Sharif Digital Repository

The friction drive principle, which is based on the superposition of two synchronized perpendicular vibrations at the interface of the robot and the work floor, plays a fundamental role in the locomotion of miniaturized robots. In this paper, the iteration perturbation method proposed by He is used to generate a periodic solution for this type of friction drive microrobot. The equation of motion for the system reveals a parametrically excited oscillator with discontinuity, the elastic force term for which is proportional to a signum function. The obtained solutions are in excellent agreement with those achieved from numerical integration and experiments reported in the literature. Results... 

In a proportional task allocation problem, it is desired for robotic agents to have equal duty to capability ratios. Here, this problem is addressed as a combination of deployment and consensus problems. Tasks occur in a convex region and each task is assigned to its nearest agent. Agents are deployed on this area in order to reach consensus over the value of their duty to capability ratio. A distributed, asynchronous, and scalable algorithm is presented for solving this problem in continuous time domain  

We study here the algorithmic analysis of systems modeled in terms of availability languages. Our first main result is a positive answer to the emptiness problem: it is decidable whether a given availability language contains a word. The key idea is an inductive construction that replaces availability languages with Parikh-equivalent regular languages. As a second contribution, we solve the intersection problem modulo bounded languages: given availability languages and a bounded language, it is decidable whether the intersection of the former contains a word from the bounded language. We show that the problem is NP-complete. The idea is to reduce to satisfiability of existential Presburger... 

This study presents a parallel evolutionary optimization approach to determine optimal management strategies of large-scale coastal groundwater problems. The population loops of evolutionary algorithms (EA) are parallelized using shared memory parallelism to address the high computational demands of such applications. This methodology is applied to solve the management problems in an aquifer system in Kish Island, Iran using a three-dimensional density-dependent groundwater numerical model. EAs of continuous ant colony optimization (CACO), particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithm are utilized to solve the optimization problems. By implementing the parallelization strategy, a... 

Instead of charging tolls on individual links, this paper considers doing the same on paths. Path and link tolls are "valid" if they encourage motorists to use routes that collectively lead to a target distribution, e.g., one that minimizes travel delay. Because the numbers of valid link and path tolls are typically infinite, an objective in pricing tolls is to find a set of valid tolls that yields the least revenue to lessen the financial burden on motorists.Path tolls are generally more flexible than link tolls and this paper shows that this flexibility can substantially reduce the financial burden on motorists. Additionally, valid path tolls yielding the least revenue possess... 

Abstract Several researchers have worked on transmitting a given amount of flow through a network flow within fastest possible time, allowing flow to be transmitted through one or more paths. Extending this problem to the system reliability problem, the quickest path reliability problem has been introduced. The problem evaluates the probability of transmitting some given amount of flow from a source node to a sink node through a single minimal path in a stochastic-flow network within some specified units of time. Later, the problem has been extended to allow flow to be transmitted through two or more separate minimal paths (SMPs). Here, we consider the problem of sending flow through two... 

This paper presents an optimisation model for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell system based on simultaneous power maximisation and cost minimisation. The results show that, by employing appropriate relation between the objectives, the innovative design could be proposed. Genetic algorithm is applied to solve the optimisation problem. Power maximisation results reveal that at maximum amount of power (1.95 kW), unit cost of energy is $0.64. In contrast, minimisation of cost decreases unit cost of energy to $0.33. In this condition, output power is reduced approximately to 0.93 kW. To consider both optimisation problems concurrently, weighting method and Pareto set are employed. Our... 

Estimating Origin-Destination matrix, named O-D matrix or ODM, is an important issue in transportation planning. Due to need to survey movements on the network, estimating ODM is usually considered as a high-cost measure in transportation planning. In this research work, a two-stage procedure, including solving routing problem and minimizing the difference between observed and estimated traffic volumes on the network, has been developed to estimate the O-D matrix elements. At the first stage, routing problem is solved to determine paths while in the second stage an absolute error function has been defined to determine the number of trips from each origin to destination pairs. The procedure... 

In this paper a new model is proposed for the integrated problem of supply chain network designing and assembly line balancing under demand uncertainty. In this problem there are three types of entities: manufacturers, assemblers and customers. Manufacturers provide assemblers with components and assemblers use these components to produce the final products and satisfy the demand of the customers. This problem involves determining the location of manufacturers and assemblers in the network, balancing the assembly lines, and transportation of materials and products throughout the network. A mixed integer nonlinear programming formulation based on two stage stochastic programming method is... 

In this paper, a multiproduct single vendor-single buyer supply chain problem is investigated based on the economic production quantity model developed for the buyer to minimize the inventory cost. The model to be more applicable for real-world supply chain problems contains five stochastic constraints including backordering cost, space, ordering, procurement, and available budget. The objective is to find the optimal order quantities of the products such that the total inventory cost is minimized while the constraints are satisfied. The recently-developed sequential quadratic programming (SQP), as one of the best optimization methods available in the literature, is used to solve the... 

This paper presents a bi-objective vendor managed inventory (BOVMI) model for a supply chain problem with a single vendor and multiple retailers, in which the demand is fuzzy and the vendor manages the retailers' inventory in a central warehouse. The vendor confronts two constraints: number of orders and available budget. In this model, the fuzzy demand is formulated using trapezoidal fuzzy number (TrFN) where the centroid defuzzification method is employed to defuzzify fuzzy output functions. Minimizing both the total inventory cost and the warehouse space are the two objectives of the model. Since the proposed model is formulated into a bi-objective integer nonlinear programming (INLP)... 

Bi-objective optimization of a multi-product multi-period three-echelon supply-chain-network problem is aimed in this paper. The network consists of manufacturing plants, distribution centers (DCs), and customer nodes. To bring the problem closer to reality, the majority of the parameters in this network including fixed and variable costs, customer demand, available production time, set-up and production times, all are considered stochastic. The goal is to determine the quantities of the products produced by the manufacturing plants in different periods, the number and locations of the warehouses, the quantities of products transported between the supply chain entities, the inventory of... 

This article proposes a novel algorithm to improve the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. This algorithm employs swarm intelligence algorithms in conjunction with compressive sensing theory to build up the routing trees and to decrease the communication rate. The main contribution of this article is to extend swarm intelligence algorithms to build a routing tree in such a way that it can be utilized to maximize efficiency, thereby rectifying the delay problem of compressive sensing theory and improving the network lifetime. In addition, our approach offers accurate data recovery from small amounts of compressed data. Simulation results show that our approach can effectively extend the... 

Forecasting stock price time series is very important and challenging in the real world because they are affected by many highly interrelated economic, social, political and even psychological factors, and these factors interact with each other in a very complicated manner. This article presents an approach based on Genetic Fuzzy Systems (GFS) for constructing a stock price forecasting expert system. We use a GFS model with the ability of rule base extraction and data base tuning for next day stock price prediction to extract useful patterns of information with a descriptive rule induction approach. We evaluate capability of the proposed approach by applying it on stock price forecasting... 

In this note, we show that under certain assumptions the scalar Riccati differential equation x′=a(t)x+b(t)x 2+c(t) with periodic coefficients admits at least one periodic solution. Also, we give two illustrative examples in order to indicate the validity of the assumptions  

Intelligent solutions, based on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, to solve complicated practical problems in various sectors are becoming more and more widespread nowadays. On the other hand, electrical load prediction is one of the important concerns of power systems so development of intelligent prediction tools for performing accurate predictions is essential. This study presents an intelligent hybrid approach called ACO-SA by hybridization of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Simulated Annealing (SA). The hybrid approach consists of two general stages. At the first stage time series inputs will be fed into ACO and it performs a global search to find a globally optimum solution.... 

We study bargaining games between suppliers and manufacturers in a network context. Agents wish to enter into contracts in order to generate surplus which then must be divided among the participants. Potential contracts and their surplus are represented by weighted edges in our bipartite network. Each agent in the market is additionally limited by a capacity representing the number of contracts which he or she may undertake. When all agents are limited to just one contract each, prior research applied natural generalizations of the Nash bargaining solution to the networked setting, defined the new solution concepts of stable and balanced, and characterized the resulting bargaining outcomes.... 

In this paper, it is shown that the fractional-order derivatives of a periodic function with a specific period cannot be a periodic function with the same period. The fractional-order derivative considered here can be obtained based on each of the well-known definitions Grunwald-Letnikov definition, Riemann-Liouville definition and Caputo definition. This concluded point confirms the result of a recently published work proving the non-existence of periodic solutions in a class of fractional-order models. Also, based on this point it can be easily proved the absence of periodic responses in a wider class of fractional-order models. Finally, some examples are presented to show the... 

The focus of this research is on the flexible flow shop sequence dependent group scheduling problem (FFSDGS) with minimization of makespan as the criterion (FFm|fmls, Splk|Cmax). Since the research problem is shown to be NP-hard, a meta-heuristic algorithms based on memetic algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the problem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the only available meta-heuristic algorithm in the literature, i.e., tabu search (TS). The comparison is performed based on paired t-test and the result shows that the memetic algorithm has a superior performance compared to the TS  

In this paper, the nonlinear dynamic response of an inclined pinned-pinned beam with a constant cross section, finite length subjected to a concentrated vertical force traveling with a constant velocity is investigated. The study is focused on the mode summation method and also on frequency analysis of the governing PDEs equations of motion. Furthermore, the steady-state response is studied by applying the multiple scales method. The nonlinear response of the beam is obtained by solving two coupled nonlinear PDEs governing equations of planar motion for both longitudinal and transverse oscillations of the beam. The dynamic magnification factor and normalized time histories of mid-pint of the...