Sharif Digital Repository

This article studies the problem of locating fuel stations to minimize the extra cost spent in refueling detours, which belongs to a class of discretionary service facility location problems. Unlike many studies of similar problems in the literature, the proposed model considers capacity constraints and compares different ways to incorporate them in the formulation. Note that ignoring the capacity constraint results in nonoptimal and unrealistic solutions. The proposed models are solved using both an off-the-shelf solver (CPLEX) and a specialized meta-heuristic method (Simulated Annealing) developed in this study. The solution methods are tested and compared in two case studies; a test... 

Meta-heuristic algorithms have been successfully applied to solve the redundancy allocation problem in recent years. Among these algorithms, the electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) is a powerful population-based algorithm designed for continuous decision spaces. This paper presents an efficient memory-based electromagnetism-like mechanism called MBEM to solve the redundancy allocation problem. The proposed algorithm employs a memory matrix in local search to save the features of good solutions and feed it back to the algorithm. This would make the search process more efficient. To verify the good performance of MBEM, various test problems, especially the 33 well-known benchmark instances in... 

An important issue for efficient execution of MapReduce jobs on a cloud platform is selecting the best fitting virtual machine (VM) configuration(s) among the miscellany of choices that cloud providers offer. Wise selection of VM configurations can lead to better performance, cost and energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to explore the available configurations and choose the best one for each given MapReduce application. Executing the given application on all the configurations for comparison is a costly, time and energy consuming process. An alternative is to run the application on a subset of configurations (sample configurations) and estimate its performance on other... 

Given a triangulation of a point set on the plane, dilation of any pair of the points is the ratio of their shortest path length to their Euclidean distance. The maximum dilation over all pairs of points is called the dilation of this triangulation. Minimum dilation triangulation problem seeks a triangulation with the least possible dilation of an input point set. For this problem no polynomial time algorithm is known. We present an exact algorithm based on a branch and bound method for finding minimum dilation triangulations. This deterministic algorithm after generating an initial solution, iteratively computes a lower bound for the answer and then applies a branch and bound method to find... 

Continuous down scaling of CMOS technology in recent years has resulted in exponential increase in static power consumption which acts as a power wall for further transistor integration. One promising approach to throttle the substantial static power of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) is to power off unused routing resources such as switch boxes, known as dark silicon. In this paper, we present a Power gating Switch Box Architecture (PESA) for routing network of SRAM-based FPGAs to overcome the obstacle for further device integration. In the proposed architecture, by exploring various patterns of used multiplexers in switch boxes, we employ a configurable controller to turn off unused... 

PPG based heart rate (HR) monitoring has recently attracted much attention with the advent of wearable devices such as smart watches and smart bands. However, due to severe motion artifacts (MA) caused by wristband stumbles, PPG based HR monitoring is a challenging problem in scenarios where the subject performs intensive physical exercises. This work proposes a novel approach to the problem based on supervised learning by Neural Network (NN). By simulations on the benchmark datasets [1], we achieve acceptable estimation accuracy and improved run time in comparison with the literature. A major contribution of this work is that it alleviates the need to use simultaneous acceleration signals.... 

The characteristic boundary conditions are applied and assessed for the solution of incompressible inviscid flows. The two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations based on the artificial compressibility method are considered and then the characteristic boundary conditions are formulated in the generalized curvilinear coordinates and implemented on both the far-field and wall boundaries. A fourth-order compact finite-difference scheme is used to discretize the resulting system of equations. The solution methodology adopted is more suitable for this assessment because the Euler equations and the high-accurate numerical scheme applied are quite sensitive to the treatment of boundary... 

In this research, a new metaheuristic optimization algorithm, inspired by biological nervous systems and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed for solving complex optimization problems. The proposed method, named as neural network algorithm (NNA), is developed based on the unique structure of ANNs. The NNA benefits from complicated structure of the ANNs and its operators in order to generate new candidate solutions. In terms of convergence proof, the relationship between improvised exploitation and each parameter under asymmetric interval is derived and an iterative convergence of NNA is proved theoretically. In this paper, the NNA with its interconnected computing unit is examined... 

In cryptographic engineering, extensive attention has been devoted to ameliorating the performance and security of the algorithms within. Nonetheless, in the state-of-the-art, the approaches for increasing the reliability of the efficient hash functions ECHO and Fugue have not been presented to date.We propose efficient fault detection schemes by presenting closed formulations for the predicted signatures of different transformations in these algorithms. These signatures are derived to achieve low overhead for the specific transformations and can be tailored to include byte/word-wide predicted signatures. Through simulations, we show that the proposed fault detection schemes are... 

In this study, a jet propulsion JP combustor is studied numerically to investigate the combustor wall temperature influences on the soot characteristics emitted at its exhaust. There are a number of ways to control the combustor wall temperatures benefiting from different wall cooling technologies. Irrespective of using different high technology cooling systems, it is important to recognize how the wall temperature can affect the soot emission from one specific JP engine. Before examining the main combustor, it is important to assess the accuracy of the computational fluids dynamics (CFD) tool via solving a benchmark problem. In this regard, the predicted flame structure for the benchmark... 

In this paper, we propose a new method for damaging and destroying robust invisible watermarks using an image resizing technique which is named seam carving. By using this method we are able to resize watermarked images in a content-aware manner so that the synchronization of the embedder and extractor of watermarking system is broken and the watermark detection becomes impossible. In contrast to the available benchmarks like Stirmark, proposed attack does not severely reduce the quality of the watermarked image. Therefore it maintains the commercial value of the watermarked image. We have tested the proposed method to attack 3 recent and robust watermarking methods and the results sound... 

In this paper, a new hybrid metaheuristic algorithm based on the scatter search approach is developed to solve the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem. This algorithm combines two solutions from scatter search to build a set of precedence feasible activity lists and select some of them as children for the new population. We use the idea presented in the iN forward/backward improvement technique to define two types of schedule, direct and reverse, and the members of the sequential populations change alternately between these two types of schedule. Extensive computational tests were performed on standard benchmark datasets and the results are compared with the best... 

Augmenting the security of cryptographic algorithms by protecting them against side-channel active attacks (and natural faults) is essential in cryptographic engineering. BLAKE algorithm is an efficient hash function which has been developed based on Bernstein's ChaCha stream cipher. Because of the fact that Google has chosen ChaCha along with Bernstein's Poly1305 message authentication code as a replacement for RC4 in TLS for Internet security, BLAKE's implementation is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present high-performance fault detection schemes for BLAKE. Specifically, for the round function, two fault diagnosis approaches are developed and analyzed in terms of error... 

This paper introduces a new methodology for the design of fixed-order multi-objective output feedback controllers. The problem comprises a set of linear matrix inequalities and an additional rank constraint. The primary idea is to classify convex subsets of the set of rank constrained matrices in such formulations, based on which two noniterative and relatively fast methods are developed. The proposed methods require solving a convex optimization problem at each step and can be applied with any weighted summation of design objectives such as (Formula presented.) performance, (Formula presented.) performance, passivity, and regional pole assignment. Several benchmark systems with performance... 

The goal of this work is to propose a hybrid algorithm called real-coded self-organizing migrating genetic algorithm by combining real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA) and self-organizing migrating algorithm (SOMA) for solving bound-constrained nonlinear optimization problems having multimodal continuous functions. In RCGA, exponential ranking selection, whole-arithmetic crossover and non-uniform mutation operations have been used as different operators where as in SOMA, a modification has been done. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm has been tested by solving a set of benchmark optimization problems taken from the existing literature. Then, the simulated results have been... 

Due to the growing complexity of today's digital circuits, the speed of fault simulation has become increasingly important. Although critical path tracing (CPT) is faster than conventional methods, it is not fast enough for fault simulation of complex circuits with a large number of faults and tests. Exact stem analysis is the most important obstacle in accelerating the CPT method. The simplification of stem analysis eliminates time-consuming computations and makes the CPT method more parallelizable. An approximate and bit-parallel CPT algorithm is proposed for ultrafast fault simulation for both stuck-at-fault (SAF) and transition delay fault (TDF) models. Time linearity, speedup, and... 

MapReduce framework is an effective method for big data parallel processing. Enhancing the performance of MapReduce clusters, along with reducing their job execution time, is a fundamental challenge to this approach. In fact, one is faced with two challenges here: how to maximize the execution overlap between jobs and how to create an optimum job scheduling. Accordingly, one of the most critical challenges to achieving these goals is developing a precise model to estimate the job execution time due to the large number and high volume of the submitted jobs, limited consumable resources, and the need for proper Hadoop configuration. This paper presents a model based on MapReduce phases for... 

The aggregators are intermediary players at the distribution system level. They manage the financial transactions of resources such as micro-turbines (MTs), photo-voltaic (PV) production systems, flexible demands (FDs), and must-run demands (MDs) in the energy market. Based on the regulation of many transmission system operators (TSOs) in European countries, an aggregator is obliged to be assigned to a balancing group (BG) represented by a balancing group manager (BGM). The TSO measures the energy imbalances at the BG level. Meanwhile, the BGM is responsible for the management of financial transactions between the aggregators and the TSO. The strategic aggregators can establish a common BG... 

This paper presents an extension to PathFinder FPGA routing algorithm, which enables it to deliver FPGA designs free from risks of crosstalk attacks. Crosstalk side-channel attacks are a real threat in large designs assembled from various IPs, where some IPs are provided by trusted and some by untrusted sources. It suffices that a ring-oscillator based sensor is conveniently routed next to a signal that carries secret information (for instance, a cryptographic key), for this information to possibly get leaked. To address this security concern, we apply several different strategies and evaluate them on benchmark circuits from Verilog-to-Routing tool suite. Our experiments show that, for a... 

In this paper, a novel computational algorithm is proposed for hierarchical optimal control of nonlinear systems. The hierarchical control uses a new coordination strategy based on the gradient of the coordination errors. This type of coordination extremely reduces the number of iterations required for obtaining the overall optimal solution. The performance and the convergence rate of the proposed approach, in compare to the classical gradient-type interaction prediction approach, is shown through simulations of a benchmark continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) problem. ©2008 IEEE