Sharif Digital Repository

Reliability evaluations play a significant role in engineering applications to ensure the serviceability and safety of advanced structures such as those made of composites. Here, a dynamic reliability evaluation analysis based on the probability density evolution Method (PDEM) has been adapted to assess the reliability of composite structures under uncertainties within the material properties and the external loadings. A Back-Propagation Neural Network approach is employed to identify the system's nonlinear structural response, which is often the case under large deformations. To exemplify, a split Hopkinson pressure bar system was employed to mimic the mechanical behavior of a... 

Reliability evaluations play a significant role in engineering applications to ensure the serviceability and safety of advanced structures such as those made of composites. Here, a dynamic reliability evaluation analysis based on the probability density evolution Method (PDEM) has been adapted to assess the reliability of composite structures under uncertainties within the material properties and the external loadings. A Back-Propagation Neural Network approach is employed to identify the system's nonlinear structural response, which is often the case under large deformations. To exemplify, a split Hopkinson pressure bar system was employed to mimic the mechanical behavior of a... 

The Stochastic Distribution Control (SDC) problem is a generalised form of the minimum variance control problem where non-Gaussian noise distributions are encountered. The problem has been previously solved using two alternative approaches. When it is assumed that the output Probability Distribution Function (PDF) is measurable, then a parameterized controller is obtained. If on the other hand this assumption is removed (which corresponds to most practical cases), then the controller found is no longer parameterisable (i.e. it is a control action sequence). Both these approaches have thus far been solved using local Newtonian methods. In this paper a third alternative is presented which... 

We study a relay channel with confidential messages (RCC), which involves a sender, a receiver and a relay. In the RCC, a common information must be transmitted to both a receiver and a relay and also a private information to the intended receiver, while keeping the relay as ignorant of it as possible. The level of ignorance of the relay rather than the private message is measured by the equivocation rate. We consider two error probability exponents (reliabilities) E1, E2 of exponentially decrease of error probability of the receiver decoder and the relay decoder, respectively. For E = (E1, E2), the E-capacity region is the set of all E-achievable rates of codes with given reliability E. We... 

Enabling cooperation in a NOMA system is a promising approach to improve its performance. In this paper, we study the cooperation in a secure NOMA system, where the legitimate users are distributed uniformly in the network and the eavesdroppers are distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process. We consider a cooperative NOMA scheme (two users are paired as strong and weak users) in two phases: 1) Direct transmission phase, in which the base station broadcasts a superposition of the messages, 2) Cooperation phase, in which the strong user acts as a relay to help in forwarding the messages of the weak user. We study the secrecy outage performance in two cases: (i) security of... 

In non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, serving multiple users in shared resource blocks can allow untrusted users to overhear the messages of other users. In this context, we study a network consisting of a base station (BS), a near user and a far user, where the latter attempts to overhear the message of the former. The near user is a full-duplex (FD) node that can also act as a relay. Two operating scenarios are considered: 1) friendly jammer (FJ), where the FD node broadcasts noise for degrading the channel between the BS and the far user, while receiving data from the BS; and 2) friendly jammer relay (FJR), where, in addition to degrading the channel between the BS and the far... 

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines color and texture information of skin with cellular learning automata to segment skin-like regions in color images. First, the presence of skin colors in an image is detected, using a committee structure, to make decision from several explicit boundary skin models. Detected skin-color regions are then fed to a color texture extractor that extracts the texture features of skin regions via their color statistical properties and maps them to a skin probability map. Cellular learning automatons use this map to make decision on skin-like regions. The proposed algorithm has demonstrated true positive rate of about 83.4% and false positive... 

Skin detection is a difficult and primary task in many image processing applications. Because of the diversity of various image processing tasks, there exists no optimum method that can perform properly for all applications. In this paper, we have proposed a novel skin detection algorithm that combines color and texture information of skin with cellular learning automata to detect skin-like regions in color images. Skin color regions are first detected, by using a committee structure, from among several explicit boundary skin models. Detected skin-color regions are then fed to a texture analyzer which extracts texture features via their color statistical properties and maps them to a skin... 

This paper addresses the problem of frame detection in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Using fourth-order statistics, a novel approach is presented for detection of a preamble composed of two identical parts in the time domain. First, it is demonstrated that sufficient statistics for detection of a periodic preamble do not exist, and conventional methods are not optimal. Next, looking at the detection of a preamble from the viewpoints of hypothesis testing and classification, a new method is presented based on the idea that fourth-order statistics can increase class separability (between-class distance) and consequently improve detection performance. It is proven... 

Combining the advection-diffusion equation approach with Monte Carlo simulations we study chaperone driven polymer translocation of a stiff polymer through a nanopore. We demonstrate that the probability density function of first passage times across the pore depends solely on the Péclet number, a dimensionless parameter comparing drift strength and diffusivity. Moreover it is shown that the characteristic exponent in the power-law dependence of the translocation time on the chain length, a function of the chaperone-polymer binding energy, the chaperone concentration, and the chain length, is also effectively determined by the Péclet number. We investigate the effect of the chaperone size on... 

The first phase of the Alborz Observatory Array (Alborz-I) consists of 20 plastic scintillation detectors each one with surface area of 0.25 m2spread over an area of 40 × 40 m2 realized to the study of Extensive Air Showers around the knee at the Sharif University of Technology campus. The first stage of the project including construction and operation of a prototype system has now been completed and the electronics that will be used in the array instrument has been tested under field conditions. In order to achieve a realistic estimate of the array performance, a large number of simulated CORSIKA showers have been used. In the present work, theoretical results obtained in the study of... 

This paper outlines a quantitative risk assessment for an 110,000 ton/day ethylene oxide production plant in Iran. After a complete and detailed hazard identification study, done by HAZOP method, the purification column was found to be one of the most hazardous sections in this plant. As ethylene oxide with high concentration and inventory is present there. Fault tree analysis (FTA) technique has been used to identify the basic events responsible for top event occurrence and also calculation of top event frequency of occurrence. Human error has been calculated numerically and probability of human error has been estimated. Failure rate data were collected referring to several sources and... 

We study the problem of optimizing the symbol error probability (SEP) performance of cluster-based cooperative wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is shown in the literature that an efficient relay selection protocol based on simple geographical information of the nodes to execute the cooperative diversity transmission, can significantly improve the SEP performance at the destination of such networks. Also, a similar analysis on the optimal power allocation for the source and the relay exists in the literature. However, we propose that to achieve the minimum SEP at the destination, a joint optimization of power allocation and relay selection should be accomplished. To this aim, we... 

There are various cases in physics and engineering sciences (especially communications) where one requires the envelope probability density function (pdf) of the sum of several random sinusoidal signals. According to the correspondence between a random sinusoidal signal and a random vector, the sum of random vectors can be considered as an abstract mathematical model for the above sum. Now it is desired to obtain the pdf of the length of the resulting vector. Considering the common and reasonable assumption of uniform distributions for the angles of vectors, many researchers have obtained the pdf of the length of the resulting vector only for special cases. However in this paper, the pdf is... 

The Weibull distribution plays an important role in failure distribution modeling of reliability research. While there are three parameters in the general form of this distribution, for simplicity, one of its parameters is usually omitted and as a result, the others are estimated easily. However, due to its more flexibility, when the general form of the Weibull distribution is of interest, the estimation procedure is not an easy task anymore. For example, in the maximum likelihood estimation method, the likelihood function that is formed for a three-parameter Weibull distribution is very hard to maximize. In this paper, a new hybrid methodology based on a variable neighborhood search and a... 

The Burr XII distribution can closely approximate many other well-known probability density functions such as the normal, gamma, lognormal, exponential distributions as well as Pearson type I, II, V, VII, IX, X, XII families of distributions. Considering a wide range of shape and scale parameters of the Burr XII distribution, it can have an important role in reliability modeling, risk analysis and process capability estimation. However, estimating parameters of the Burr XII distribution can be a complicated task and the use of conventional methods such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and moment method (MM) is not straightforward. Some tables to estimate Burr XII parameters have been... 

It is always crucial to estimate process capability index (PCI) when the quality characteristic does not follow normal distribution, however skewed distributions come about in many processes. The classical method to estimate process capability is not applicable for non-normal processes. In the existing methods for non-normal processes, probability density function (pdf) of the process or an estimate of it is required. Estimating pdf of the process is a hard work and resulted PCI by estimated pdf may be far from real value of it. In this paper an artificial neural network is proposed to estimate PCI for right skewed distributions without appeal to pdf of the process. The proposed neural... 

We study the problem of approximating a function F:ℝ → ℝ by a piecewise-linear function F̄ when the values of F at {x 1,...,xn} are given by a discrete probability distribution. Thus, for each xi we are given a discrete set y i,1,..., yi,mi of possible function values with associated probabilities pi,j such that Pr[F(xi) = yi,j] = pi,j. We define the error of F̄ as error(F, F̄) = maxi=1n E[|Fxi) - F̄(xi)|]. Let m = ∑i=1nmi be the total number of potential values over all F(xi). We obtain the following two results: (i) an O(m) algorithm that, given F and a maximum error ε, computes a function F̄ with the minimum number of links such that error(F, F̄) ≤ ε; (ii) an O(n4/3+δ + mlogn) algorithm... 

We study two well-known planar visibility problems, namely visibility testing and visibility counting, in a model where there is uncertainty about the input data. The standard versions of these problems are defined as follows: we are given a set S of n segments in R 2 , and we would like to preprocess S so that we can quickly answer queries of the form: is the given query segment s∈S visible from the given query point q∈R 2 (for visibility testing) and how many segments in S are visible from the given query point q∈R 2 (for visibility counting). In our model of uncertainty, each segment may or may not exist, and if it does, it is located in one of finitely many possible locations, given by a...