Sharif Digital Repository

Recent researches have shown the importance of improving the supply chain competitiveness by means of strategic alliances. This study considers the retailer-supplier partnership through a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) system and develops an analytical model to explore the effect of important supply chain parameters on the cost savings realized from collaborative initiatives. This model is developed for a two-level supply chain consisting of a single supplier and a single retailer and examines the inventory management practices before and after implementation of VMI. The results of analytical examination show that VMI implementation in economic order quantity model when shortage is... 

In this study, a multi-item economic order quantity model with shortage under vendor managed inventory policy in a single vendor single buyer supply chain is developed. This model explicitly includes warehouse capacity and delivery constraints, bounds order quantity, and limits the number of pallets. Not only the demands are considered imprecise, but also resources such as available storage and total order quantity of all items can be vaguely defined in different ways. An ant colony optimization is employed to find a near-optimum solution of the fuzzy nonlinear integer-programming problem with the objective of minimizing the total cost of the supply chain. Since no benchmark is available in... 

The purpose of this paper is to develop a multi-item economic order quantity (EOQ) model with shortage for a single-buyer single-supplier supply chain under green vendor managed inventory (VMI) policy. This model explicitly includes the VMI contractual agreement between the vendor and the buyer such as warehouse capacity and delivery constraints, bounds for each order, and limits on the number of pallets. To create a kind of green supply chain, tax cost of green house gas (GHG) emissions and limitation on total emissions of all items are considered in the model. A hybrid genetic and imperialist competitive algorithm (HGA) is employed to find a near-optimum solution of a nonlinear... 

Adsorption of human serum proteins (Albumin and total protein) onto high purity synthesis nano-hydroxyapatite (HA), Ca 10(PO 4) 6(OH) 2, has been studied in a wide temperature range by UV-visible spectrophotometer. Adsorption isotherm is basically important to describe how solutes interact with adsorbent, andiscriticalinoptimizing the use of adsorbent. Inthe present study, the experimental results werefitted tothe Langmuir, Freundlich, Temkin and Dubinin-Radushkevich (DR) models to obtain the characteristic parameters of each model and square of the correlation coefficients (R 2). According to the results, the DR isotherm model had the best agreement with the experimental data. The effect of... 

The effect of the corona wind on the natural convection at a rectangular channel was investigated experimentally. The results indicate that the natural convection in the absence of electric/corona wind at obtuse angles outperforms than acute angles and keeps improving by increasing the angle. However, the efficiency of the electric/corona wind at acute angles is higher than obtuse angles. Generally, in the presence of electric/corona wind, heat transfer coefficient was increased. The effect of the electric/corona wind was decreased by raising heat flux. This mainly stems from the fact that the temperature gradient raises the thermal boundary layer and reduces the secondary flow power.... 

Pharmaceutical waste has attracted significant attention in the past two decades due to the current high consumption of pharmaceuticals together with the development of reliable detection technologies. In order to acquire better understanding on pharmaceuticals removal in biological processes, the treatment of synthetic wastewater containing diclofenac (DFN) and ibuprofen (IBU), two of the most commonly prescribed medicines worldwide, was studied using a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR). An 8.5-L aerobic MBBR with Kaldnes packing filling ratio of 40% was designed. The controlled parameters were pH within neutral range, temperature of 37 °C, mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) of 2100 mg/L,... 

This paper presents a recursive approach for solving kinematic and dynamic problems in snake-like robots using Kane's equations. An n-link model with n-nonholonomic constraints is used as the snake robot model in our analysis. The proposed algorithm which is used to derive kinematic and dynamic equations recursively, enhances the computational efficiency of our analysis. Using this method we can determine the number of additions and multiplications as a function of n. The proposed method is compared with the Lagrange and Newton-Euler's method in three different aspects: Number of operations, CPU time and error in the computational procedures. © 2006 Cambridge University Press  

This paper presents a recursive approach for solving kinematic and dynamic problem in snake-like robots using Kane's equations. An n-link model with n-nonholonomic constraints is used as the snake robot model in our analysis. The proposed algorithm which is used to derive kinematic and dynamic equations recursively enhances the computational efficiency of our analysis. Using this method we can determine the number of additions and multiplications as a function of n. The proposed method is compared with the Lagrange and Newton-Euler's method in three different aspects: Number of operations, CPU time and error in the computational procedures. Copyright © 2005 by ASME  

In this research, an economic order quantity (EOQ) model is first developed for a two-level supply chain system consisting of several products, one supplier and one-retailer, in which shortages are backordered, the supplier's warehouse has limited capacity and there is an upper bound on the number of orders. In this system, the supplier utilizes the retailer's information in decision making on the replenishments and supplies orders to the retailer according to the well known (R, Q) policy. Since the model of the problem is of a non-linear integer-programming type, a genetic algorithm is then proposed to find the order quantities and the maximum backorder levels such that the total inventory... 

Growth of thin layers of compound semiconductors such as GaAs and Al x Ga1-x As was obtained by Liquid Phase Epitaxy (LPE) at 838-828 ° C in thickness range of 0.1-4.3 μm which was estimated by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). By Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy (SIMS) measurements, type of impurity atoms and their density and uniformity with respect to thickness were measured. In this way we are sure that variation of impurity atoms such as Si, Te, Sn and Ge indicates that epilayers were formed uniformly and it demonstrated that the LPE growth was a suitable way to obtain a good quality of epitaxy layers. Amount of composition parameter x in the compound semiconductor AlxGa1-xAs was... 

High order harmonic generation is investigated for N2 and CO molecules under ten-cycle sin-squared laser pulse at 800 nm wavelength and I = 2 × 1014 W cm−2 intensity. In order to study effects of the asymptotic behavior of the exchange-correlation (XC) potentials, the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations are numerically solved in the non-linear non-perturbative regime with four different XC potentials. Time-dependent electron localization function is used to get imaging on the temporal dependence of the electron density. Time-profile analysis was also utilized for studying long and short electron trajectories. It is found that the ionization energy values both molecules calculated by using... 

In the present work, an efficient method is theoretically investigated for extending high-order harmonics and ultrashort attosecond pulse generation in N2 and CO molecules by using the time-dependent density functional theory approach. Our results show that by utilizing chirped laser field in the presence of a low frequency field, not only is the harmonic cutoff extended remarkably but also the single short quantum trajectory is selected to contribute to the harmonic spectra. When a low frequency field is added to the two-color chirped laser field, the long quantum trajectories are suppressed and only the short quantum trajectories contribute to the higher harmonic emission mechanism. As a... 

We present a method for high-order harmonics generation of N2 and CO molecules under two-color circularly polarized counter-rotating laser pulses at frequencies of and 2. Pulse envelope in this investigation is sin-squared and the intensity of each laser beam is with ten-optical cycle (o.c.). We show that an isolated pulse with a pulse duration shorter than 20 attosecond from the superposition of several harmonics can be generated. Both two-color linearly- and bicircularly-polarized laser pulses are considered. Our results have also been compared with the outcomes of the previous theoretical works as well as experiment observations. It is found that for CO molecule, the... 

Multicamera vehicle tracking is a necessary part of any video-based intelligent transportation system for extracting different traffic parameters; such as link travel times and origin/destination counts. In many applications, it is needed to locate traffic cameras disjoint from each other to cover a wide area. This paper presents a method for tracking moving vehicles in such camera networks. The proposed method introduces a new method for handling inter-object occlusions; as the most challenging part of the single camera tracking phase. This approach is based on coding the silhouette of moving objects before and after occlusion and separating occluded vehicles by computing the longest common... 

This method introduces the structural error of regression deviation, which is an effective method for the path generation of a vast type of planar and spatial mechanism. The proposed method avoids point-by-point comparison and requirement of timing and reflects the difference between the two curves very effectively in the objective function. By decreasing the number of the design variables, this method would help considerably in decreasing CPU time. The objective function that is based on regression error would converge to a global minimum by a genetic algorithm. At the end, the effectiveness of the method is shown by two numerical examples. © Sharif University of Technology  

In this study, the effect of a compressive normal stress has been considered in the determination of forming limit diagrams and forming limit stress diagrams to predict neck initiation failure in tube hydroforming of T-shaped parts. Computation of the forming limit diagrams and FLSDs is based on the generalized Marciniak and Kuczynski method to consider the existence of through-thickness compressive normal stress. The proposed forming limit diagrams and FLSDs were used in conjunction with ABAQUS/EXPLICIT finite element simulations to predict the onset of necking in tube hydroforming of T-shaped part. The amount of calibration pressure and axial feeding required to produce an acceptable part... 

Vehicle tracking is an essential requirement of any vision based Intelligent Transportation System for extracting different traffic parameters, efficiently. Handling inter-object occlusion is the most challenging part of tracking as a process of finding and following interested objects in a sequence of video frames. In this paper we present a system, based on code-book background model for motion segmentation and Kalman filter for tracking with a new approach for occlusion. This approach separates occluded vehicles based on longest common substring of chain codes. We use this tracking system to estimate some traffic parameters. Experimental results show the efficiency of the method. ©2009...