Sharif Digital Repository

This study investigates a supply chain of perishable fruits and vegetables. A simulation model using system dynamics approach is proposed to study the behaviors and relationships within the supply chain and to determine the impact of the supply, demand and price interactions. The proposed model yields an insight into the overall agricultural system, taking into account the influence of import quota policies. The purpose of this study is to develop a multi-objective model identifying the best import quota policy for Tehran Municipality Organization of Fruits and Vegetables. The multiple objectives are considered to be price mean, price variation and markup. Key conclusions were reached on how... 

There are many parameters utilized to obtain a more reasonable performance for structures under earthquake excitations in seismic provisions. General considered parameters in seismic provisions are: PGA, importance factor (I) and typical inherent overstrength and global ductility capacity (R). It is well recognized that the main characteristic of the design of structures under seismic excitation is probabilistic rather than deterministic; therefore, it should be determined if whether the probability of structural damage decreases when such parameters change in the design of structures. In this paper, fragility curves are developed in order to evaluate these parameters. Fragility curves are... 

Mesh point positions in Finite Difference Method (FDM) of discretization for the neutron diffusion equation can remarkably affect the averaged neutron fluxes as well as the effective multiplication factor. In this study, by aid of improving the mesh point positions, an enhanced finite difference scheme for the neutron diffusion equation is proposed based on the neutron importance function. In order to determine the neutron importance function, the adjoint (backward) neutron diffusion calculations are performed in the same procedure as for the forward calculations. Considering the neutron importance function, the mesh points can be improved through the entire reactor core. Accordingly, in... 

The diffusion phenomenon has a remarkable impact on Online Social Networks (OSNs). Gathering diffusion data over these large networks encounters many challenges which can be alleviated by adopting a suitable sampling approach. The contributions of this paper is twofold. First we study the sampling approaches over diffusion networks, and for the first time, classify these approaches into two categories, (1) Structure-based Sampling (SBS), and (2) Diffusion-based Sampling (DBS). The dependency of the former approach to topological features of the network, and unavailability of real diffusion paths in the latter, converts the problem of choosing an appropriate sampling approach to a trade-off.... 

Partially-observed data collected by sampling methods is often being studied to obtain the characteristics of information diffusion networks. However, these methods usually do not consider the behavior of diffusion process. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step (sampling/estimation) measurement framework by utilizing the diffusion process characteristics. To this end, we propose a link-tracing based sampling design which uses the infection times as local information without any knowledge about the latent structure of diffusion network. To correct the bias of sampled data, we introduce three estimators for different categories, link-based, node-based, and cascade-based. To the best of... 

There are, to date, few general answers to fundamental questions related to the interactions of nanoparticles (NPs) with living cells. Studies reported in the literature have delivered only limited principles about the nano-bio interface and thus the biological behavior of NPs is yet far from being completely understood. Combining computational tools with experimental approaches in this regard helps to precisely probe the nano-bio interface and allows the development of predictive and descriptive relationships between the structure and the activity of nanomaterials. In the present contribution, a nano-quantitative structure-activity relationship (nano-QSAR) model has been statistically... 

An adaptive tracker to address the problem of tracking objects which undergo abrupt and significant motion changes is introduced. Abrupt motion of objects is an issue which makes tracking a challenging task. To address this problem, a new adaptive motion model is proposed. The model is integrated into the sequential importance resampling particle filter (SIR PF), which is the most popular probabilistic tracking framework. In this model, in each time step, if necessary, the particles' configurations are updated by using feedback information from the observation likelihood. In order to overcome the local-trap problem, local search algorithm with best improvement strategy is used to update... 

It is often required that image resizing be done brightly in order to preserve important content. Some image resizing techniques like scaling and cropping fail to identify and protect important objects, or they produce non-photorealistic images. But content aware image resizing schemes aim to change image aspect ratios while preserving visually outstanding features. In this paper, a novel method for content aware resizing is presented. Seam carving, an effective image resizing algorithm, fails to protect important objects in images, when either the energy content of the objects are low with respect to their surroundings, or, the number of seams removed are very large. Using saliency map as... 

Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cells are attracting most of the electricity consumers because of high efficiency, zero carbon emissions and high reliability. There are many parameters influencing on this power source's operation. A model of PEM fuel cell will be presented and the sensitivity of the fuel cell's parameters will be analyzed. Multi Parameters Sensitivity Analysis is used next to examine the relative importance of the influential parameters on the PEM fuel cell operation  

In image hiding we embed a secret image into a cover image. In order to minimize the distortion of secret image, we presented a novel steganographic method based on content-aware seam carving. In this paper, we propose a new image hiding method in which, the secret image is initially classified based on image complexity measure. Then it is resized to an appropriate smaller size, but for having the important objects of the image in resized image we use seam carving method that resizes an image whereas the important content of it remains. By applying the seam carving, we have an image that is smaller than the original one, and then we hide it in a cover image. Obviously hiding a smaller secret... 

Control of three phase inverters is of paramount importance in the realm of control applications. In this regard, this paper proposes active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) scheme as a new method for voltage control of three phase inverters in UPS applications. The main advantage of ADRC refers to the fact that it is model independent. In this paper, the controller is composed of a double loop structure including an inner current loop and outer voltage loop. This structure is used in a three phase inverter in order for implementation of voltage control. To draw a comparison between ADRC and PI as the common control method, a case study has been simulated in SIMULINK. Simulation results... 

Structural reliability methods are employed in this paper for nationwide probabilistic seismic hazard analysis of Iran and in-depth seismic hazard and hazard sensitivity analysis of Downtown Tehran. The companion paper proposes two analysis approaches based on reliability methods and presents the technical framework for such analyses. The first approach was based on Monte Carlo sampling reliability analysis, which is employed here to conduct hazard analysis at a grid comprising 3695 sites throughout Iran. The results are used to produce nationwide hazard maps for the peak ground acceleration, spectral acceleration, and cumulative absolute velocity. The other analysis approach employs the... 

We investigate the potentials of applying the coded caching paradigm in wireless networks. In order to do this, we investigate physical layer schemes for downlink transmission from a multiantenna transmitter to several cache-enabled users. As the baseline scheme, we consider employing coded caching on the top of max-min fair multicasting, which is shown to be far from optimal at high-SNR values. Our first proposed scheme, which is near-optimal in terms of DoF, is the natural extension of multiserver coded caching to Gaussian channels. As we demonstrate, its finite SNR performance is not satisfactory, and thus we propose a new scheme in which the linear combination of messages is implemented... 

We consider the problem of distributed multi-choice voting in a setting that each node can communicate with its neighbors merely by sending beep signals. Given its simplicity, the beep communication model is of practical importance in different applications such as system biology and wireless sensor networks. Yet, the distributed majority voting has not been resolved in this setting. In this paper, we propose two algorithms, named Distributed Voting with Beeps, to resolve this problem. In the first proposed algorithm, the adjacent nodes having the same value form a set called spot. Afterwards, the spots with majority value try to corrode the spots with non-majority values. The second...