Sharif Digital Repository

Image logs provide useful information for fracture study in naturally fractured reservoir. Fracture dip, azimuth, aperture and fracture density can be obtained from image logs and have great importance in naturally fractured reservoir characterization. Imaging all fractured parts of hydrocarbon reservoirs and interpreting the results is expensive and time consuming. In this study, an improved method to make a quantitative correlation between fracture densities obtained from image logs and conventional well log data by integration of different artificial intelligence systems was proposed. The proposed method combines the results of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Neural... 

[No abstract available]  

Control charts are useful tools of monitoring quality characteristics. One of the problems of employing a control chart is that the time it alarms is not synchronic with the time when assignable cause manifests itself in the process. This makes difficult to search and find assignable causes. Knowing the real time of manifestation of assignable cause (change point) helps to find assignable cause(s) sooner and eases corrective actions to be taken. In this paper, a probabilistic neural network (PNN)-based procedure was developed to estimate the variance change point of a normally distributed quality characteristic. The PNN was selected based on trial and error among different types of... 

Most of industrial applications of statistical process control involve more than one quality characteristics to be monitored. These characteristics are usually correlated, causing challenges for the monitoring methods. These challenges are resolved using multivariate quality control charts that have been widely developed in recent years. Nonetheless, multivariate process monitoring methods encounter a problem when the quality characteristics are of the attribute type and follow nonnormal distributions such as multivariate binomial or multivariate Poisson. Since the data analysis in the latter case is not as easy as the normal case, more complexities are involved to monitor multiattribute... 

Many actions have been taken by researchers to design an appropriate controller for a quadruped robot. These efforts can be divided into two main categories: analytical and intelligent methods. The analytical method is based on the motion equations of the robot which are mostly complicated. These complication leads to difficulty in implementation. In contrast, there exists intelligent method which is based on the learning algorithms. Despite lots of improvements in the controlling of the quadruped robots, their ability of walking is still far less from the four legged animals' capability. Many researchers believe that four legged animals owe this priority to the learning attribute. Therefore... 

In this paper, a heuristic threshold policy is developed to detect and classify the states of a multivariate quality control system. In this approach, a probability measure called belief is first assigned to the quality characteristics and then the posterior belief of out-of-control characteristics is updated by taking new observations and using a Bayesian rule. If the posterior belief is more than a decision threshold, called minimum acceptable belief determined using a heuristic threshold policy, then the corresponding quality characteristic is classified out-of-control. Besides using a different approach, the main difference between the current research and previous works is that the... 

The earned value is a leading technique in monitoring and analyzing project performance and project progress. Although, it allows exact measurement of project progress, and can uncover any time and cost deviations from the plan, its capability in reporting accepted level of deviation is not well studied. This study presented an approach to overcome this limitation by applying statistical quality control charts to monitor earned value indices. For this purpose, project time and cost performance indices of a real construction project were monitored regularly on individual control charts. The results were quite promising, and not only competed well against traditional approaches, but also... 

A new approach is developed in this paper to detect general mean shifts of multivariate quality control systems and to determine the quality characteristic(s) responsible for the shift. This approach takes advantage of both a decomposition method and an EWMA-based control statistics that are employed for multivariate normal distributions. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, simulation studies are provided to estimate the in- and out-of-control average run lengths under different mean and variance shift scenarios. Simulation experiments are also given to compare the performances of the proposed procedure with the ones of the well-known MEWMA and MCUSUM methods.... 

This Regular evaluation and analysis of river quality helps accurate management to reach acceptable quality. In this study, water quality indices (WQI) method applied to evaluate quality of Jajrood River which is one of the main sources of Tehran drinking water. It helps to subsidize management actions in Jajrood watershed. Sampling carried out for 9 years during 2001-2010 in 10 stations along the river in wet and dry stations to identify water quality and the main source of pollution. Results show water quality in all stations classifies as medium according to National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) and water quality index in wet season is better than the corresponding value in dry seasons.... 

Smoking is known as a major cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and hence immediate and effective interventions are required for its elimination. This study aimed to collect valid data with regard to cigarette smoking in adult population of north of Iran for policy making by a meta-analysis of the documents of national non-communicable disease risk factors surveillance system. We investigated relevant evidences by searching in published and non-electronic databases. Data were extracted based on variables such as year of the study, sex, age group and prevalence of smoking habit. Based on results of heterogeneity, we applied fixed or random effects model to estimate the... 

Object-oriented frameworks are widely used to develop new applications. They provide reusable concepts that are instantiated in application code through potentially complex implementation steps such as subclassing, implementing interfaces, and calling framework operations. Unfortunately, many modern frameworks are difficult to use because of their large and complex APIs and frequently incomplete user documentation. To cope with these problems, developers often use existing framework applications as a guide. However, locating concept implementations in those sample applications is typically challenging due to code tangling and scattering. To address this challenge, we introduce the notion of... 

Efficient control of gas metal arc welding process enables us to have high quality products in consequence of achieving high quality weld. In this paper, an extended dynamic matrix controller is designed and applied on the gas metal arc welding process, which is considered as a nonlinear multi-inputs multi-outputs system. In order to reach a high quality weld, the outputs, welding current and arc length, are effectively controlled by open circuit voltage and wire feed speed. The structure and performance of the proposed controller are discussed in detail, and then a set of simulation results is presented to verify its efficiencies  

Recently, data stream has become popular in many contexts of data mining. Due to the high amount of incoming data, traditional clustering algorithms are not suitable for this family of problems. Many data stream clustering algorithms proposed in recent years considered the scalability of data, but most of them did not attend the following issues: (1) The quality of clustering can be dramatically low over the time. (2) Some of the algorithms cannot handle arbitrary shapes of data stream and consequently the results are limited to specific regions. (3) Most of the algorithms have not been evaluated in multi-density environments. Identifying appropriate clusters for data stream by handling the... 

Processing time and segmentation quality are two main factors in evaluation of image segmentation methods. Oversegmentation is one of the most challenging problems that significantly degrade the segmentation quality. This paper presents a framework for decreasing the oversegmentation rate and improving the processing time. Significant variations in both color and texture spaces are the main reasons that lead to oversegmentation. We exploit Affine Invariant Region Detectors to mark regions with high variations in both color and texture spaces. The results are then utilized to reduce the oversegmentation rate of image segmentation algorithms. The performance of the proposed framework is... 

Thorium dioxide (thoria) nano-particle was synthesized by employing supercritical water (SCW) as an excellent reaction environment for hydrothermal crystallization of metal oxide particles. This method is ideal for production of ultrafine powder having controlled stoichiometry, high quality, purity and crystallinity. The nano-crystalline thoria was prepared in a stainless steel (316 L) autoclave, fed with an aqueous solution of Th(NO 3) 4.5H 2O as a reactant and took place under SCW condition up to 450 °C for 45 min. The product was recovered and characterized by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Thermal Gravimetry Analysis (TG/DTA) and Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET) surface area analysis. The... 

In this research, Repetitive Group Sampling (RGS) plans are developed for the Weibull and generalized exponential distributions. To design the proposed plans, the median of a life-time is first used as the quality parameter. Then, a decision-making framework is developed, based on first and second type errors. Next, based on acceptable and limiting quality level criteria, tables are obtained to select the parameters of the proposed decision-making framework. The advantages of the proposed method over single sampling plans are discussed at the end  

The Burr III distribution properly approximates many familiar distributions such as Normal, Lognormal, Gamma, Weibull, and Exponential distributions. It plays an important role in reliability engineering, statistical quality control, and risk analysis models. The Burr III distribution has four parameters known as location, scale, and two shape parameters. The estimation process of these parameters is controversial. Although the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is understood as a straightforward method in parameters estimation, using MLE to estimate the Burr III parameters leads to maximize a complicated function with four unknown variables, where using a conventional optimization such as... 

Strategic health, safety, and environmental management system (HSE-MS) involves systematic and cooperative planning in each phase of the lifecycle of a project to ensure that interaction among the industry group, client, contractor, stakeholder, and host community exists with the highest level of health, safety, and environmental standard performances. Therefore, it seems necessary to assess the HSE-MS performance of contractor(s) by a comparative strategic management model with the aim of continuous improvement. The present Strategic Management Model (SMM) has been illustrated by a case study and the results show that the model is a suitable management tool for decision making in a contract... 

The electrochemical behavior of lamotrigine (LMT) at the pyrolytic graphite electrode (PGE) is investigated in detail by the means of cyclic voltammetry. During the electrochemical reduction of LMT, an irreversible cathodic peak appeared. Cyclic voltammetric studies indicated that the reduction process has an irreversible and adsorption-like behavior. The observed reduction peak is attributed to a two-electron process referring to the reduction of azo group. The electrode showed an excellent electrochemical activity toward the electro-reduction of LMT, leading to a significant improvement in sensitivity as compared to the glassy carbon electrode. The results of electrochemical impedance... 

In this paper, a multi-product multi-chance constraint joint single-vendor multi-buyers inventory problem is considered in which the demand follows a uniform distribution, the lead-time is assumed to vary linearly with respect to the lot size, and the shortage in combination of backorder and lost-sale is assumed. Furthermore, the orders are placed in multiple of packets, there is a limited space available for the vendor, there are chance constraints on the vendor service rate to supply the products, and there is a limited budget for each buyer to purchase the products. While the elements of the buyers' cost function are holding, shortage, order and transportation costs, the set up and...