Sharif Digital Repository

Feed-in tariff (FiT) is one of the most efficient ways that many governments throughout the world use to stimulate investment in renewable energies (REs) technology. For governments, financial management of the policy could be challenging as it needs a considerable amount of budget to support RE producers during the long remuneration period. In this paper, it has been illuminated that the early growth of REs capacity could be a temporary boost. And the socio-economic structure of the system will backlash the policy if some social mechanisms are not considered. Social tolerance for paying REs tax and potential investors’ trust emanated from budget-related mechanisms -which have rarely been... 

This study presents comprehensive studies on practical means to predict aerial-image motion blurs due to the flying vehicle dynamics, including flying altitude; cruising speed; and angular velocities and finally installed camera characteristics; such as, frame rate and image size. The resulting predictions of blur values are in-turn used to generate blurry images to be fed as input data for later use in a de-blurring-in-the-loop of a Mono-simultaneous localization and mapping system. The whole process is coordinated by means of an integrated aerial virtual environment. The integrated aerial virtual environment consists of a three-dimensional graphical engine which could communicate with a... 

Nerve repositioning surgery is one of the treatments chosen for the patients with edentulous posterior atrophic mandible. Like any other treatments, this therapy has its advantages and disadvantages, indications and contraindications. The most important complication of this procedure is neurosensory disturbance. This problem may occur at different stages of the treatment. One common time when nerve damage happens is when the nerve is located outside the canal and drilling and insertion of the implant are performed. Accordingly, this report describes a simple and feasible method to retract and protect nerves outside the canal during the treatment of nerve transposition. This will reduce the... 

Nerve repositioning surgery is one of the treatments chosen for the patients with edentulous posterior atrophic mandible. Like any other treatments, this therapy has its advantages and disadvantages, indications and contraindications. The most important complication of this procedure is neurosensory disturbance. This problem may occur at different stages of the treatment. One common time when nerve damage happens is when the nerve is located outside the canal and drilling and insertion of the implant are performed. Accordingly, this report describes a simple and feasible method to retract and protect nerves outside the canal during the treatment of nerve transposition. This will reduce the... 

This work presents a complete framework of an integrated aerial virtual environment (IAVE), which could effectively help implementing MonoSLAM (single-camera simultaneous localization and mapping) on an aerial vehicle. The developed system allows investigating different flight conditions without using any preloaded maps or predefined features. A 3D graphical engine integrated with a full 6 DOF aircraft dynamic simulator together with its trajectory generator completes the package. The 3D engine generates and accumulates real-time images of a general camera installed on the aerial vehicle. We effectively exploit C++ to develop the 3D graphics engine (3DGE) and all its associated visual... 

This work describes the essential tools and architecture of a simulation environment, which could help enhance general aviation training as well as safety issues, especially while dealing with flights over unfamiliar environments. It also describes how the authors could effectively generate any desired flight path and its associated surrounding images through implementing a virtual single camera with simultaneous localization and mapping (monocular simultaneous localization and mapping) techniques. The overall package enjoys an aerial three-dimensional (3D)/graphical engine integrated with a full six-degrees-of-freedom aircraft dynamics, which serves as its trajectory generator, together... 

Nicanfar and Leung proposed a multilayer consensus elliptic curve based password authenticated key-exchange (MCEPAK) protocol for smart grid. They claimed that their protocol is secure against possible attacks. In this paper, we show that the MCEPAK protocol is vulnerable to the dictionary attack and an adversary can obtain the passwords of the appliances by eavesdropping the communicated messages in the protocol. Moreover, we state that the passwords can be discovered by curious operators of the building area networks and the neighbor area networks. Theses weaknesses motivated us to introduce a chaotic maps based authenticated key exchange protocol for smart grid. To the best of our... 

Knowing the rate of evaporation from surface water resources such as channels and reservoirs is essential for precise management of the water balance. Few detailed evaporation studies exist for small lakes or reservoirs in arid regions of the world. In this study, monthly evaporation was determined by Bowen Ratio Energy Budget technique (BREB) for Alghadir reservoir (Saveh, Iran) from 1995-2007 and compared with class-A pan. Daily data were obtained from IMO (Iran Meteorological Organization) weather station, located near the reservoir, for all of these years. Some variations have been observed on the estimated evaporation of the energy budget at different years, ranging from 151 cm for 1997... 

In this article, we discuss the possibility of integrating image de-blurring techniques in an aerial simultaneous localization and mapping by a single camera (monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (Mono-SLAM)). We use an integrated aerial virtual environment together with a six-degree-of-freedom aircraft flight simulator to show the effectiveness of the approach to generate three-dimensional flight trajectories via integration of image de-blurring in the associated loop of the Mono-SLAM. The objective is to increase the overall performance of a flying mission over an unknown area by means of a vision-only method. The integrated aerial virtual environment produces and collects... 

In a proxy signature scheme, an original signer delegates his/her signing capability to a proxy signer and then the proxy signer can sign messages on behalf of the original signer. The security of many proxy signature schemes that have been proposed depends, either directly or indirectly, on either the difficulty of big integers factoring problem or the difficulty of finding discrete logarithm in a finite group. These types of schemes cannot resist quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose a new lattice-based proxy signature scheme which can resist quantum attacks. The proposed scheme is based on the GGH-signature scheme and also satisfies all the security requirements of proxy signature... 

In a (t, n) threshold proxy signature scheme, the original signer can delegate the signing power to n proxy signers such that any t or more out of n proxy signers can sign messages on behalf of the original signer, but t -1 or less of the proxy signers cannot generate a proxy signature. In this paper, we will improve the security of Xie's threshold proxy signature scheme against the new types of collusion attack was presented by Liu and Tan in 2007 We also present that our improved scheme is more efficient than Xie's scheme in terms of computational complexities  

In some applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), for privacy preserving and authentication of entities, it is necessary to use ultra-lightweight cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new ultra-lightweight authentication protocol between RFID components, in which only simple operations are used. In this protocol, the server has access to the data gathered by the tag in the same authentication phase through the reader interface, instead of sharing a secret key. The proposed protocol is secure against several attacks, such as replay attacks, denial of service, offline guessing attacks, modification attacks, full disclosure attacks and impersonation attacks, in addition to... 

Lightweight authentication protocols are crucial for privacy preserving in Internet of Things (IoT). Authentication protocols should be implementable for devices with constrained memory and computational power in this area, in addition to resistance against cryptographic threats. On the other hand, these protocols should not impose a heavy computational load on such devices. In this paper we proposed an authentication protocol that properly meets these features. Our protocol is suitable for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this protocol, authentication is fulfilled with low communication and computational loads between sensors and users through the gateway interface using a hash function... 

Strong designated verifier signature scheme is a concept in which a user (signer) can issue a digital signature for a special receiver; i.e. signature is produced in such way that only intended verifier can check the validity of produced signature. Of course, this type of signature scheme should be such that no third party is able to validate the signature. In other words, the related designated verifier cannot assign the issued signature to another third party. This article proposes a new ID-based strong designated verifier signature scheme which has provable security in the ROM (Random Oracle Model) and BDH assumption. The proposed scheme satisfies the all security requirements of an... 

Motorcycles are the third most common means of transportation in the megacity of Tehran. Hence, measurements of emission factors are essential for Tehran motorcycle fleets. In this study, 60 carburetor motorcycles of various mileages and engine displacement volumes were tested in a chassis dynamometer laboratory according to cold start Euro-3 emissions certification test procedures. For almost all of the tested samples, the average carbon monoxide (CO) emission factors were about seven times higher than the limits for Euro-3 certification. No motorcycle fell within the Euro-3 certification limit on CO emissions. 125 cc engine displacement volume motorcycles, which are dominant in Tehran,... 

Passenger cars (PCs) not only are a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Iran but also pose severe energy security challenges due to their dependence on gasoline. This study aimed to understand the future trends of the gasoline demand and GHG emissions from PCs in Iran and assess the effectiveness of mitigation policies. The data were collected from multiple sources and used to develop the survival rate function of PCs. The study used back-calculation to compensate for the short period of stock data availability. The use intensity of PCs was estimated based on the gasoline consumption statistics. Econometric models were developed to project the future PC stock and use... 

Passenger cars (PCs) are a major contributor to urban air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy security challenges in megacities in developing countries because of their high growth potential. Since the PC fleet changes through time, the projection of air pollutant emissions from PCs is essential for effective emission reduction policymaking. However, the extensive amount of data and proper models are required for this purpose that are not available in many developing countries. Hence, this study develops multiple econometric and emission models and integrate them into a framework to simulate the future stock and activity of PCs and projects PCs’ air pollutants and CO2 emissions... 

As an essential step of product design, tolerance design plays a critical role in reducing manufacturing costs while ensuring mechanical assemblies’ quality and reliability. However, existing tolerance allocation approaches only are concentrated on design specification constraints during the design stage, although component degradation caused by environmental and operating conditions increases the probability of product failure during the service life. To deal with the degradation effect arising over the service life of mechanical assemblies, this paper proposes a reliability-based tolerance design approach to allocate optimal, reliable tolerances to mechanical systems. The proposed approach...