Sharif Digital Repository

Due¬ to the volatile nature of material prices, projecting highway construction costs are proven to be very difficult, leading to many challenges in cost estimation process. Bid preparations as well as project planning and control processes are also negatively affected by the concerns about the inaccuracy of cost projections. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests the use of inaccurate cost estimate can result in bid loss or profit loss for contractors and hidden price contingencies, delayed or cancelled projects, inconsistency in budgets and unsteady flow of projects for owner organizations. Analysis of historical data indicates that a relationship between construction materials... 

Residual stresses are one of the influencing factors on fatigue life. These stresses may cause cracking and failure of the element even in the absence of any applied stress or any external load. For this reason they are very important, and their measurement is crucial. The methods for measuring the residual stress in spite of their name often measure the strain and by analyzing the measured strain, determine the residue stress of the element. The important problem about residual stresses is that their values in the element often remain unknown and usually no simple and non destructive method for measuring is available. Usually finite element analyzing is used for modeling the production... 

Earthquakes can cause significant economic damage to society. These damages include direct economic damage, ie, the cost incurred by the community to rebuild damaged infrastructure. In addition, damaging the infrastructure, the earthquake reduces the level of infrastructure service, and thus, disrupts the businesses that rely on it. The consequences of such disruptions, such as a decline in the level of productivity and efficiency of firms, or an increase in the rate of unemployment and migration from the community, can cause indirect economic damage to society. The costs incurred to society by disasters can be reduced by adopting appropriate solutions. In many cases, however, the incentives... 

Today, by emerging wearable technologies and digital health, it is possible to constantly monitor vital signals of people without time-consuming and costly referrals to medical centers. Applications of wearable sensors for health monitoring include electrocardiograms (ECG), blood pressure measurement, and blood sugar measurement, etc. One of the important fields of health monitoring is cardiac arrhythmia detection. Cardiac arrhythmia is any kind of anomalies in heart beat rhythm that can lead to serious damage to vital organs of the body. It is estimated that between 750 thousand to 1.5 million people are facing cardiac arrhythmia in Iran. Therefore, early detection of cardiac arrhythmia is... 

Since the awareness of project costs is a prerequisite for resource allocation and budget planning in construction projects, it is crucial to forecast project costs. In addition, as a part of the decision-making process, managers use predicted construction costs to assess and reduce project time risks. This study aims to estimate and predict residential building construction costs using hybrid machine learning models. In this research, to estimate the construction costs, in addition to considering the general characteristics of buildings, economic parameters are also considered. These physical and economic features are determined using experts' opinions and the results of previous studies.... 

The paper presents the results nonlinear analysis of steel base plates subjected to different combinations of axial and bending forces. The bending forces range from small moments representing small eccentricities to large moments from seismic actions. The results of analyses proved to be in good agreement with experiments. The parameters investigated in this study are as follows: distribution of strain and stresses in the concrete foundation and the steel plate, the strains and stresses in the tensile anchorage bolts, the location of neutral curve under the base plate, the centre of compressional reaction forces in concrete, the flextural rigidity of the base plate connection, and the axial... 

Occurrence of natural disasters such as earthquake could seriously damage most buildings especially those with insufficient resistance located in urban worn-out textures. In order to reduce unpleasant consequences of an earthquake, appropriate policies need to be considered to persuade the beneficiaries to follow retrofitting standards in the process of planning, designing, and construction of buildings. These policies shall be implemented through institutions in arbitrary or obligatory forms, by encouragement or penalty mechanisms. In order to consider these policies, first of all we need to identify the beneficiaries and their particulars. By studying and considering subjects discussed in... 

This study proposes a probabilistic framework to quantify the seismic resilience of urban natural gas distribution networks. Infrastructure resilience is defined as the ability to maintain performance after a hazard or, in case of a loss of performance, return to the minimum desired level in the optimal time. The framework presented in this research is comprised of multiple interconnected probabilistic models. These models work in harmony to characterize the impact of the earthquake on various infrastructures such as the buildings and urban gas distribution network components, as well as the probable consequences of the earthquake. The post-earthquake recovery of the gas distribution network... 

Optimal use of available resources for construction projects depends on proper decision-making on how to spend resources. Optimization of resource consumption should be done taking into account project revenue. In this regard, investors need a suitable mechanism to predict the selling price of the construction project and the resulting profit. Therefore, investors and stakeholders need a suitable model with the help of which they can make decisions such as choosing materials to guarantee the desired profit from the sale. This research will provide a framework for constructing models for estimating the price of residential units by considering some features of the building and some economic... 

Estimation of indirect economic losses due to natural disasters, especially earthquakes, is one of the essential issues in disaster management. This study presents a framework that uses an economic model of the community under study and calculates the indirect economic losses caused by an earthquake. To this end, first, the earthquake-induced direct economic losses are quantified using appropriate risk analysis models. The direct losses are used to characterize the consequent shock to labor and capital. These shocks are then used as inputs to the regional economic model. In the proposed framework, a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model uses various data about the state of the community... 

Natural disasters can damage the infrastructure of society. Damages to the infrastructure components of society can disrupt their service delivery. Disruption in providing services to society's infrastructure can disrupt social and economic activities and impose various significant costs on society. The cost of repairing the damaged infrastructure and reducing the income of households are among the economic damages of accidents. The decline in the quality of life, as well as the death and injury of people due to the breakdown of the infrastructure or the disruption in their services, are among the social damages caused by accidents. In the same way, natural disasters are considered a... 

Due to the vulnerability of urban fabric and residential buildings to earthquakes and considering its destructive social and economic effects on society, the need to adopt appropriate policies to prevent and reduce vulnerability, has been increasingly considered by policy makers. Despite the laws, regulations, incentives and penalties that policymakers have envisioned to prevent unprincipled and unsafe construction, evidence shows that a significant number of new buildings being built in the country are not earthquake resistant and there are many violations in design, implementation and supervision that is done by the stakeholders. To solve this problem, research has been done on the... 

In the aftermath of earthquakes, hospitals serve the critical role of treating casualties and reducing mortalities and severe injuries. A hospital must be resilient to play its role correctly after the earthquake. A resilient hospital is able to maintain its functionality at an acceptable level and provide service to the injured. In order to enhance the resilience of a hospital, an appropriate framework is needed to evaluate the hospital resilience and determines the impact of modification actions. This framework should characterize the serviceability of a hospital in terms of an appropriate metric. In this framework, the behavior of a given hospital building in the event of an earthquake as... 

This study provides a probabilistic framework for assessing and quantifying flood damage to infrastructure. This framework models the state of the community's infrastructure after the occurrence of possible floods in five steps. The first step is to model the hazard using a set of models that determine the characteristics of potential floods. The second step is to model and estimate the damage to community buildings and infrastructure. In the third step, infrastructure serviceability is modeled. The infrastructures that are modeled in this study are water distribution network, power network, transportation networks and industrial facilities for processing agricultural products. In the fourth... 

This study aims to investigate the cost and time uncertainty of the seismic repair process of structural elements in earthquake damaged buildings in Iran. In order to identify the most important type of structural system in the country, using the method of analytic hierarchy process (AHP), 39 activists in the field of construction were interviewed. Based on the results, in buildings with reinforced concrete materials, concrete moment frames and in buildings with steel materials, steel moment frames and braced steel braced frames are the most important structural systems. By selecting the structural component of lateral load-bearing in each of the mentioned structural systems and considering...