Sharif Digital Repository

One of the main issues of industrialization and growth in population nowadays is pollution and particularly air pollution emitted by personal vehicles, which could have global effects threatening life on earth. The ever-growing increase in air pollution to the point of being on the verge of irreversibly endangering the planet, has incentivised the governments to invest into finding ways and solutions to control and then decrease the man-made pollution. One of the simplest and yet efficient ways to achieve this goal is by placing taxes on personal vehicles which has been one of the first studies in this field. In more advanced studies, this problem has been turned into a multi level and more... 

The purpose of this study is to solve the problem of allocating relief teams to reopen damaged roads and remove debris from damaged areas after the earthquake for large cities. In the deteriorated areas of large metropolises, severe earthquakes may damage links, which causes some nodes to separate from the network. In this research, by using an Ant System meta-heuristic algorithm, a joint problem of damaged link restoration and demolished zone debries removal problem for search and rescue of the trapped population in an earthquake is solved. Ant System parameters are calibrated, and sensitivity analyses are done for the number of relief teams, earthquake intensity. The results of 1000... 

This thesis extends a probabilistic framework for evaluating the seismic resilience of communities by modeling the transportation system. The framework that is being extended is under continuous development at the Center for Infrastructure Sustainability and Resilience Research (INSURER) at Sharif University of Technology quantifies community resilience by integrating hazard models, risk models, and recovery models within an agent-based simulation. In this framework, the transportation system is modeled by developing a library of probabilistic models to predict the occurrence and intensity of earthquake hazard, damage and capacity of network components, network travel demand, and economic,... 

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... 

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... 

Since the classical continuum theory fails to deal with the problems associated with defects, stress concentrators, and relevant deformation phenomena in solids, alternative approaches that can detect the atomistic nature of materials' fracture are required. The deficiency of the capture the size effect which yields delusively high values for some components of the stress field right on the edge of the stress concentrators, and its weakness in describing the complex interaction between small inhomogeneities, cracks and the like when they are only a few nanometers apart, are among some of the disadvantages of the classical approach. In recent years, however, atomistic methods are emerging to... 

Aluminum Bronzes have many applications in marine environments. These alloys suffer from both hot cracking and cold cracking. In order to overcome the hot cracking and cold cracking, Semisolid Stir Joining method and a proper thermal cycle was used respectively. Effects of temperature, stirring rate, and tool type were investigated in Semisolid Stir joining method. In this method, butt joint design was used in order to place specimens, and the specimens were heated up to specific temperatures (920, 925, 930°C). A stirrer (Cylindrical and Grooved tool) with three rotational speeds (800, 1200, 1600 RPM) was introduced into the stir weld seam. Welded specimens were cooled to the 900°C... 

The low female labor force participation rate in the Iranian labor market relative to the global average and even to countries that do not differ significantly from the socio-economic characteristics of our country is one of the important questions of the Iranian labor market. In this study, we seek to answer the question of whether the economic participation rate of married women will increase if the gender gaps in wages, job findings and job losses among women and men are eliminated in the Iranian labor market. To answer this question using household expenditure and income data and labor force data, we show that between the two categories of occupations, in terms of the share of women's... 

Shot peening is a cold-working process commonly used in industry to improve the fatigue performance, stress corrosion resistance and surface nano-crystallization of metallic parts. This process extends fatigue life via two mechanisms: Preventing the crack growth due to compressive residual stresses and, preventing the crack initiation because of increased material hardness. These mechanisms are the results of the bombardment of the component's surface with small spherical particles. In this research, an analytical model is developed for estimating the residual stress distribution induced by shot peening process. The modifications of the developed analytical model are related to... 

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) provide high performance, low power consumption, and hence are widely used in the I/O cache of enterprise storage systems and high performance servers. Although employing high performance SSDs in the I/O cache of storage systems significantly improves system performance, it comes with significant reliability threats for write operations upon power failures. In order to provide high level of reliability, storage architectures employ SSDs in I/O cache with RAID-1 configuration, however, such configuration only partially mitigates the reliability issues of the SSDs. In this thesis, we analyze the reliability of SSD-based I/O caches against power outage and high... 

Language model is one of the most important parsts of an automated speech recognition system whiche incorporates the knowledge of Natural Language to the system to improve its accuracy. Conventionally used language model in recognition systems is ngram which usually is extracted from a large corpus using related frequency method. ngram model approximates the probability of a word sequence by multiplying its ngram probabilities and thus does not take into account the long distance dependencies. So, syntactic language models could be of interest. In this research after probing different syntactic language models, a mehtod for re-estimating ngram model, introduced by Stolcke in 1994, was... 

A method of joining dissimilar metals in the semi solid state is presented. By this method bonding of Stainless steel and semisolid aluminum alloy took place in this research. By usage of thermomechanical treatment, dendritic microstructure of cast aluminum alloy changed to globular structure. The experimental process of bonding occurred at semisolid temperature stage of aluminum alloy in a predesigned mold by using a pressure equipment. The relationship between interfacial shear strength and solid fraction of aluminum alloy, bonding pressure and time of keeping pressure were studied by method of orthogonal experiment. By the usage of Taguchi method in designing experiments, plurality of... 

The human speech conveys much information such as semantic contents, emotion and even speaker identity. Our goal in this thesis is the task of text-independent speaker identification (SI) in large population applications. Identification (test) time has become one of the most important issues in recent real time systems. Identification time depends on the cost of likelihood computation between test features and registered speaker models. For real time application of SI, system must identify an unknown speaker quickly. Hence the conventional SI methods cannot be used. The main goal in this thesis is to propose several methods that reduced identification time without any loss of identification...