Sharif Digital Repository

Time-varying electricity rates enable demand-side potentials, which provide an opportunity for distribution companies (DisCos) to hedge against the financial risk imposed by volatile spot market prices and uncertain customers' load. In particular, time-varying rates can be effective alternatives for at least a portion of costly forward contracts. This paper establishes a stochastic framework to determine optimal forward market purchases under time-varying rates. Various electricity rating strategies with different time intervals covering flat, time-of-use, and real-time pricing schemes are considered. The objective of the framework is to maximize DisCo's expected profit while the exposure... 

Available transfer capability (ATC) provides important information for power marketers and planning sectors in restructured power systems. The stochastic nature of power system behaviour, however, made ATC determination a difficult and complicated task. A stochastic framework has been established for ATC calculation with implication of uncertainties in transmission failures, hourly peak loads and system cascading collapse. The proposed ATC calculation framework is based on parametric bootstrap technique which enables generating random samples of system operating condition with uncertainty at a predefined confidence interval. The IEEE RTS-96 network is employed to demonstrate the... 

This paper enhances the observability of power networks by taking into consideration random component outages. The architecture of wide-area measurement system (WAMS) is analyzed in order to identify components that would affect the network observability. An iterative framework is devised to calculate a bus index in power networks equipped with phasor measurement units (PMUs) and conventional measurements. The average of bus indices represents a system index which provides an overall insight on the power network observability. The system index is utilized as a criterion to distinguish among multiple optimal PMU placements. Conventional bus injection and line flow measurements and the effect... 

A method for clearing energy and reserve market in an aggregated framework is presented in this paper. The objective function of the optimization problem considers offered costs for energy and reserve requirements, the cost of nondelivery energy and the cost of nondelivery reserve. Incorporating these costs in the objective function, the proposed algorithm can obtain a solution in which the market required energy and reserve capacities are assigned to generating units with lower costs and higher response reliability. A new method based on optimal selection of nondelivery compensation alternatives is proposed to determine the mentioned costs. The proposed procedure provides incentives for... 

Understanding the fresh groundwater lens (FGL) behavior and potential threat of climatic-induced seawater intrusion (SWI) are significant for the future water resources management of many small islands. In this paper, the FGL of Kish Island, an arid-region case in the Persian Gulf, Iran, is modeled using two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) simulations. These simulations are based on the application of SUTRA, a density-dependent groundwater numerical model. Also, the numerical model parameters are calibrated using PEST, an automated parameter estimation code. Firstly a detailed conceptualization of the FGL model is completed to understand the sensitivity of the FGL to some... 

In the present work, adsorption of hydrogen molecules over a metal organic framework (MOF-5) has been investigated by using first principles density functional theory (DFT). Different strategies have been applied for improving hydrogen storage, i.e. metal doping, boron substitution and functionalization. The metal atoms used for enhancing hydrogen adsorption include Li, Ca and Sc. It is found that the binding energy between these metal atoms and MOF is not enough to prevent clustering. Therefore a number of carbon atoms are substituted by boron atoms and it is indicated that boron substitution enhances the binding energies, significantly. Also the results reveal that boron substituted MOF... 

A metal-organic framework [Co3(BDC)3(DMF)2(H2O)2] was synthesized and structurally characterized. X-ray single crystal analysis revealed that the framework contains a 2D polymeric chain through coordination of 1,4-benzenedicarboxylic acid linker ligand to cobalt centers. The polymer crystallize in monoclinic P21 /n space group with a=13.989(3) Å, b=9.6728(17) Å, c=16.707(3) Å, and Z=2. The polymer features a framework based on the perfect octahedral Co-O6 secondary building units. The catalytic activities of [Co3(BDC)3(DMF)2(H2O)2]n for olefins oxidation was conducted. The heterogeneous catalyst could be facilely separated from the reaction mixture, and reused three times without significant... 

In this article, solving the population balance equation (PBE) and controlling the final particle size for crystallization problems have been addressed. For solving the general form of multidimensional PBE, a numerical method called conservation element and solution element (CE/SE) has been used. By applying this method to one- and two-dimensional crystallization problems, it has been shown that this technique can handle all types of source terms in the PBE. Model accuracy has been checked with experimental data reported in the literature and also with the analytical solution of PB-type equations. Control of final particle size was formulated in an optimization framework. To obtain a desired... 

Source separation models that make use of nonnegativity in their parameters have been gaining increasing popularity in the last few years, spawning a significant number of publications on the topic. Although these techniques are conceptually similar to other matrix decompositions, they are surprisingly more effective in extracting perceptually meaningful sources from complex mixtures. In this article, we will examine the various methodologies and extensions that make up this family of approaches and present them under a unified framework. We will begin with a short description of the basic concepts and in the subsequent sections we will delve in more details and explore some of the latest... 

We show that a metal-organic framework (MOF) sustained by a nanosized Ag12 cuboctahedral node can be applied to selectively extract traces of lead(II) ion from environmental water samples. The MOF was characterized by thermogravimetric and differential thermal analysis, scanning electron microscopy, FTIR, and X-ray diffraction. The effects of pH value, flow rates, of type, concentration and volume of the eluent, of break-through volume and potentially interfering ions on the separation and determination of lead were evaluated. Following desorption with EDTA, Pb(II) was quantified by FAAS. The use of the MOF results in excellent analytical figures of merit including an analytical range from 2... 

A multi-item multiperiod inventory control model is developed for known-deterministic variable demands under limited available budget. Assuming the order quantity is more than the shortage quantity in each period, the shortage in combination of backorder and lost sale is considered. The orders are placed in batch sizes and the decision variables are assumed integer. Moreover, all unit discounts for a number of products and incremental quantity discount for some other items are considered. While the objectives are to minimize both the total inventory cost and the required storage space, the model is formulated into a fuzzy multicriteria decision making (FMCDM) framework and is shown to be a... 

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of implant design on the apex area and on stress and stress patterns within surrounding bone. Methods: Three commercially available implants with the same diameter (3.5 mm), same length (10-11 mm), and same complement abutment were selected for modeling as follows: (1) flat apical design with light tapering degree, (2) dome-shaped apical design with light tapering, and (3) flat apical design with intense tapering in one-third of the apical area. According to human cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT), the bone was modeled using a cortical thickness of 2 mm and cancellous bone. Forces of 100 N and 300 N in the vertical and 15°... 

Social network analysis and mining get ever-increasingly important in recent years, which is mainly due to the availability of large datasets and advances in computing systems. A class of social networks is those with positive and negative links. In such networks, a positive link indicates friendship (or trust), whereas links with a negative sign correspond to enmity (or distrust). Predicting the sign of the links in these networks is an important issue and hasmany applications, such as friendship recommendation and identifyingmalicious nodes in the network. In this manuscript, we proposed a new method for sign prediction in networks with positive and negative links. Our algorithm is based... 

A damage plastic constitutive model for metals is proposed in this paper. An anisotropic damage tensor and a damage surface are adopted to describe the degradation of the mechanical properties of metals. The model is developed within the thermodynamic framework and creates an anisotropic damage plastic model with the ability to describe the plastic and damage behavior of iron based materials. According to the principle of strain energy equivalence between the undamaged and damaged materials, the linear elastic constitutive equations for the damaged material expressed a stiffness tensor in the damaged configuration. The damaged material is modeled using the constitutive laws of the undamaged... 

In project management context, the Earned Value Management (EVM) is a well-known technique. Despite its popularity, the standard EVM suffers from the absence of some features that require being focused further on to make this method more efficient. This paper is addressing such features specifically the financial aspects of cost control system. These aspects that have been absent in the standard EVM include the time value of money, delay in client payment and contractor cash flow in uncertain environment. The proposed model here utilizes fuzzy sets to deal with the uncertain conditions of real projects. It attempts to extend the theoretical framework of EVM to evaluate and control the... 

It is now a common approach pursued by programmers to develop new software systems using Object-Oriented Application Frameworks such as Spring, Struts and, Eclipse. This improves the quality and the maintainability of the code. Furthermore, it reduces development cost and time. However, the main problem is that these frameworks usually have a complicated Application Programming Interface (API), and typically suffer from the lack of enough documentation and appropriate user manuals. To solve these problems, programmers often refer to existing sample applications of those frameworks to learn how to implement the desired functionality in their own code. This is called the Monkey See, Monkey Do... 

One of the challenging problems in artificial intelligence is credit assignment which simply means distributing the credit among a group, such as a group of agents. We made an attempt to meet this problem with the aid of the reinforcement learning paradigm. In this paper, expertness framework is defined and applied to the multi-agent credit assignment problem. In the expertness framework, the critic agent, who is responsible for distributing credit among agents, is equipped with learning capability, and the proposed credit assignment solution is based on the critic to learn to assign a proportion of the credit to each agent, and the used proportion should be learned by reinforcement... 

In this paper, three fundamental properties of a potential field-based flocking algorithm, i.e. merging of neighbouring graphs during the system evolution, collision avoidance and convergence of position of the centre of mass of informed agents to that of virtual leader are discussed. Next, these properties are utilized to determine required number of informed agents based on initial position of uninformed ones and consequently reduce the domain of search in optimization problems defined for finding the optimal number of required informed agents. Finally, a new optimization framework is proposed, which benefits Voronoi diagrams in order to reduce the number of informed agents required for... 

Authenticated key exchange protocols allow parties to establish a common session key which in turn is fundamental to building secure channels. Authenticated group key exchange protocols allow parties to interact with each other and establish a common group session key and avoid peer to peer key exchange; in other words they pave the way to build a broadcast channel. We construct an authenticated group key exchange protocol over UC framework which has the contributiveness property; i.e., the output is not biased by inputs of any party. Our protocol uses CRS model and discrete logarithm. Other protocols over UC framework either are defined over RO model [19] or benefit from a non-standard... 

This paper presents a stochastic framework for short-term operation of a distribution company (disco). The proposed framework optimizes disco's operational decisions in two hierarchical stages. The first stage, called day-ahead operation stage (DAOS), deals with the operational decisions on purchases from the day-ahead market and commitment of distributed generation (DG) units. The objective of this stage is to minimize the expected operating cost while the financial risk exposed by uncertain real-time prices and loads is restricted to a given level. The model associated with this stage is based on the mixed-integer programming (MIP) format. The second stage, named real-time operation stage...