Sharif Digital Repository

The economic production quantity (EPQ) is one of the most commonly used models for production planning and inventory control problems. In this paper, a multi-product single- machine EPQ inventory model with imperfect production is extended under production capacity. In this system, produced items do not have perfect quality; they either are reworked or are scrapped. Moreover, the limited warehouse space for each item and the limited total available capital lead to constraints for storage and budget, respectively. Besides, the setup cost/time for each product depends on the quantity produced. The objective function of the developed EPQ inventory model is shown to be a convex non-linear... 

Recent enhancements in computer aided design and manufacturing have made dentistry workflow more effective. Dental products are highly customized and personalized for patients. So, they require manufacturing processes for flexibility and agility and fulfilling requirements like quality, delivery time and cost. Various types of scanners, design software and production devices are used by stakeholders in digital dentistry. Also, other stakeholders such as dentists, dental surgeons and lab technicians work together to respond to patient demands to produce the required products while they are distributed in different geographical locations. This paper introduces a new practical and... 

Embedded Systems (ESs) have migrated from special-purpose hardware to commodity hardware. These systems have also tended to Mixed-Criticality (MC) implementations, executing applications of different criticalities upon a shared platform. Multi-cores, which are commonly used to design MC Systems (MCSs), bring out new challenges due to the Process Variation (PV). Power and frequency asymmetry affects the predictability of ESs. In this work, variation-aware techniques are explored to not only improve the reliability of MCSs, but also aid the scheduling and energy saving of them. We leverage the Core-to-Core (C2C) variations to protect high-criticality tasks and provide full service for a high... 

Due to the battery-operated nature of some embedded Mixed-Criticality Systems, simultaneous energy and reliability management is a crucial issue in designing these systems. We propose two comprehensive schemes, MC-2S and MC-4S, which exploit the standby-sparing technique to tolerate permanent faults through inherent redundancy of multicore systems and maintain the system's reliability against transient faults with low energy overhead. In these schemes, two copies of each high-criticality task are scheduled on different cores to guarantee their timeliness in case of permanent fault occurrence. To guarantee the quality of service of low-criticality tasks, in the MC-2S scheme, one backup copy... 

A huge amount of energy consumption, the cost of this usage and environmental effects have become serious issues for commercial cloud providers. Solar energy is a promising clean energy source, to provide some portion of the Internet data center's (IDC's) energy usage which can reduce environmental effects and total energy costs. Moreover, due to the high energy consumption of the cooling system, considering cooling power in job scheduling can provide efficient solutions to reduce total energy consumption. In this article, we investigate the problem of minimizing the energy cost of an IDC and propose an algorithm which schedules heterogeneous IDC workloads, by considering available renewable... 

Increasing power densities in future technology nodes is a crucial issue in multicore platforms. As the number of cores increases in them, power budget constraints may prevent powering all cores simultaneously at full performance level. Therefore, chip manufacturers introduce a power budget constraint as Thermal Design Power (TDP) for chips. Meanwhile, multicore platforms are suitable for the implementation of fault-tolerance techniques to achieve high reliability. Task Replication is a well-known technique to tolerate transient faults. However, careless task replication may lead to significant peak power consumption. In this article, we consider the problem of achieving a given reliability... 

Confronted with the power system restructuring trend reforming the past-regulated power systems, the need for a narrower insight on the costly maintenance strategies seems imperative. It falls within the realm of reliability centered maintenance to enhance the cost effectiveness of power distribution maintenance policies. From a practical point of view, this paper devises a novel approach on the basis of the analytical hierarchical process (AHP) accompanied by fuzzy sets theory to determine the most critical component types of distribution power systems to be prioritized in maintenance scheduling. In the presence of many qualitative and quantitative attributes, fuzzy sets can effectively... 

This paper presents a novel heuristic algorithm for solving economic dispatch (ED) problems, by employing iteration particle swarm optimization with time varying acceleration coefficients (IPSO-TVAC) method. Due to the effect of valve-points and prohibited operation zones (POZs) in the generating units' cost functions, ED problem is a non-linear and non-convex optimization problem. The problem even may be more complicated if transmission losses are taken into account. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined and validated by carrying out extensive tests on three different test systems. Valve-point effects, POZs, ramp-rate constraints and transmission losses are modeled. Numerical... 

Atherosclerosis is a major cause of coronary artery disease leading to morbidity and mortality worldwide. Currently, coronary angiography is considered to be the most accurate technique to diagnose coronary artery disease (CAD). However, this technique is an invasive and expensive procedure with risks of serious complications. Since the symptoms of CAD are not noticed until advanced stages of the disease, early and effective diagnosis of CAD is considered a pertinent measure. In this paper, a non-invasive optical signal, the finger photoplethysmogram (PPG) obtained before and after reactive hyperemia is investigated to discriminate between subjects with different CAD conditions. To this end,... 

Fuel management in PWR nuclear reactors is comprised of a collection of principles and practices required for the planning, scheduling, refueling, and safe operation of nuclear power plants to minimize the total plant and system energy costs to the extent possible. Despite remarkable advancements in optimization procedures, inherent complexities in nuclear reactor structure and strong inter-dependency among the fundamental parameters of the core make it necessary to evaluate the most efficient arrangement of the core. Several patterns have been presented so far to determine the best configuration of fuels in the reactor core by emphasis on minimizing the local power peaking factor (Pq). In... 

Considerable developments in the real-time telemetry of demand-side systems allow independent system operators (ISOs) to use reserves provided by demand response (DR) in ancillary service markets. Currently, many ISOs have designed programs to utilize the reserve provided by DR in electricity markets. This paper presents a stochastic model to schedule reserves provided by DR in the wholesale electricity markets. Demand-side reserve is supplied by demand response providers (DRPs), which have the responsibility of aggregating and managing customer responses. A mixed-integer representation of reserve provided by DRPs and its associated cost function are used in the proposed stochastic model.... 

Voltage stability is the ability of a power system to maintain acceptable voltages at all buses in the system under normal conditions and after being subjected to a disturbance. This paper employs the management of reactive power generation to improve the voltage stability margin (VSM), in the framework of optimal reactive power dispatch (ORD) problem. Scheduling of VAR sources is performed using the concept of relative value of VAR sources. The proposed methodology has been tested on the IEEE 14-bus test system. Simulation results show that after the optimal reactive power scheduling, VSM of the systems is increased considerably. In addition, it is observed that reactive power reserve is... 

This paper presents a priority based dynamic programming approach for long term maintenance scheduling of overhead distribution networks. The proposed approach is based on risk management approach and utilizes the model of decoupled risk factors. Two heuristic factors are defined and utilized in order to establish a maintenance priority list and to curtail the dynamic programming search space. The proposed methodology yields a significant computational saving compare to the previously reported dynamic programming. Risk management approach enables the asset managers to consider the actual condition of electrical equipments and expected consequence of their failures. Furthermore, the decoupled... 

Recently, with the growth and development of distributed generation (DGs) and energy storage systems (ESSs), as well as smart control equipment, microgrids (MGs) have been developed. Microgrids are comprised of a limited number of constitutive parts, including loads, DGs, ESSs, and electric vehicles (EVs). This paper presents a novel scheme to manage active and reactive powers, based on DGs, ESSs, and EVs to reduce the total operation cost including power generation and emission costs. Simultaneous management of active and reactive power makes it possible to consider grid operation constraints together. In the proposed schedule, the vehicles are assumed to be plug-in hybrid electric... 

In a wirelessly-powered communication network (WPCN), an energy access point (E-AP) supplies the energy needs of the network nodes through radio frequency wave transmission, and the nodes store their received energy in their batteries for possible data transmission. In this paper, we propose an online control policy for energy transfer from the E-AP to the wireless nodes and for data transfer among the nodes. With our proposed control policy, all data queues of the nodes are stable, while the average energy consumption of the network is shown to be within a bounded gap of the minimum energy required for stabilizing the network. Our proposed policy is designed using a quadratic Lyapunov... 

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of mobile hosts forming a temporary network on the fly, without using any fixed infrastructure. Characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks such as lack of central coordination, mobility of hosts, dynamically varying network topology, and limited availability of resources make QoS provisioning very challenging in such networks. In this paper, we introduce a fuzzy QoS traffic conditioner for mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed traffic conditioner consists of fuzzy admission control (FAC), fuzzy traffic rate controller (FTRC), and fuzzy scheduler (FS). The proposed FAC monitors the delay and available bandwidth and decides whether to accept or reject the... 

A three-dimensional multi-component transport model in a two-phase oil-water system was developed. The model includes separated terms to account for the dispersion, convection, injection, growth and death of microbes, and accumulation. For the first time, effects of both wettability alteration of reservoir rock from oil wet to water wet and reduction in interfacial tension (IFT) simultaneously on relative permeability and capillary pressure curves were included in a MEOR simulation model. Transport equations were considered for the bacteria, nutrients, and metabolite (bio-surfactant) in the matrix, reduced interfacial tension on phase trapping, surfactant and polymer adsorption, and effect... 

In ad hoc wireless networks, there are scenarios where the desired destination is located in the range of other transmitters, so that the efforts on setting up communication with this terminal will fail due to collisions that may occur between transmitted control frames and undesired received control and data frames. This phenomenon becomes a bottleneck when most of data transmissions experience packet fragmentation. In such scenarios, the desired destination becomes unreachable during the data transfer of neighboring nodes. Using the same PHY of IEEE 802.11 and making slight modifications in its MAC, a new medium access control scheme equipped by a novel transmission scheduling algorithm is... 

An increasing trend for reducing cost, space, and weight leads to modern embedded systems that execute multiple tasks with different criticality levels on a common hardware platform while guaranteeing a safe operation. In such Mixed-Criticality (MC) systems, multiple Worst-Case Execution Times (WCETs) are defined for each task, corresponding to system operation mode to improve the MC system’s timing behavior at run-time. Determining the appropriate WCETs for lower criticality modes is non-trivial. On the one hand, considering a very low WCET for tasks can improve the processor utilization by scheduling more tasks in that mode, on the other hand, using a larger WCET ensures that the mode... 

An increasing trend for reducing cost, space, and weight leads to modern embedded systems that execute multiple tasks with different criticality levels on a common hardware platform while guaranteeing a safe operation. In such mixed-criticality (MC) systems, multiple worst case execution times (WCETs) are defined for each task, corresponding to the system operation mode to improve the MC system's timing behavior at runtime. Determining the appropriate WCETs for lower criticality (LC) modes is nontrivial. On the one hand, considering a very low WCET for tasks can improve the processor utilization by scheduling more tasks in that mode, on the other hand, using a larger WCET ensures that the...