Sharif Digital Repository

Iran's petroleum industry is facing challenges including maturity of hydrocarbon fields, growing population of the nation that demands additional revenues from petroleum exports, and international economic sanctions that have limited access to technology sources. Restrictions from international technology providers have led managers of the industry enterprises to try to develop their needed technologies inside the country. The Ministry of Petroleum has supervised this and as a result, a technology planning systems has been developed and implemented since 2009. In this paper, an overview of the Iranian petroleum industry is provided from a technology planning perspective. The focus has been... 

Fulfilment of the underlying structure within an indivisible system which leads to a specific pattern of behaviour was previously addressed by prominent approaches. However, there was a considerable lack for proposal of a proper idea that considers the susceptibility of structures to change with time through other adjacent structures. Considering such a point of view necessitates an alternative approach to functional perspective. Thus, a process-oriented architectural decomposition of a simplified organization structure embedded in a supply chain is applied to analyse the structure dynamics. This novel perspective to dynamic multi-structure systems is introduced in this research and the... 

This paper describes a novel approach will be called guided hill climbing to improve the efficiency of hill climbing in the planning domains. Unlike simple hill climbing, which evaluates the successor states without any particular order, guided hill climbing evaluates states according to an order recommended by an auxiliary guiding heuristic function. Guiding heuristic function is a self-adaptive and cost effective function based on the main heuristic function of hill climbing. To improve the performance of the method in various domains, we defined several heuristic functions and created a mechanism to choose appropriate functions for each particular domain. We applied the guiding method to... 

The selection of a suitable duty factor (DF) remains a major challenge in respiratory-gated treatments. Therefore, this study aims at presenting a new methodology for fast optimizing the gating window width (duty factor (DF)) in respiratory-gated proton partial breast irradiation (PBI). To do so, GATE Monte Carlo simulations were performed for various target sizes and locations in supine and prone positions. Three different duty factors of 20, 25, and 33% were considered. Sparing factors (SF) for four organs-at-risk (OARs) were then assessed. The weighted-sum method was employed to search for an optimal DF. The results indicate that an SF higher than unity was obtained for all plans. The SF... 

Needle insertion simulation and planning systems (SPSs) will play an important role in diminishing inappropriate insertions into soft tissues and resultant complications. Difficulties in SPS development are due in large part to the computational requirements of the extensive calculations in finite element (FE) models of tissue. For clinical feasibility, the computational speed of SPSs must be improved. At the same time, a realistic model of tissue properties that reflects large and velocity-dependent deformations must be employed. The purpose of this study is to address the aforementioned difficulties by presenting a cost-effective SPS platform for needle insertions into the liver. The study... 

In this paper, we introduce DiFF, a novel extension of the Fast Forward (FF) planning system. FF is a domain independent planner that employs a forward heuristic search. Its search strategy is an enforced form of hill climbing. In order to move to a more promising state, FF evaluates successor states without any particular order. In this paper, we introduce a new form of the enforced hill climbing, which we call directed enforced hill climbing, to enhance the efficiency of Fast Forward planning. This strategy evaluates successor states in the order recommended by an adaptive heuristic function. Our experimental results in several planning domains show a significant improvement in the... 

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to benchmark a Monte Carlo (MC) model of the 18 MV photon beam produced by the Siemens Oncor® linac using the BEAMnrc and DOSXYZnrc codes. METHODS: By matching the percentage depth doses and beam profiles calculated by MC simulations with measurements, the initial electron beam parameters including electron energy, full width at half maximum (spatial FWHM), and mean angular spread were derived for the 10×10 cm2 and 20×20 cm2 field sizes. The MC model of the 18 MV photon beam was then validated against the measurements for different field sizes (5×5, 30×30 and 40×40 cm2) by gamma index analysis. RESULTS: The optimum values for electron energy, spatial FWHM and mean... 

Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) play a significant role in the management of businesses processes. Determining the influential factors that are positioned behind a successful ERP implementation is critical to gain the most value-added from competitive potentials of such systems. The driver of current research is to gain a deeper understanding of the various subjective criteria to measure ERP implementation success with the aim of enhancing the chance success through investigating ERP implementation performance indicators. By exploring the international literature, a comprehensive list of potential success factors of ERP systems is identified which are complementary and critical to... 

Although collaborative distributed simulations and virtual environments (VE) have been an active area of research in the past few years, they have recently gained even more attention due to the emergence of online gaming, emergency simulation and planning systems, and disaster management applications. Such environments combine graphics, haptics, animations and networking to create interactive multimodal worlds that allows participants to collaborate in real-time. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), perhaps the most widely deployed practical application of distributed virtual environments, allows players to act together concurrently in a virtual world over the Internet. IP...