the utility seeks to maximize its profit in this competitive environment. On the other hand, this model does not consider the upcoming new challenges ahead of distribution systems, such as smart grid and distribution automation technologies. This paper presents a novel profit-based... 

Demand response (DR) as a state-of-the-art program is accommodated in the energy efficiency contexts of the smart grid. Lack of the customer knowledge about how to respond to the time-differentiated tariffs and offered controlling signals is the major obstacle in the way of broad DR implementing. As a solution, an optimization method, namely load control (LC), is proposed to automatically control the on/off status of the responsive appliances in a smart home. This paper focuses on the direct load control (DLC) program in the category of incentive-based DR programs. LC is extended to consider inconvenience cost of the DLC implementation for DLC program participants. Outputs of the extended LC... 

Although demand response (DR) potentially brings miscellaneous advantages, it is currently faced with challenges in its implementation due to customers' difficulty in manually responding to the time-varying prices. This paper presents an optimal and automatic residential load commitment (LC) framework to achieve the household minimum payment. Problem decision variables are the operating status of responsive appliances and charging/discharging cycles of battery storage and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). Storage capability in residential centers provide the customers with this opportunity to not only supply the local demand during the high price hours but also sell the energy back... 

Automation is acknowledged by distribution utilities as a successful investment strategy to enhance reliability and operation efficiency. However, practical approaches that can handle the complex decision-making process faced by decision makers to justify the long-term financial effects of distribution automation have remained scarce. An automated and remote-controlled sectionalizing switch play a fundamental role in an automated distribution network. This paper introduces a new optimization approach for distribution automation in terms of automated and remotely controlled sectionalizing switch placement. Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is utilized to model the problem. The proposed... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

In a practical power system, automating all the substations is neither affordable nor economically justifiable. On the other hand, the trend for electric power subsidies elimination in some regions, such as Iran, aggravates this situation. To enhance the cost effectiveness of distribution automation system, this paper proposes a novel applicable qualitative-quantitative method using analytical hierarchical process (AHP) to find the optimum placement of remote terminal units (RTU). Entire attempt is to contribute all the crucial technical and practical parameters related to this problem in order to find the most reliable solution. Optimum number of RTUs is determined using the concepts of... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

Liver-shape analysis and quantification is still an open research subject. Quantitative assessment of the liver is of clinical importance in various procedures such as diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring. Liver-shape classification is of clinical importance for corresponding intra-subject and inter-subject studies. In this research, we propose a novel technique for the liver-shape classification based on Spherical Harmonics (SH) coefficients. The proposed liver-shape classification algorithm consists of the following steps: (a) Preprocessing, including mesh generation and simplification, point-set matching, and surface to template alignment; (b) Liver-shape parameterization,... 

As digital technology has developed, relays have evolved from simple electro-mechanical devices into robust microprocessor-embedded intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). Distance protection, one of the most important and sophisticated forms of substation protection, quickly and selectively detects and clears phase faults in sub-transmission and transmission lines. The installation of a substation automation system (SAS) involves implementing control, monitoring, and protection logic by programming the IEDs and providing an appropriate communication network. IEC61850 has gradually satisfied the need for a standard communication protocol so that IEDs from different manufacturers can... 

In this paper, we investigate the CO emission from an oil refinery gas incinerator both theoretically and experimentally. At the beginning of this research, our collected data from this incinerator showed that the CO contamination would be far exceeding the permissible environmental standards at the stack exhaust. Therefore, we decided to perform a combined theoretical-experimental study to find a reasonable solution to reduce the CO pollution suitably. Our theoretical study showed that a reliable solution would be to increase the incinerator operating temperature. However, we needed to collect some data from this incinerator to examine if our achieved analytical solution would work... 

New technologies such as smart homes and appliances and renewable energy production have been attracting much attention in recent years. In practice, the management of these technologies to get the minimum household payment has become a challenge due to the time-varying electricity price. In this paper, we propose a real time energy management system to manage the appliances and storages. The solar energy is charged in the storages and used together with the grid electricity to supply the appliances. The proposed management system uses an ILP-based Home Energy Management (ILPHEM) optimization engine. ILPHEM schedules appliances requests and storage usage based on updated real time input data... 

A number of challenges including instability, nonconvergence, nonuniqueness, nonoptimality, and lack of a general guideline for inverse modelling have limited the application of automatic calibration by generic inversion codes in solving the saltwater intrusion problem in real-world cases. A systematic parameter selection procedure for the selection of a small number of independent parameters is applied to a real case of saltwater intrusion in a small island aquifer system in the semiarid region of the Persian Gulf. The methodology aims at reducing parameter nonuniqueness and uncertainty and the time spent on inverse modelling computations. Subsequent to the automatic calibration of the... 

Demand response (DR) as a state-of-the-art program is accommodated in the energy efficiency contexts of the smart grid. Lack of the customer knowledge about how to respond to the time-differentiated tariffs and offered controlling signals is the major obstacle in the way of broad DR implementing. As a solution, an optimization method, namely load control (LC), is proposed to automatically control the on/off status of the responsive appliances in a smart home. This paper focuses on the direct load control (DLC) program in the category of incentive-based DR programs. LC is extended to consider inconvenience cost of the DLC implementation for DLC program participants. Outputs of the extended LC... 

We propose a cost estimation model based on a fuzzy rule backpropagation network, configuring the rules to estimate the cost under uncertainty. A multiple linear regression analysis is applied to analyze the rules and identify the effective rules for cost estimation. Then, using a dynamic programming approach, we determine the optimal path of the manufacturing network. Finally, an application of this model is illustrated through a numerical example showing the effectiveness of the proposed model for solving the cost estimation problem under uncertainty  

This study aims at quantitatively assessing the availability indices of various substation automation systems. In order to illustrate the proposed technique, first, nine types of substation automation architectures are reviewed. The reliability block diagrams of various substation automation architectures are then developed. Subsequently, comparative studies are performed to demonstrate the most reliable architectures in comparison with the others. The results obtained by the proposed approach show the impact of repair on availability indices of the automation system. Finally, different sensitivity analyses are conducted for all architectures, where the impact of varying availability of all... 

Visual tracking has attracted a significant attention in the last few decades. The recent surge in the number of publications on tracking-related problems have made it almost impossible to follow the developments in the field. One of the reasons is that there is a lack of commonly accepted annotated data-sets and standardized evaluation protocols that would allow objective comparison of different tracking methods. To address this issue, the Visual Object Tracking (VOT) workshop was organized in conjunction with ICCV2013. Researchers from academia as well as industry were invited to participate in the first VOT2013 challenge which aimed at single-object visual trackers that do not apply... 

Here, an approach for finding an optimal path in a flexible jobshop manufacturing system considering two criteria of time and cost is proposed. A network is configured in which the nodes are considered to be the shops with arcs representing the paths among the shops. An automated guided vehicle functions as a material handling device through the manufacturing network. To account for uncertainty, time is considered to be a triangular fuzzy number and apply an expert system to infer the cost. The expert system based on fuzzy rule backpropagation network to configure the rules for estimating the cost under uncertainty is proposed. A multiple linear regression model is applied to analyze the...