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The objective of this thesis is to prioritize a portfolio of buildings for seismic retrofit. A new set of sensitivity measures is proposed to rank the buildings in accordance with the reduction in the loss of the entire portfolio. To this end, various risk measures are differentiated with respect to the cost of retrofit for each building. These risk measures are the moments of the portfolio cost probability distribution which imply the risk-neutral and risk-averse decision making. Two costs are considered: Construction cost due to retrofit and repair cost due to structural and non-structural damage. To quantify the risk, reliability methods are employed in which many interacting... 

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... 

A probabilistic approach to modeling the seismic damage incurred by structural and nonstructural components is developed in this study. For this purpose, Bayesian linear regression is employed to characterize the epistemic uncertainty in the model. In this approach, regressors are constructed based on the mechanics of damage. In turn, the probability distributions of the model parameters and the model error are quantified by Bayesian regression using real-life data from laboratory experiments and/or post-earthquake inspections of damaged components. The study presents the stepwise procedure of collecting the observations, quantifying the repair costs, developing model forms, performing model... 

Electrical substations and its vital components such as switchgears, have experienced severe damage during recent earthquakes, followed by widespread blackouts around the world. To improve the seismic resiliency of power grids and use probabilistic decision-making frameworks, comprehensive fragility data for the different equipment is needed. The purpose of this study is to assess the vulnerability of equipment in substations and to develop fragility curves for this equipment. For this purpose, four main equipment of switchgear, namely circuit breaker, disconnect switch, current transformer and surge arrester, have been modeled in three dimensions and verified. After examining the different... 

Renewable energy resources, e.g. wind, solar and geothermal, experience rapid progresses in electric power industry all over the world. So, it becomes essential that these free-emission electrical energy resources be integrated in the existing generating capacity planning procedures. On the other hand, the uncertain and intermittent nature of these energies has led to some problems in their integration in power systems. The reserve requirement in a renewable-based power system is a main challenge, which has to be addressed properly. In this way, this research presents an analytical approach, based on the modified PJM method, to quantify the risk of renewable energies commitment during the... 

This thesis targets the multidisciplinary area of time-variant seismic risk analysis of transportation networks. For this purpose, a new methodology and a library of probabilistic models are developed. Risk, in this context, denotes the probability of exceeding the sum of direct and indirect losses due to seismic events. Direct economic losses are due to the repair cost of the physical damage in the components of the network, such as bridges. The indirect losses are due to the reduced capacity of the components for traffic flow, which results in increased travel times in the network. This leads to socioeconomic losses. In this research, a reliability-based approach is adopted to carry out... 

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... 

This thesis aims to assess the seismic risk of the community of schools with masonry buildings in the Tehran metropolitan in the next 50 years and to prioritize the buildings of this community for seismic retrofit based on the optimal mitigation of risk of the community. Tehran is among the largest cities with the highest level of seismic risk in the world, and Masonry buildings are among the structures with poor seismic performance; Therefore, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive and accurate evaluation of the seismic risk of schools, as one of the most critical and sensitive occupancies, in this region and with this type of structure. It is also very beneficial to reduce the seismic...