Sharif Digital Repository

The competitiveness of a port convinced shipping lines and shippers with a significant basis in selecting a port. Port authorities and port operators can make use of the competitive advantage as a parameter for counter measures by grasping the advantages and disadvantages of the ports and be a prime factor of opportunities and threats of the ports. Ports have a significant role in today’s networked business environment. They are being regarded as hubs that are part of various logistic systems. The very essence of a seaport is to link maritime networks and land network. These networks for the port are means of analyzing its competitiveness. A port overall competitiveness is determined by it’s... 

Internet and the market based on this new product and service has penetrated in all aspects of today’s modern life of human being. After invention of this market each day a new innovation revolutionized this market and industry. High speed internet based on ADSL technology was one of these innovations. The high-speed internet service has achieved a remarkable increase in penetration in recent years. In order to survive in this competitive market, companies should continue to improve their service performance. The high level of service performance is believed to be an effective way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. In recent years, the high-speed internet service, based on the... 

Reviewing trends of energy consumption in the world reveals that sooner or later energy resources will be depleted. This concerning rate of consumption has brought about more greenhouse gases (GHG) emission influencing deleteriously on environment and climate. Human has continued energy consumption to maintain and improve the quality of his life through industrial production. Industry as a significant energy user owns considerable contribution to this consumption. Several attempts have been carried out to develop energy management systems in order to improve the energy efficiency of industrial sectors. Whilst they are comprehensive and could be applied to any sector, there is lack of... 

Neither state planning nor economic liberalization has been the answer for developing countries to escape from the middle-income trap, mainly due to presence of institutional voids and due to the governance of hindering institutions. Therefore, we need another explanation for how of the development, which must include how institutions change and how new institutions and new institutional fields emerge. Developing countries are full of institutional voids and the governance of hindering institutions. Therefore, the process of economic development in these countries, is beyond the power of market and state, and needs agency. Responding to the recent call by the literature for doing more... 

Knowledge flows across organizational boundaries shape a firm’s knowledge base. Knowledge structuration refers to the two structural dimensions of a firm's knowledge base: Breadth (knowledge across technology domains) and depth (knowledge within technology domains). Despite the conceptual difference between the terms “(technological) knowledge” and “technology”, the two are often used interchangeably in empirical research on technology management. Our paper adopts an innovative approach, taking advantage of Machine Learning and clinical studies conducted by biopharma companies, to offer an empirical way of distinguishing between knowledge and technology. Moreover, we restructure the... 

This Thesis aim to study the evolution of knowledge network in the path of innovation capability accumulation in knowledge-based firms, active in Iran's innovation system as a sanctioned economy. The research, by an in-depth case study and at the micro level, examines the accumulation of capabilities and the evolution of the knowledge networks for two knowledge-based firms active in the manufacture of linear accelerators and cargo-scanners as high-tech products. The results show that 1) the accumulation of capabilities from low levels to advance is based on product diversity and the knowledge inputs, which was first through "using, doing and interacting" has changed to "science, technology... 

Considering the role of artificial intelligence and the opening of the window of opportunity to use this technology and the possibility of catching-up it, in this research, the factors affecting the technological catching-up of artificial intelligence in countries have been studied. By using the components of the technology regime, the impact of each component on the technological convergence of artificial intelligence in leading and latecomer countries has been investigated, and the indicators of technological appropriability, Cumulativeness of technological innovation, originality, Technological cycle, Concentration and Diversity to understand the changes in the share of patents of... 

Today, global value chains(GVCs) have distributed the production of goods and services all over the world and have become the main part of global trade. GVCs provide developing countries with oppurtunities for engaging in economic activity and producing goods, without developing all the infrastructure needed for producing it yourself. but participating in GVCs also pose some challenges to developing countries. if developing countries do not enhance their ability for generating value-added, by losing the advantage of cheap labour over time, they will fall into the so-called "middle-income trap". therefore upgrading, with the broad definition of generating more value-added, should be targeted... 

The behavior of boundary layer under the effect of the sweep angle is considered. The measurements were performed by a pitot tube rake. Three models with various sweep angels at angles of attack -2, 0 and 2 degree were tested. Both tip and root of all wings were closed by flat plates in order to prevent the flow to roll-up. However the flow field on the wing was still three-dimensional because of the sweep angle. The velocity on the wing has two components; longitudinal and lateral. The cross flow emerges due to the non-equilibrium of pressure and centrifugal forces. The velocity profiles showed that the magnitude of cross flow was stronger near the leading edge of the wing. The cross flow... 

This research attempts to develop the optimal solution for an inventory problem consisting of a single machine which produces items some of which may be defective. We assume that no shortages are allowed and all defective items are to be reworked. Setup cost for rework and waiting time of defectives are considered. This research consists of two different parts. In the first part we consider two different policies where in the first policy in each cycle after the regular production the machine is setup for the rework of defectives of the same cycle. In the second policy several cycles constitute a period. All the defectives produced in the period are reworked in the last cycle of that period.... 

Energy harvesters are used in today’s Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to harvest the energy from the environment. One of the important advantages of the energy harvesting sensor networks over battery-operated sensor networks is that the use of the energy harvester prolongs the life time of the nodes, while a battery-operated node becomes useless once its energy runs out. Although an energy harvester can provide a supply source with a lifetime much greater than a battery, the amount of available energy for an energy harvesting system is a random variable and is not as predictable as the energy of a battery. This unpredictability may cause reliability problems. In order to solve the existing... 

Wireless Sensor Networks have become widespread because of their flexibility, applicability and ability to precept data with high accuracy. However, the most limiting factor in their usage is the amount of available energy in nodes since energy depletion in a node means that it is dead, therefore many efforts have been done for optimum energy management in Wireless Sensor Networks. In many cases, the key solution to prolong the network lifetime is load balancing. In this way, all the nodes will die (approximately) together and the lifetime of network will be maximized. Load balancing can be implemented in all layers from physical layer to application. It should be noted that it is not always... 

Concrete is the second most structural material in the world. So attention and promotion of the concrete mix design with respect to variable issues and requirements, is very important. On the other hand, these days environment and its pollution has become very popular discussion. Waste-glass which is produced by human products is one of the environmental pollutants. In this thesis it replaces some aggregate in concrete and it can reduce the level of this material in the world. Also we study effects of silica-fume as cement replacement and properties enhancer in our concrete mix design and see how it can ... 

In recent decades the use of FRP materials for strengthening structures has been developed extensively, thanks to their high strength, sufficient stiffness, high durablity, and ease of use. A great deal of research has been conducted on strengthening reinforced concrete beams and columns with FRP composites. By contrast, not many researches are performed on slabs, especially two-way slabs. In these few researches, the loading and boundary conditions are limited to simplest ones. Therefore, in this thesis, the focus of attention is on strengthening reinforced concrete slabs under various loads and boundary conditions using FRP composites.
In this thesis, first, FRP composites and their... 

Supplier selection is a strategic decision that has a key impact on the success of the supply chain. Due to the nature of goods and storage conditions in the cold supply chain has a great impact on environmental pollution compared to other chains, and it also has the possibility of disrupting the chain due to the importance of temperature and time conditions. Currently, due to the spread of international pressures on the observance of environmental and social principles, the issue of choosing a sustainable supplier has been raised. Also, the expansion of supply chains has caused the challenges and risks faced by supply chains to expand and disrupt the chain, so the decision of supply chain... 

Reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls with a curved cross-section are appealing structural elements to architects and engineers due to the aesthetic and structural advantages. Owing to the paucity of decent experimental research on curved RC shear walls (CRCSWs), the seismic response of these structural elements is essentially unknown. In that regard, this study includes research on a high-demanding type of structural element, which has found its application in North America, Europe, Asia, and to some extent in the Middle East with relatively no design specifications and laboratory research, structural analysis, and design methodology. Therefore, in order to provide an insight into the... 

In this research we focus on study and fabrication of ZnO composite nanofibers by electrospinning method for photocatalytic application. The most important challenges in the field of photocatalyst are photocatalytic activity under the visible light and efficiency enhancement. ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor and it is not active under the visible light. In Iran, we have more than 300 sunny days in a year. Therefore fabrication and application of photocatalytic material with activity under the sun light that contained 40% of visible light is so vital in our country. In the first part of this project, ZnO-CNT nanofibers were fabricated and carbon doped in the crystal lattice of the ZnO.... 

Decimal multiplication is a frequent operation with inherent complexity in implementation. Commercial and financial applications require their data to be precise while binary number system cannot ensure precision. Existing research works on parallel decimal multipliers have mainly focused on latency and area as two major factors to be improved. However, energy/power consumption is another prominent issue in today’s digital systems. Hence, in this thesis we present a comparative study of parallel decimal multipliers, considering energy/power consumption (leakage and dynamic power consumption), latency and area. Furthermore, we present two novel techniques to reduce energy/power consumption of... 

This thesis is concerned with a fundamental problem in computational geometry. This problem inspects covering a space with a set of points provided that each point of the space is visible to at least one point from the selected subset. Applications of these problems are in the areas such as geographic information systems (GIS), robotics,computer graphics and the military.The investigated space is a planar rectangular region which is partitioned into smaller rectangles by connected edges. The objective of this study is to find an optimized corridor; i.e., a connected subset of edges which contains at least one point from each rectangle. For the minimum diameter corridor problem, an exact...