Sharif Digital Repository

We propose an approach for finding an optimal path in a flexible jobshop manufacturing system considering two criteria of time and cost. With rise in demands, advancement in technology and increase in production capacity, the need for more shops persists. Therefore, a flexible jobshop system has more than one shop with the same duty. The difference among shops with the same duty is in their machines with various specifications. A network is configured in which the nodes are considered to be the shops with arcs representing the paths among the shops. An automated guided vehicle functions as a material handling device through the manufacturing network. To account for uncertainty, we consider... 

Summary Reliability of a satellite attitude control system depends on accurate detection of failures in its sensors. This paper presents an observer for robust detection and isolation of a class of failures in satellite attitude sensors. The proposed observer uses measurement of a three-axis gyro together with only one attitude sensor, and generates a residual signal which is sensitive to faults and is simultaneously robust against disturbance and noise. A nonlinear model of satellite kinematics is considered for design of the observer. The structure of the observer is in the form of a delayed continuous-time differential equation ensuring its robustness properties. A realistic simulation is... 

Implementation of various incentive-based demand response strategies has great potential to decrease peak load growth and customer electricity bill cost. Using advanced metering and automatic demand management makes it possible to optimize energy consumption, to reduce grid loss, and to release generation capacities for the sake of providing sustainable electricity supply. Executing an incentive-based program is a simple way for customers to monitor and manage their energy consumption, and therefore, to reduce their electricity bill. With these objectives, this paper examines the previously suggested load scheduling programs and proposes a new practical one for residential energy management.... 

The application of digital technologies in power systems has resulted in an evolutionary replacement of electromechanical devices with numerical ones featuring internal digital processors with communication capabilities. A substation automation system (SAS) deploys substation operation functions, including control, protection, monitoring, and measuring. Ethernet technology and local area networks (LANs) make it possible to design substation communication architectures with greater reliability, availability, speed, and cost savings than conventional hard-wired systems. This paper proposes a new method to describe topologies of the SAS as an interconnected network. The concept of data... 

With the expansion of electricity networks, increasing operational complexities, improved knowledge of the system operators, all with the subsidies elimination in some countries such as Iran and experiencing the real price of electricity by then, it necessitates a more reliable power to be delivered to the system customers. Power system automation is regarded as an efficient solution and the effective key to this problem. However, the great number of substations in power distribution systems has led to the fact that it is neither feasible nor economic to automate all of them. This calls for a comprehensive scheme on the placement of the distribution substations to be automated. In this... 

In this paper we evaluate the performance of Energy Management and Building Automation Systems in smart environment using wireless sensor network. We describe some aspects of smart grid and then explain the related communication models of smart meters and building management or energy management systems in a smart home. We propose three models, then we compare these models and we select a model for our test bed. We implement the selected model in real environment using wireless sensor network. We analyse network delay to find out whether wireless sensor network is useful or not. With proposed model, we can save up to 57% in energy cost. Also, we develop In- home display to inform customers... 

Washing the corpse and dressing the body prior to burial is an act of love and necessity in many religions. Applying robotics and automation technologies for the washing and preparation of a deceased Muslim in accordance with the Islamic Shari'at laws has been the challenging foundation of this research. With an increasing annual population growth resulting in an increase in the number of deaths (historically and/or immediately after a national disaster), automating part of this procedure to increase the speed of operation, reducing the health risks to the personnel of washing rooms "Ghassalkhaneh™ at the cemeteries and enhancing their quality of life have been the primary objectives of this... 

Automation is acknowledged by distribution utilities as a successful investment strategy to enhance reliability and operation efficiency. However, practical approaches that can handle the complex decision-making process faced by decision makers to justify the long-term financial effects of distribution automation have remained scarce. An automated and remote-controlled sectionalizing switch play a fundamental role in an automated distribution network. This paper introduces a new optimization approach for distribution automation in terms of automated and remotely controlled sectionalizing switch placement. Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is utilized to model the problem. The proposed... 

Karyotyping, is the process of classification of human chromosomes within the microscopic images. This is a common task for diagnosing many genetic disorders and abnormalities. Automatic Karyotyping algorithms usually suffer the poor quality of the images due to the non rigid nature of the chromosomes which makes them to have unpredictable shapes and sizes in various images. One of the main problems that usually need operator's interaction is the identification and separation of the overlapping/touching chromosomes. This paper presents an effective algorithm for identification of any cluster of the overlapping/touching chromosomes together with the number of chromosomes in the cluster, which... 

Parallel corpora are the necessary resources in many multilingual natural language processing applications, including machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Manual preparation of a large scale parallel corpus is a very time consuming and costly procedure. In this paper, the work towards building a sentence-level aligned English-Persian corpus in a semi-automated manner is presented. The design of the corpus, collection, and alignment process of the sentences is described. Two statistical similarity measures were used to find the similarities of sentence pairs. To verify the alignment process automatically, Google Translator was used. The corpus is based on news... 

Reflection appears as a layer that partly covers the original image. This phenomenon may cause failure in extracting information from images of reflecting objects. This work presents an automated technique for determining of reflection area as well as its severity to define reliability of extracted information. This is done by analyzing histogram and objects found in the image. We present a strong detector based on combining the results of these two procedures. We presented new reflection detection algorithm and a new method to find a good threshold value for converting any image into a binary image. The average reflection detection accuracy of the proposed algorithm is more than 95% for... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

In a practical power system, automating all the substations is neither affordable nor economically justifiable. On the other hand, the trend for electric power subsidies elimination in some regions, such as Iran, aggravates this situation. To enhance the cost effectiveness of distribution automation system, this paper proposes a novel applicable qualitative-quantitative method using analytical hierarchical process (AHP) to find the optimum placement of remote terminal units (RTU). Entire attempt is to contribute all the crucial technical and practical parameters related to this problem in order to find the most reliable solution. Optimum number of RTUs is determined using the concepts of... 

Sleep spindle is the hallmark of second stage of sleep in human being, which is defined as a rhythmic sequence with waxing and waning waves, whose frequency is approximately between 8 to 14 Hz, and its time duration is between 0.5 to 2 seconds. Bump modeling is a method for extracting regions with higher amounts of energy in a related time-frequency map. The bump model of the sleep spindle consists of a group of high energy bumps concentrating in approximately 8 to 14 Hz frequency band. In this study, it will be shown that the power of bumps of EEG can be used in automated detection of sleep spindle. The presented method sensitivity is 99.41% which shows high correctly detection rate, and... 

This paper presents a new solution framework to locate the workstations in the tandem automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems. So far, the research has focused on minimizing the total flow or minimizing the total AGV transitions in each zone. In this paper, we focus on minimizing total cumulative flow among workstations. This objective allocates workstations to an AGV route such that total waiting time of workstations to be supplied by the AGV is minimized. We develop a property which simplifies the available mathematical formulation of the problem. We also develop a heuristic algorithm for the problem. Computational results show that our heuristic could yield very high-quality solutions and... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability... 

This paper presents an advanced grid adaptation strategy to be used by unstructured grid users. The idea behind this strategy originates from the need for automatic control of computational grids during iterative procedures utilized by fluid flow solvers. This strategy eliminates unnecessary grid computations by dividing the unstructured grid into active and inactive zones automatically. The active zones are extended automatically in order to capture the propagation of disturbances in solution domain. In this work, we focus to solve the grid deformations which are imposed in some portions of the main body and are propagated into computational domain during the iterative solutions. To achieve... 

We propose a cost estimation model based on a fuzzy rule back-propagation network (BPN), configuring the rules to estimate the cost under uncertainty. A multiple linear regression analysis is applied to analyze the rules and identify the effective rules for cost estimation. Then, using a dynamic programming approach we determine the optimal path in the manufacturing network. Finally, an application of this model is illustrated through a numerical example showing the effectiveness of the proposed model for solving the cost estimation problem under uncertainty  

There are many websites specially designed for mobile phones. Some hackers write automated programs to abuse these website services and waste the website resources. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between human users and computer programs. Methods known for achieving this are known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart). CAPTCHA methods are mainly based on the weaknesses of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems and ask the user to type a word. So using them is difficult in tools such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) or mobile phones that lack a complete keyboard. In this paper, a new CAPTCHA system is proposed for... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is...