Sharif Digital Repository

Land-use and transportation are inter-related, such that land-use may be used to control transportation. This study aims to design a suitable combination of the residential and service land-use on one side, and the transportation system on the other side. The model presented in this study has two external and internal levels, and its objective is to minimize the cost of residence, receiving goods and services, and transportation. The performance of any combination of spatial allocation of population and employment, as well as transportation, is evaluated by the internal level of the model which determines the interaction between population, employment, and transportation. This is done by a... 

Natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, have been, and will be, one major source of mankind disastrous problems. Mankindinterventions to relieve this heavy pressure on humanity have been divided into four categories: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This study is in the response phase, and aims to find an optimal network to help people in the devastated part of a city, hit by a major earthquake. Such earthquakes demolish buildings over the people inside, causing them fatal harm and serious injuries. At the same time, they ruin the city infrastructures (life lines), including transportation networks, preventing flow of relief supply to reach to the... 

This research deals with the joint problem of reopening the roads closed after a disastrous natural event and the damaged area relief programming. While these two problems are connected to each other by the joint resources of ruins and debris removal, they are usually treated separately in the literature, and their solutions are sought in practice by the art of experienced authorities. This study formulates a dynamic tri-level integer programming problem to represent the two problems of Road Reopening and Relief, in which the crisis manager has the objective of minimizing the death tolls over a planning time interval. It identifies the roads for reopening at the first level; and the second... 

Governments are concurrently faced with two problems in Network Development Problem (NDP): limited resources to invest, and the economic justification of the candidate projects. Public- Private Participation (PPP) is a solution for the first problem, in which Build- Operate- Transfer (BOT) is a scheme to implement this partnership.This study formulates a NDP, in which two sources of funds back projects’ construction: that of the private investor and the public budget for this purpose. The problem is seen as bi-level optimization, with the upper level dealing with the government decisions on the level of participation (from 0 to 100 percent of the project costs), and the lower level being a... 

Earthquake is one of the deadliest natural hazards that has taken more than 400 thousand lives, only in the last decade. Iran is one of the countries that are at high risk of potential death toll resulting from such hazards, firstly because it is located in a potentially high-risk zone, the so-called earthquake belt and, secondly because of its problems in the management of disastrous situations (especially, pre-disaster management). Bam 2003 earthquake is one of the most painful experiences in this context. So, in this research, emphasizing on the practical use of optimization models, an existing model is applied on the damaged area of the Bam earthquake. The mentioned model considers the... 

Relaxing the underlying assumptions of transportation networks analysis and approaching to more realistic behavioral assumptions in route choice modeling, allows more precise predictions for equilibrium traffic pattern. Furthermore, enhancing the degree of sensitivity in modeling traffic equilibrium is crucial from planning perspective in the sense that it can make transportation analyst capable to evaluate and predict the impacts of a broad spectrum of supply and demand management policies. This research has concentrated on proposing some generalizations in route choice behavior modeling and relaxing some restrictive assumptions of the previous approaches in this area. Formally speaking, in... 

Variations in supply and demand of transportation, as well as those in the related environment, would cause daily variations in user travel time of transportation networks. This phenomenon particularly happen in morning travel time peaks, and make estimation of travel time highly unreliable. Morning peak passengers, whose timely presence at the destinations are highly important to them, prefer to choose paths that have minimum travel time and maximum reliability. Thus, the look at travel time pessimistically, and based on their experience, they put a margin of reliability to reach at timely at their destinations.
This study analysis such reliability margins based on the standard... 

Increasing demand for Gold in electronic devices and catalysts, and its high cost, makes it crucial to recover the Gold from waste electronic devices such as Printed Circuit Boards. In this research, recovery of Gold by hydrometallurgical process based on heating the scraps along with a strong oxidizing agent, Potassium Persulphate, which is “eco-friendly” or “green”process is concerned. Recovery of Gold achieved by simple filtration process following by washing with water and nitric acid in order to dissolve impurities such as Al and Sn. The systematical and analytical evaluation method of Taguchi quality engineering has been applied for the leaching to evaluate the optimal experimental... 

A theory of gradient elasticity is used and numerically implemented by a meshless method that is called reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM) to model size effects. Some of the problems are modeled under the consideration of gradient elasticity for the first time and all of them are also modeled with classical elasticity to compare with gradient elasticity. First of all, the RKPM formulation and computing the amount of shape functions and requisite derivatives will be explained with details and a mathematical innovation that will decrease the computational cost seriously proposed for the first time. Several 1D and 2D shape functions with first and second derivatives that are resulted... 

Long-term effects of natural disasters, like earthquakes, in many cases have been reported high on transportation networks. Disruption in this lifeline network's performance imposes high social and economic costs upon the society. Undoubtedly, retrofitting the structures of all network links (or constructing new links) are practically impossible and economically infeasible. One solution to this problem is finding a method for determining the network's important links, and retrofitting their structures. Based on this concept, an optimization problem of network performance improvement under these stochastic events is introduced. In this problem, a link importance index for network links is... 

There are several algorithms in the literature to solve the problem of finding an optimal path between two points in a region. Such path satisfies certain constraints while optimizing the objective function. There are many factors in building, or finding, such paths in the real world, whose considerations complicate the solution procedure. This led the researchers to seriously consider meta-heuristics to solve the problem. This study hybridizes several suitable and effective meta-heuristic algorithms to solve the routing problem on a given topography. In this hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm an Ant System finds a horizontal path between the two points under considerations on the topography. A... 

One important problem in all, particularly in developing countries, is shortage of funds to invest in infrastructure projects. One way to lessen this difficulty is to benefit from the private sector participation in this respect. Build-Operate-Own-Transfer (BOT) is a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP), in which the private sector invests and builds a (e.g. road) project, operates it for a specified period of time to collect the tolls to return the investment cost plus the specified attractive rate on it, and then transfer it to the public sector. This research, which is a continuation of previous endeavors in this area, formulates the problem, discusses the multiplicity of the solutions, and... 

This work is an attempt toward an integrated preliminary design of solid rocket (SR) propulsion system for impulsive orbital maneuvers. In this regard a comparative study is initially performed classifying current space propulsion systems and along the goals of this thesis, solid rocket system was selected for our integrated approach. Subsequently, two integration schemes were studied that differed in the primacy of the two design tasks. This study directed our focus to initially size and design an ideal rocket engine and refine it through integration with the maneuver design. Utilizing the ideal rocket concept and its governing equations, a SR was designed to provide the required total... 

Network design problem has been, and is, an important problem in transportation. Network design based on different objectives affects network's performance in different dimensions, so it is crucial to define a good objective for the network design problem that improves the network's performance in more than one aspect. The purpose of this study is to obtain the differences between the two network design problems, one based on resiliency, and the other based on consumer surplus.Network design problem based on consumer surplus minimizes the total travel time for the users in the network. Network design problem based on resiliency is defined as: (1) before the incident, (2) after the incident...