Sharif Digital Repository

The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) is the problem of locating each department in a long plant floor without any overlap between departments in order to minimize the material handling cost. The main purpose of this study is to show the effectiveness of a robust approach to solve FLP. In this study, it is assumed that the departments’ length and width are not predetermined. For modeling this kind of uncertainty, the size of each department is considered as a bounded variable and two new parameters are also introduced to implement a robust approach. Moreover, a new adaptive algorithm is designed to determine the robust layout with respect to the decision makers’ requirements. Furthermore, the... 

Facility layout problem (FLP) is one of the classical and important problems in real-world problems in the field of industrial engineering where efficiency and effectiveness are very important factors. To have an effective and practical layout, the deterministic assumptions of data should be changed. In this study, it is assumed that we have dynamic and uncertain values for departments’ dimensions. Accordingly, each dimension changes in a predetermined interval. Due to this assumption, two new parameters are introduced which are called length and width deviation coefficients. According to these parameters, a definition for layout in uncertain environment is presented and a mixed integer... 

Multi-floor facility layout problem concerns the arrangement of departments on the different floors. In this paper, a new mathematical model is proposed for multi-floor layout with unequal department area. Maximising the number of useful adjacencies among departments is considered as the objective function. The adjacencies are divided into two major categories: horizontal and vertical adjacencies. The horizontal adjacency may be occurred between the departments assigned to same floors while the vertical can be happened between departments assigned to any consecutive floors. A minimum common boundary length (surface area) between any two horizontal (vertical) adjacent departments is... 

In this manuscript a new phenomenon of adjacency and closeness rating is proposed for constructing the optimal facility layout design. In the proposed approach, the closeness rating is applied to every pair of neighboring departments in a range of their attached point up to a predefined distance between them. Also, while in the traditional approach the closeness rating is applied for determining either the proximity or farness of two departments, the proposed approach considers both the degree of closeness as the economical purposes, and farness as the safety purposes concurrently. A mathematical model is proposed for constructing the optimal layout design. For evaluating the efficiency and... 

The effect of temperature on the noncontact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) surface imaging is investigated with the aid of molecular dynamics (MD) analysis based on the Sutton-Chen (SC) interatomic potential. Particular attention is devoted to the tip and sample flexibility at different temperatures. When a gold coated probe is brought close to the Au (001) surface at high temperatures, the tip and surface atoms are pulled together and their distance becomes smaller. The tip and sample atoms displacement varies in the different environment temperatures and this leads to the different interaction forces. Along this line, to study the effect of temperature on the resulting images, we have... 

The emergence of synchronization among a set of individual oscillators that are coupled in a network is an amazing physical phenomenon that appears in many different systems, from natural sciences to even human behavior. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of many researchers in many fields of science and engineering by the science behind its unique collective behavior without some kind of external organization. One of the most popular models for the dynamical evolution of coupled phase oscillators is the Kuramoto model, which gives a simple yet powerful formalization together with a numerical measure called the degree of synchronization. The crucial role of structural properties of... 

One of the most popular constitutive rules that correlate the continuum and atomic properties in multi-scale models is the Cauchy–Born (CB) hypothesis. Based on this constitutive law of continuum media, it assumes that all atoms follow the deformation subjected to the boundary of crystal. In this paper, the validity and failure of CB hypothesis are investigated for the silicon nano-structure by comparison of the continuum and atomic properties. In the atomistic level, the stresses and position of atoms are calculated using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation based on the Tersoff inter-atomic potential. The stresses and strains are compared between the atomistic and continuous media to... 

Human running can be stabilized in a wide range of speeds by automatically adjusting muscular properties of leg and torso. It is known that fast locomotion dynamics can be approximated by a spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) system, in which leg is replaced by a single spring connecting body mass to ground. Taking advantage of the inherent stability of SLIP model, a hybrid control strategy is developed that guarantees a stable biped locomotion in sagittal plane. In the presented approach, nonlinear control methods are applied to synchronize the biped dynamics and the spring-mass dynamics. As the biped center of mass follows the mass of the mass-spring model, the whole biped performs a... 

Short ZnO nanorods and long ZnO nanowires have been produced on SiO2 and Si substrates by VLS and VS mechanisms via a double tube chemical vapor transport and condensation (CVTC) process. The role of reactants and droplet interfaces on the nucleation and growth of ZnO nanorods have been investigated. A conceptual model for nucleation of ZnO nanorods has been proposed by describing the half-oxidation and reduction reactions at the growth front. The importance of Zn vapor in the nucleation phenomena has been studied by changing starting materials. Atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and EDX analysis have been used to characterize ZnO nanorods and investigate the... 

This study focuses on developing an efficient material that integrates high adsorption performances of dye and antibiotics as well as effective oxidation activity of it. Herein, we report a facile method to synthesize polyresorcinol@CoFe2 O4 via a one-step hydrothermally route. The prepared composite possesses multifunctional performance for methylene blue (MB) and tetracycline (TC) removal with appropriate magnetic separation operation and significant removal ability with an adsorption capacity of 51.48 and 28.16 mg g–1, respectively. Meanwhile, the aforementioned composite exhibits a high oxidation activity toward MB and TC molecules where the adsorption capacity increases to 1,723 and 120... 

In this paper, a content-aware medical image transmission scheme is investigated over a multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel in wireless healthcare systems. The multi-antenna-aided access point, as a source node, wishes to wirelessly send medical images of a patient to a trusted destination node, while multiple randomly-located totally passive and non-colluding eavesdroppers (Eves) try to wiretap the transmission. Considering the fact that not all regions of an image have the same importancy level from the security view-point, we first segment the image into two parts: the region of interest (RoI), which more likely contains important diagnostic information regarding the medical image... 

In this work, we have examined the distributed consensus averaging problem from a novel point of view considering the need for privacy and anonymity. We have proposed a method for incorporating security into the scalable average consensus mechanisms proposed in the literature. Random Offsets Method (ROM) is lightweight, transparent and flexible since it is not based on cryptography, does not require any change in the fusion system and can be used optionally by some nodes who care about their privacy. In this method, which is based on noisiflcation of nodes' information, we achieve robustness against n - 1 colluding adversaries in a network of n nodes, which is maximum level of robustness... 

We study the sample complexity of learning a high-dimensional simplex from a set of points uniformly sampled from its interior. Learning of simplices is a long studied problem in computer science and has applications in computational biology and remote sensing, mostly under the name of “spectral unmixing.” We theoretically show that a sufficient sample complexity for reliable learning of a K-dimensional simplex up to a total-variation error of ε is O(Kε2 log Kε ), which yields a substantial improvement over existing bounds. Based on our new theoretical framework, we also propose a heuristic approach for the inference of simplices. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets... 

Ionic liquids, which are designable and nonvolatile, have become a hot topic in the field of CO2 separation from industrial gases. In order to utilize the nonvolatile and low heat capacity of ionic liquids, it is necessary to solve the problem of high viscosity of pure ionic liquids. In the present study, ether functionalized pyridinium ion [E1Py]+ with good biodegradability and low viscosity was selected as cation. Ions containing cyano groups were used as anions, such as thiocyanate ion [SCN]-, dicyanamide ion [N(CN)2]-, tricyanomethanide ion [C(CN)3]-. Three ionic liquids with low viscosity were synthesized and characterized by 1HNMR, 13CNMR and FTIR. The physiochemical properties of...