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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... 

Ways to reduce an airline's cost has been studied for years. In fact, in order to achieve this goal, ones need to know different types of airline's costs including; fuel and oil, maintenance, Ticketing, passenger services, etc. and their impact on the total cost of an airline. According to announcement of ICAO [1], "maintenance cost (about 11% of total cost) is the second major cost after fuel and oil". Therefore, this may attract airline owners' attention to find ways to control maintenance cost and eventually the total cost of an airline. Though, there are many systematic approaches to analyze cost reduction and making policies, in this article, SD modeling is applied to develop a... 

This review covers the most recent developments of inorganic and organic-inorganic composite coatings for orthopedic implants, providing the interface with living tissue and with potential for drug delivery to combat infections. Conventional systemic delivery of drugs is an inefficient procedure that may cause toxicity and may require a patient's hospitalization for monitoring. Local delivery of antibiotics and other bioactive molecules maximizes their effect where they are required, reduces potential systemic toxicity and increases timeliness and cost efficiency. In addition, local delivery has broad applications in combating infection-related diseases. Polymeric coatings may present some... 

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... 

Recent developments in improving lighting efficiency and cost reduction of LED's have caused them to be a suitable alternative for the current lighting systems. In this paper a novel off-line structure is proposed to drive LED's. The proposed circuit has a high power factor and high efficiency and a long lifetime. To increase the life time of the converter, the proposed circuit doesn't use any electrolytic capacitors in the power stage. The proposed circuit consists of a transition mode (TM) Flyback converter in order to have power factor correction (PFC). A Buck converter is added to the third winding of the Flyback transformer in order to create two paths for the electrical power. DC power... 

A novel, robust and practical method for active user enumeration in asynchronous CDMA in multipath channel condition is proposed in this paper. Most of the previous works do not consider the fact that in practical case, user's signals with the help of receiver arrive asynchronously. The proposed method can be used practically in blind multi-user detection such as eavesdropping; moreover, the method is based on information theory criteria which outperform other methods. Minimum description length (MDL) has better performance than all other information criteria used in such scenarios. Unlike most of the pervious works, we do not exploit array antenna to gather necessary data of the users.... 

Design and implementation of Architecture is a knowledge-driven process. Evaluation and verification the knowledge, in order to ensure its quality, have important role in improving overall design process. Furthermore, Architectural decision making is a complex and multi-criteria decision making problem in which multiple stakeholders make decisions from their perspectives causing overlaps and conflicts in the adopted decisions. Therefore, the requirement for strategies to manage these issues and also to improve coordination and cooperation among the various stakeholders to improve the overall process design is necessary. In this regard, there have been several activities that focus on... 

This paper discusses a technical comparison of a directexpansion ground-source heat pump (DX-GSHP) and an airsource heat pump (ASHP). To lower the ground heat exchanger size for cost reduction purposes, the system performance of a hybrid system is also evaluated using a supplementary air evaporator combined with the DX-GSHP. Detailed screening models previously developed for ASHPs and DX-GHSPs are first used to compare the seasonal performance of these two options for a residential building in the cold-climate city of Montreal, Canada. Then, the model is adopted for performance evaluation of the hybrid system. Additionally, different parameters including borehole total length and heat pump... 

The purpose of this paper is to adopt and analyze a new ordering policycalled one-for-one-period policy in a multi-echelon supply chain consisting ofone retailer and a series of TV suppliers. The main advantage of adopting theone-for-one-period (7,7) ordering policy for retailers is the elimination ofuncertainty for supplier which leads to total elimination of the safety stocksat all suppliers. This in turn leads to the reduction of the total system costsand in case any supplier's ordering cost is negligible it can even eliminate theneed for him to carry any inventory. In addition to this advantage, thenumerical results show that the application of this new policy for the retailerleads to... 

In a deregulated environment of power distribution industry, a comprehensive economic evaluation for the implementation of distribution automation (DA) systems is inevitable. Using the presented methodology in this paper and system dynamics approach, it is efficiently possible to deal with variation of the economic parameters such as the interest rate, inflation rate, energy supply cost, load growth, etc. In this paper, economic short-run and long-run impacts of DA systems are evaluated from utility point of view. Also economic benefits from customers' point of view are analyzed. A practical pricing strategy for maximizing the utility profit is suggested depending on the underlying market... 

There are several types of drilling methods to increase the productivity of a well, such as horizontal drilling, extended reach horizontal drilling and Multilateral (ML) drilling. It is thought that ML wells could be more economic with higher productivities than horizontal or extended reach horizontal wells. Advances in ML drilling promise reduced costs, greater flexibility and increased profit potential. In the last 20 years, thousands of ML wells have been drilled worldwide, but only a small percentage of the total number of wells is multilateral. The probable reason may be lack of concise information and misconceptions surrounding the costs and perceived risks. However, recent advances in... 

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are necessary when they are deployed in reality. In This paper, we have presented a combined method of selecting IDS agent nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Since, the IDS agents in MANET due to more activities need to more battery power. In our method, first, compromised nodes are detected and then the nodes with the highest energy power from among valid nodes as IDS agent nodes are considered. So, with this method, some valid nodes contribute in intrusion detection activities and costs of the network monitoring will be reduced and the network lifetime will be increased. © 2009 IEEE  

An adaptive approach for distribution system reconfiguration and charging management of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) is presented in this study. A stochastic model predictive control is applied to stochastically, adaptively, and dynamically reconfigure the system, manage the incidental charging pattern of PEVs, and deal with the variable and uncertain power of renewable energy sources. The objective function of problem is minimizing daily operation cost of system. Herein, the geography of area is considered and the behavior of PEVs' drivers (based on their income level) is modeled with respect to the value of incentive and their hourly distance from each charging station. It is shown that... 

Reducing the size of the technology increases leakage power in Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers drastically. Power-gating, particularly in NoC routers, is one of the most efficient approaches for alleviating the leakage power. Although applying power-gating techniques alleviates NoC power consumption due to high proportion of idleness in NoC routers, since the timing behavior of packets is irregular, even in low injection rates, performance overhead in power-gated routers is significant. In this paper, we present SMART, a Scalable Mapping And Routing Technique, with virtually no area overhead on the network. It improves the irregularity of the timing behavior of packets in order to mitigate... 

A 3 DOF platform was constructed in the Georgia Institute of Technology to perform new control strategies in an experimental framework. Also in this simulator, there isn't any sensor used by a real satellite for attitude determination. The setup was structured on data transmitting and synchronization of distributed elements for ADCS tests. In such a plan, not only can different elements of the test bed be used individually, but also they can support an integrated hardware in the loop test. Accordingly, reusing the hardware sources causes a cost reduction of development. Furthermore the geometric interferences of different parts are minimized in this plan. So, the test bed can be developed... 

Crosstalk faults occurring in wires of Networks on Chip (NoCs) can seriously threaten the reliability of data transfer. One efficient way to tackle crosstalk faults is numeral-based Crosstalk Avoidance Codes (CACs). Numeral-based CACs reduce crosstalk faults by preventing specific transition patterns to occur. One-Lambda Codes (OLCs) are the most efficient types of CACs. However, the codec of OLCs imposes overheads including power consumption, critical path and area occupation to the routers of NoCs. To find overhead-efficient OLCs, this paper proposes an Algorithm for Generating OLC Numeral systems (AGON). AGON provides a tradeoff for designers in selecting overhead-efficient OLCs. Using... 

There are a vast number of cloud service providers, which offer virtual machines (VMs) with different configurations. From the companies perspective, an appropriate selection of VMs is an important issue, as the proper service selection leads to improved productivity, higher efficiency, and lower cost. An effective service selection cannot be done without a systematic approach due to the modularity of requests, the conflicts between requirements, and the impact of network parameters. In this paper, we introduce an innovative framework, called PCA, to solve service selection problem in the hybrid environment of peer-assisted, public, and private clouds. PCA detects the conflicts between the... 

Coordinated operation of hydro-thermal power systems helps reduce generation costs. The Hydro-Thermal Coordinating Model (HTCOM) software package, as one of these models, determines long-term operational policies for a hydro-thermal power system with multipurpose reservoirs. The CLT was incorporated within this framework to ensure a logical time-based run-time, with no serious decrease in precision. HTCOM, based on both its theoretical background and its application in the KWPA system, has shown that it can handle real world problems successfully, with more reliable outcomes. Many models have also been developed to optimize the planning of hydro-thermal systems. HTCOM was developed and... 

Distributed Generation (DG) can help in reducing the cost of electricity to the customer, relieve network congestion, provide environmentally friendly energy close to load centers as well as promote system technical characteristics such as loss reduction, voltage profile enhancement, reserve mitigation and many other factors. Furthermore, its capacity is also scalable and it can provide voltage support at distribution level. The planning studies include penetration level and placement evaluation which are influenced directly by DG type. Most of the previous publications in this field chose one or two preferred parameter as basic objective and implement the optimizations in systems. But due...