Sharif Digital Repository

Electricity distribution systems are dynamically expanded in anticipation of new demands. Cost and reliability are the most important factors in finding the optimal plans for network expansion. Recently, implementation of incentive reliability regulations has accentuated the role of reliability considerations in distribution systems studies. This is because such incentive schemes create a direct link between distribution companies' revenues and their service reliability. Thus, these schemes have changed the role of reliability from a technical constraint to an economic factor. In this occasion, distribution companies require new techniques to incorporate the effects of incentive reliability... 

One of the important problems in fulfilling the consumers' power demand that has been especially intensified after restructuring is transmission line congestion. To solve this problem, either new transmission lines should be constructed or the existing transmission lines should be better utilized. Construction of new transmission lines is both expensive and time consuming. Therefore, it is usually better to enhance the utilization of the existing transmission assets. FACTS devices have been introduced over the past decades to enhance power systems operation. However, wide scale deployment of them has not occurred yet due to their high initial investment cost and some other problems. In order... 

A structural system will normally fail as a result of a chain of failures of different components. In this thesis, fatigue reliability of fixed offshore platforms is investigated through analyzing different failure scenarios. In order to evaluate the occurrence probability of a special scenario, each failure scenario is divided into a finite number of sub-scenarios. To do this, all combinations of time sequences are generated for a given sequence of failures, using a specially developed program.
In order to calculate the occurrence probability of each scenario, a massive reliability analysis should be done for each of corresponding sub-scenarios. Knowing that there are a large number of... 

Wide-area measurement system (WAMS), which is enabled by broad installation of phasor measurement units (PMUs), is a novel solution for the secure and reliable operation of modern power systems. The adequate number and appropriate location of PMUs has been introduced as a challenging research area in recent years. This dissertation is the first effort to assess the cost/worth analysis of WAMS design and PMU locationing in a probabilistic manner. In the studies conducted here, power network monitoring and control associated with the energy management system (EMS), among miscellaneous applications of WAMS, have been taken into consideration. First, the conventional deterministic definition of... 

Assessment of existing jacket type offshore platform against environmental wave loading hazard is the central component of this work. Two general approaches exist in this context, deterministic and probabilistic assessment. In this study, a new probabilistic method (reliability analysis) to assess offshore structures under environmental loading (extreme wave) is introduced. Before describing this approach, several necessary elements such as collapse analysis, sampling methods and wave hazard analysis should be investigated. First of all, deterministic assessment of SPD2 platform located in Persian Gulf, which is the case study considered in this dissertation, is conducted utilizing... 

Increasing need to electrical energy, gradual diminishing of fossil fuel resources and environmental pollution due to continuous exploitation of them, have lead to inevitable change of energy sources in power generation. Due to random nature of wind speed, the power output of a wind farm is varied and as a result, it does not have a proper control capability. If the wind power has a major role in system generation, the system could not respond to the fluctuations appropriately. With the increasing penetration of wind power, it affects different aspects of power system such as power quality, system stability, and system reliability. Utilizing energy storage systems (ESS) is a solution to... 

Capacitor setting and reconfiguration are of main means of loss reduction and voltage profile improvement in distribution system operation. Cooperation between these two strategies can effectively minimize power losses in distribution system automation. Also, from the medium and long term viewpoint, capacitor placement and reconfiguration can be used for loss reduction and reliability enhancement. In this section, the sum of losses cost, capacitor investment cost and reliability cost should be minimized. Regarding the need to solve two non-linear combinatorial optimization problems simultaneously, metaheuristic algorithms are used in this thesis. Specifically, Elitist Genetic Algorithm,... 

In general, reliability is the ability of a system to perform and maintain its functions in routine circumstances, as well as hostile or unexpected circumstances. Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) is a combinatorial problem where it is going to maximize system reliability by discrete selection from available components. The main purpose of this study is to prove the effectiveness of robust optimization to solve RAP. Generally, robust optimization is a field of optimization theory where robustness is sought against uncertainty and/or variability of parameters' values. In this study it is assumed to have Erlang distribution density for components' failures where to implement robust... 

Analyzing reliability of large cold-standby systems has been a complicated and time-consuming task, especially for systems with components having non-exponential time-to-failure distributions. In this research, an approximation model, which is based on the central limit theorem, is presented for the reliability analysis of binary cold-standby systems whit non-identical components. The proposed model can estimate the reliability of large cold-standby systems with binary-state components having arbitrary time-to-failure distributions in an efficient and easy way. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are illustrated using several different types of distributions, such as... 

The development of embedded systems in safety critical applications leads to using fault tolerant methods to improve their dependability. Among the various fault tolerant methods, recently, software based methods are more appealing during to the following reasons: 1) They are applicable to the Commercial-Off-The Shelf (COTS) processors and lead to reduction in cost and time to market, 2) Unlike the traditional hardware based internal error detection methods, software based methods fault coverage are more promising, and 3)Software-based methods are cheaper, quicker and do not require any hardware modifications. The technology scaling trend in recent years, made system more vulnerable to... 

In current societies, reliability is an important and fundamental factor in designing and manufacturing products and it cannot be ignored anyway; because sometimes malfunction and failure in a system can cause severe financial losses and health issues. In the field of optimizing reliability by redundancy allocation, one of the structures that has drawn many researchers attention is series-parallel structure. In the models proposed for reliability optimization in series-parallel systems, there is a restricting assumption which all components of a sub-system have to be homogeneous. In this thesis, new models are presented which enable components of a sub-system be non-homogeneous. Modeling is... 

Reliability is an important concern in safety-critical applications. Hardware and software redundancies are used to include reliability in such systems. Software approaches benefit from high flexibility and low cost. Moreover, they do not impose any hardware modifications to the design. The most important challenges of software approaches are performance and code size overheads. Some of software reliability approaches duplicate all of the program’s instructions which impose high performance overhead to the designs. Some other approaches only apply the redaduncies to critical instructions in the programs. While these approaches impose the the performance overhead but they suffer from fault... 

In recent decades, large economic losses and social impacts following earthquakes and hurricanes have revealed the need for improved design criteria intended to reduce consequences including economic impacts to an acceptable level along with life protection. So, it is tried to express the expected performance of structures as financial and social criteria. Any assessment on earthquake consequences requires estimations of structural responses to seismic excitations. Endurance Time (ET) method as a dynamic procedure requiring reasonably reduced computational effort compared to other common time-history based procedures, is used to estimate the response of the structure in all levels of hazard... 

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has been the leading main memory technology during the last four decades. In deep sub-micron regime, however, scaling DRAM comes with several challenges caused by charge leakage and imprecise charge placement. Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology is known as one of the most promising technologies to replace DRAM. Compared to competitive non-volatile memories, PCM benefits from best attributes of fast random access, negligible leakage energy, superior scalability, high density, and operating in both Single-level Cell (SLC) and Multi-level Cell (MLC) storage levels without imposing large storage overhead. Unfortunately, density advantage of MLC PCM devices... 

One of the important tasks of operation manager is keeping system in safe and reliable situation. There are many tools that supply safety in the power system. One of them is operation reserve. Operation reserve is any type of capacity being used to support active power balance. In this thesis, an approach for optimal determining reserve capacity with considering dynamic constraint is presented. This thesis describes a method for setting the optimum value of reserve capacity based on the cost of its provision, the benefit derived from its availability and Frequency stability. The method that used is D-SCRM algorithm. However, as the size of power systems increases, the current centralized... 

In recent years, energy harvesting from ambient sources in order to use for low-powered electronics has been considered by many researchers. Wind energy, solar energy, water energy, mechanical energy from vibrations, etc are common sources of ambient energy. In this thesis, optimization of energy harvesting from ambient vibration using magnetic shape memory alloy is presented. To this end, a clamped-clamped beam coupled with MSMA units is considered. A shock load is applied to a proof mass which is attached to the middle of the beam. As a result of beam vibration a longitudinal strain is produced in the MSMA. This strain changes magnetic flux inside the coil connected to MSMA and as a... 

The main concern of power system planners and operators is to serve electric energy services economically and in an acceptable reliability level. Nowadays, in developing integrated large-scale power networks, reliability evaluation becomes a very tough and time-consuming process. The complexity of this assessment is mainly because of the large number of components, their possible operating states, different faults that can happen, and environmental and other affecting parameters. In power systems, in order to address the complexity, reliability evaluation can be conducted in three different levels. The most complicated study among these three levels is HLII that is so-called composite... 

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a set of various physiological sensors for remote monitoring and controlling of the patient’s health status. Detection of anomalies, containing faults and physiological stresses, and distinguishing between them can eliminate the need for constant presence of specialists and decrease the occurrence of False Alarm Rate (FAR).A supervisory hardware platform for WBAN architecture is introduced and implemented in this thesis. The proposed architecture contains three sensors for recording of biomedical signals, heart rate, SpO2 and body temperature simultaneously and transmitting them to central node wirelessly through Wi-Fi standard. This proposed architecture... 

This research investigated the seismic performance of gravity dam in the reliability and sensitivity analysis framework under earthquake loading. The performance criteria were defined using crest displacement and tensile stress. The uncertainty due to the material properties of the dam was considered for the reliability approach, in addition to the different ground motion intensity levels for parametric analysis. The exceedance probability of the limit-state functions was computed for varying threshold values through Mean-Value Second-Moment, First-Order Reliability Method and improved Latin Hypercube sampling. Approximation methods were applied along with the sampling method for considering... 

Dealing with different supply chain risks and how firms should prepare against them has become an important issue in real world application. In this paper, we propose a periodic model to fortify supply chain structure against disruption by remanufacturing different types of returned products at first priority and manufacturing raw materials at second priority only if it is necessary. Additionally, our approach to model disruption is that there are two kinds of facilities for manufacturing/ remanufacturing centers. The first one is reliable and the second one is unreliable. Therefore, in this paper, we formulate and solve a reliable discrete dynamic linear programming with different types of...