Sharif Digital Repository

Prestressed concrete structures are used all around the world widely; especially for elements which are under the effects of bending like prestressed concrete slabs. In these sorts of elements the aim of designing is to control the tensional stresses and the cracks delivering higher strength. This can improve the capabilities of the structure, architecturally and economically. Seismic design of structures is based on horizontal component of ground motions. In recent years, it has been observed that the vertical component of ground motion could be stronger than horizontal one especially for those which have happened in near field sources. In these kinds of earthquakes the importance of... 

Sensor Observation Service (SOS) which is defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement group is a Web service specification in order to standardize the way sensors and sensor data are discovered and accessed on the Sensor Web. Multiple instances of this service can be implemented around the world, providing huge amount of data every moment. Each of these services operates in specific domain of knowledge (thematic), spatial and temporal dimensions. One way to reveal the underlying data over all of them is to provide an architecture for data integration to allow the user to query sensor data without the knowledge of the infrastructure components. In this research, a novel... 

In this study, a multiple model wind estimator is proposed to detect the wind type and to estimate the wind components as well as the states of a fixed-wing UAV without any direct measurement of the air data. Then, the identified wind model and the estimated states are compensated in the heuristic nonlinear model predictive controller during landing phase. For this purpose, a static multiple model approach is taken, comprised of four independent extended Kalman filters, each one is estimating the wind based on one of the four wind models including a constant wind, a “1-cosine” model, a wind shear and a microburst.Moreover, a new heuristic multiple model filter, called Multiple Model Extended... 

The problem of spacecraft attitude determination (AD) using thermal data is investigated. Given the Solar space environment, the key dominant mechanism of heat transfer will be radiation, in which the Sun and Earth are the major contributing heat sources that affect the satellite external surface temperatures. In this sense, the net heat fluxes (NHF) of a satellite surface that is insulated against any internal heat communication will only be related to these main radiating sources. In order to utilize the satellite temperature data for AD, a heat attitude model (HAM) that relates the satellite surfaces NHF to its attitude is developed using three orthogonal satellite surfaces. Assuming... 

The purpose of this paper is to design an integrated controller and observer (ICO) for a nonlinear system using genetic programming. ICO is a function that constructs control command directly from the measured state variables of the system. It means that, this function should imitate the behavior of the observer and controller and control the system with acceptable performance in different initial conditions, at the presence of disturbances and system uncertainties. The complexity of this design method, is not related to the complexity of the plant, in fact, the complexity in plant just effects at run time, but the design procedure does not change. So, if exact model of plant exist, using... 

In this project roll channel autopilot of an agile flight vehicle has been studied. In skid-to-turn tactical flight vehicles according to the type of control strategy, for achievment of acceleration commands, the roll angular velocity should be kept near zero. In usual autopilot design, effects of channels on each others is ignored. But three channels of agile flight vehicles have some mutual effects, that consists of kinematic, inertial and aerodynamic couplings. In the case of roll channel dynamics, aerodynamic couplings are dominant and apears because of two factors: roll induced moment and roll cross coupling moment.
After study and aerodynamic modeling of mentioned factors, based... 

In this thesis, the satellite constellation orbit design for regional coverage is investigated. The orbits of satellites in a constellation for Earth observation missions play a crucial role in performance and characteristics of the mission; for example the image resolution, the area of coverage, and the coverage interval. In this thesis the problem is to find the optimal initial orbital elements for meeting the earth observation mission objectives for one or several sites. The cost functions are the total coverage time, the maximum gap time, time average gap, altitude, and number of satellites. The problem is solved in a multi-objective manner for different combination of two of the above... 

In this research, the design of control system has been studied for a special flying vehicle at whole of flight time. This flying vehicle is vertically launched and few time after launch its attitude changes to the desired attitude by a reaction jet control system, then the acceleration commands are tracked when the aerodynamic is activated. Design process includes attitude control system design in launch phase and aerodynamic control system design. Because of the existence of nonlinear and multi-variable dynamics in the flying vehicle and the presence of uncertainty and disturbance, combination of nonlinear, robust and adaptive methods are used in controller design process. Design of... 

One of the main arguments between scientific realists and scientific anti-realists is about observability. As a prominent anti-realist, van Fraassen and his theory of constructive empiricism and his views on observability and the use of scientific instruments, have been the subject of many debates. He believes that observation is the sole path to knowledge and observation is only possible through unaided human eye, so seeing through scientific instruments like microscopes does not count as observation, therefore the information gained from these procedures are not necessarily true.This thesis not only examines van Fraassen’s outlooks on the matter, but also examines his opponents’ view and... 

To answer the explanabilty of consciousness, we have first clarified the terms “consciousness”, “explanation”, and “physic”, concluding that consciousness and physics should be integrated in a single unified explanatory system. The common problem we have targeted in this work is “direct observation”. Then, inspired by Bergson, we have suggested that ,in direct observation, there is a unity between observer and the observed, out of which the qualitative characteristic of experience or qualia is constructed. Following computer graphic courses, this unity is called “rendering unity”. In the next scientific step, by analyzing the Wigner’s friend paradox, we have stipulated that, in direct... 

In an official announcement during the inaugural speech in 2012, where Hempel Award presented on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association to Bas van Fraassen for “a lifetime scholarly achievement in the philosophy of science”, it was said that, “van Fraassen advocates a semantic approach to scientific theories and, on that basis, urges skepticism regarding laws of nature, anti-realism regarding unobservables, and pragmatism regarding explanation” (Gonzalez 2014, 5). van Fraassen’s approach to unobservable entities has a crucial role in his philosophy of science and also in this dissertation. The aim here is to defend van Fraassen’s claim based upon the distinction he makes between... 

Since the beginning of philosophy in ancient Greek, making use of the partial induction has been a challenging issue. The diversity of the challenges, from the fallibility of induction to the peculiar consequences brought about by using inductive inference, has raised seemingly impassable blockages in the way of rational using of inductive inference. But philosophers who are optimistic about induction, always seek novel solutions which can overcome the existing problems of the rational utilization of induction. Mohammad Baqer Sadr is one of these philosophers who, in his book Logical Foundations of Induction, has done a delicate and creative work to overcome these barriers. In this thesis,... 

Earlier in the philosophical tradition, the realists’ view that world exist in itself, independently of our knowledge, had been challenged by idealists, who denied such existence and considered the world and its objects as a function of (our) perception. Today, some philosophers have challenged the (scientific) realists’ belief in the existence of scientific unobservable entities, such as electrons, quarks, forces, gravitational fields, cells, bacteria, genes and so on, that are posited by the modern scientific theories. The debates which have been made in this regard, in recent decades, have spurred an important controversy known as “scientific realism and antirealism debate” in the field... 

In this text to find the answer of the question “ what is it to be physical” in a definition form or a scheme of the term physical, firstly we sought for a possible consensus among recent physicists and philosophers. But from their answers not only we did not find any clear consensus but also most of them confess that the term is ambiguous and unclear. In a general aspect, we can categorize the answers to two theoretical and realistic perspective. The theoretical perspective, beside circularity and Hempel’s triviality, seems not to present any criteria for being physical. In realistic perspective, it seems that there is no ontologic constraint for being physical, that is from “being... 

The emergence of online social networks (OSN) has encouraged scientists to investigate them more deeply due to availability of excessive data and increased computational power. Diffusion is a fundamental process taking place in such networks. The spread of news, ideas, influence and diseases are examples of diffusion in social networks. The importance of information diffusion in different disciplines such as economics, politics and social behavior has motivated us to study diffusion networks in this thesis. Diffusion’s behavior is strongly influenced by the underlying network in social networks. Despite this fact most research done in this area ignores the dynamics of the underlying network.... 

The use of Spoken Dialogue Systems is growing everyday and these systems will substitute current Iterative Voice Response systems in near future. A Spoken Dialogue System consists of Speech Recognition, Language Understanding, Dialogue Management, Speech Generation and Text to Speech Modules. Among these modules the only one that is specific part of Dialogue Systems is Dialogue Management. The responsibility of this part is to determine system behavior to maximize specific variables such as user goal finding accuracy and speed of finding the goal. There were different approaches to dialogue management in recent years the use of Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes was very popular... 

The trip demand information in the form of the origin-destination (OD) matrix is of significant importance in the transportation studies. Obtaining such a matrix by conventional methods requires a considerable amount of time, cost, and human resources. Traffic count and cellphone network data are two relatively inexpensive data that can be used for estimation of OD matrices as well as correction of prior matrices. The trip demand estimation problem is a bi-level model, and the gradient algorithm is one way to solve it. This study, by generalizing the gradient algorithm, attempts to a better use of the available data. In this algorithm, a complementary algorithm is used to solve the traffic... 

This paper presents five origin-destination (OD) flow estimation models using traffic sensors. The first model uses counting sensors data, the second model uses automated vehicle identification (AVI) sensors data and the third, fourth and fifth use combined data of counter and AVI sensors simultaneously. The first to fourth models are bi-level problems that the upper-level minimizes some objective functions where is the distance between estimated flows and observed flows. On the other hand, the lower-level problem finds user equilibrium (UE) flows pattern for estimated origin-destination matrix (ODM). The fifth model is a multi-objective problem, where a bi-level problem is solved for each... 

Regardless of the traffic model and its application, an essential input of transportation models is the amount of demand which is usually described using Origin-Destination (OD) matrices. Due to high costs and time of direct development of such matrices, they are estimated indirectly from traffic measurements recorded from the network. Dynamic Origin-Destination demand provides valuable information on within-day fluctuation of traffic demand which could be used in analyzing congestion dissipation. In addition, they are essential inputs of dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) models. The current study presents a fuzzy approach to dynamic OD estimation problem. The problem is designed as a two...