Sharif Digital Repository

Although many mathematicians have searched on fractional calculus since many years ago, but its application in engineering, especially in modeling and control, does not have many antecedents. Because there are much freedom in choosing the order of differentiator and integrator in fractional calculus, it is possible to model the physical systems accurately. Also, there is the same reasoning in the control area. We can design such fractional controllers that have high performance. Among the fractional order controllers, the fractional order PID (FOPID) has been dealt with more than others and there are many methods to design it, such as Ziegler-Nichols, state space and method based on genetic... 

Train scheduling is one of the most complicated stages of railway planning. In this stage, the arrival and departure times of trains at stations are determined. In this thesis, we studied train scheduling on a two-way and single track railway in order to minimize the total travel times of trains subject to a set of operational constraints and prayer time related constraints that determines the optimal station for prayer. In this project, we tried to simulate the real constraints exist in IRAN railway network and the objective function considers customer’s and railway management’s satisfaction, simultaneously. First, a mathematical programming is proposed for this problem. After demonstrating... 

The present ph.D. thesis consists of three sections including the static calculation, neutron noise calculation and neutron noise source unfolding in VVER-1000 reactor core. The multi-group, two dimensional neutron diffusion equations and corresponding adjoint equations are solved in the static calculation. The spatial discretization of equations is based on Galerkin Finite Element Method (GFEM) using unstructured triangle elements generated by Gambit software. The static calculation is performed for both linear and quadratic approximations of shape function; baesd on which results are compared. Using power iteration method for the static calculation, the neutron and adjoint fluxes with the... 

Process of casting with evaporative patterns and unbonded sand is a new method that due to different economic, environmental and technological benefits is considered to large and small industrial parts manufacturing in recent years. Different parameters are effective on the surface and metallurgical quality in this process, such as foam density, sand type and size, level and mode of vibration, sand compaction, coating and pouring time and temperature. If coating permeability that is function of type, thickness and concentration of coating is chosen improper, pyrolysis vapor of foam don’t exit completely and in this condition carbon of vapor deposit on the metal surface and produces defect... 

Nurse scheduling problem has received a great amount of attention during recent years. In this problem number of needed nurses from different skill levels is given for each Location-shift during planning horizon, and the goal is to allocate each nurse to shifts, such that the demand of each location-shift is satisfied. Many researches have been done with the aim of minimizing the number of needed nurses to satisfy the demand of locationshifts or maximizing nurses preferences to work in desired shifts. In this research an integer programming model is proposed to minimize the number of needed nurses and maximize nurses preferences simultaneously. The proposed mathematical model is appropriate... 

In this research the risk of oil price for Iran and Opec basket is studied. Several methods in order to estimate Value at Risk (VaR) such as Standard Historical Simulation, Historical Simulation with Autoregressive Forecast, Historical Simulation with moving average forecast, and ARMA are examined. The experiment is performed based on daily oil prices, from January 2005 to December 2009. The data is divided into two smaller time periods. The first, from 2005 to 2008, was used to estimate the model coefficients. The second part of data, i.e., the data gathered in 2009, was used for forecasting purposes. The result of experiment show that Historical Simulation with Autoregressive Forecasts... 

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) appeared as popular communication networks supporting high speed and high throughput applications. They consist of mesh routers and mesh clients and they have unique characteristics like self organizing and self configuring of the mesh nodes that bring a great deal of efficiency, reliability and robustness to networks and decreases networks maintenance cost notably. Also WMNs provide an integration of different types of wireless networks by exploiting the gateway involvement. One of the important group communication technologies that offers high level of bandwidth conservation and efficiency is multicasting. It also decreases the cost of communication compared to... 

In this thesis, two-level optimal control of uncertain and non-uncertain large-scale systems is presented. In the proposed two-level approach, using a decomposition/coordination framework, the large-scale system is first decomposed into several interactive subsystems, at the first-level, where a smaller optimization problem is solved at each subsystem. At the second-level, a substitution type prediction method, as a coordination strategy, is used to predict the interaction between subsystems. The coordinator mainly evaluates the next update for the coordination parameters and continues to exchange information with the first-level, so that the overall optimum solution is obtained. It is shown... 

Regard to high temperature and using dry fuel in engines with CNG (Compressed Natural Gas), wear problems and instability of valve seat insert (VSI) in these types of engines have been increased. Today some of high alloy steel (consist of Cr,Ni,Co,W,Mo, . . .), Ni-base alloy or Co-base alloy are used in manufacturing VSI. It's clear these materials have high price. In powder metallurgy methods high percentage alloy is used for manufacturing VSI. These are the reasons why casting method for VSI manufacturing has been pleasant to be used.
In this project the cast iron has been used for CNG engine VSI, by adding some elements like Mo,V,W, and Nb. The graphite has been used as solid... 

The analysis of gamma-ray spectra of low resolution detectors is difficult and sometimes impossible, as a result of photo peak’s overlapping. The usual methods of radiation spectra analysis based on fitting of peaks to mathematical curves or detecting of peaks with numerical calculation, are valid for high resolution detectors. However these methods are less successful for lower resolution detectors such as the common scintillators. The wide peaks in the spectrum maybe overlap and make it difficult to analysis. To solve this problem, we test here a method, based on the use of the artificial neural network. At first spectra of elements are converted to the patterns which are suitable for the... 

Radiation detection techniques have important applications including prompt gamma neutron activation analysis (PGNAA), radiotherapy dose measurement, medical imaging and homeland security. Pulse height distribution is also a useful parameter in Radionuclide identification. Gamma ray spectroscopy analysis is a common technique in measuring of radiation field to identify the radioactive source.
Probabilistic methods are commonly used for numerical simulation of Pulse height distribution. In Monte Carlo methods, each history is individually tracked and details of interactions are available. Using the Monte Carlo methods for calculation of pulse height distribution leads to more real... 

Sequencing and scheduling of jobs are decision making processes that are used in many manufacturing and service industries. In the traditional scheduling models, it is assumed that the values for all the problem parameters are constant and known in advance. However, production environments in the real world are subject to many sources of uncertainty or randomness. This research investigates three different types of stochastic scheduling problems. In the first case, the problem is minimizing the number of tardy jobs in the class of static list policies, where the job processing times are random variables. For this case, the stochastic problems in single machine and flow shop environments are... 

One of the most applicable fields in data mining is customer relationship management (CRM). CRM process includes four aspects: Customer identification, Customer attraction, Customer retention, and Customer development. Data mining can be a supportive tool for decision making in each of these CRM aspects. Huge volume of data and information corresponding to CRM that exists in companies' databases, has made sufficient potential for data mining process and discovering hidden knowledge. Importance of concepts like customer needs identification, customer retention, and increasing customer value for companies has made the need to use of data mining techniques more valuable. Saipa Yadak Co., as a... 

Due to increasing competition, Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) take more attention in the new world. This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories. The first category, machine flexibility, covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part. The second category is called routing flexibility. Due to high variation in parts and low production volume, setup times are important. In this research, Flexible Jobshop Scheduling Problem with Sequence Dependent Setup Time (SDST-FJSP), as an extension of classical Jobshop scheduling problem (JSP), is... 

Neutron fluctuations in both low and high power reactors provide important information about the system. The origins of these fluctuations are different in both regimes. In low power the branching process is the reason of these fluctuations. But the random nature of technological processes such as boiling in the reactors cooling and mechanical structure vibrating such as control rod and fuel rod created the neutron noise. Mathematical descriptions and applications of neutron noise for each mode are different. In common mode, fluctuations in the neutron detection system, determine some parameters and determin the start abnormality in system. In this study the spatial dependence of the cross... 

Localization of a neutron point source using a designed computer program namely “MCMC-MATURE” is performed. The computer program analyses several detector responses in some certain media by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method and a new iteration algorithm. Identification of the possible regions of source position would be found by analyzing the initial fluxes generated by mesh tally of MCNPX computer code. The designed computer program is capable to generate the flux between detectors. “Regular-Sequential”, “Irregular-Sequential” and “Non-Sequential” are three methods used for sampling the generated random number in two dimensions. Each sample multiplied by a sampling function and lead to... 

The traditional point of view on the scheduling of the healthcare systems, which is in common with the scheduling of other service and manufacturing systems, has contributed to inattention to patients’ psychological status and has given rise to many negative effects not only on them, but also on hospitals. However, this perspective has not been modified yet with respect to the features of healthcare systems, in which patients, rather that machines, are the main entities of the system. In this study, to address this draw back, a new concept, psyche-based optimization, as well as a new scheduling problem, anxiety-based scheduling of operating rooms, as the advent of this concept, have been... 

In this research the effect of Si, Cu and Ni alloying elements on the structure and mechanical properties of the A336 alloy is investigated. Expriments were done in two situations, casting and heat treated and the results for all samples with different amount of alloying elements are compared and the effect of heat treating is also investigated. Results show that with increasing the amount of Si and Cu and decreasing the amount of Ni strength and hardness of the cast alloy are 134 MPa and 65 HB and they increase to 187 MPa and 89 HB in heat treated alloy. The elongation and coefficient of linear expansion are decreased from 2.3% and 21.94 μm/m.K to 1.1% and 21.62 μm/m.K. Also the T6 heat... 

Precise knowledge of the laws which govern a system is of interest for two reasons. First, it paves the way to understand the subtle behaviors of the system, which are not understandable from simpler models of the system. Second, it helps in the design of experimental requirements needed to observe these behaviors. The behavior of neutrons in a system, which could be a reactor or a detector, is stochastic from two perspectives. First of all, since the place of the atoms of a medium are randomly sited, at least from a neutrons point of view, the collision sites are random places, which contributes to the stochasticity of the transport phenomena. This type of randomness is somewhat similar to... 

In operating nuclear reactor core, fluctuations (deviations from normal operating conditions) are usually produced and propagated. These fluctuations can be due to control rod vibrations, inlet coolant temperature fluctuations, inlet coolant velocity fluctuations and so on. The induced neutron noise can be detected by in-core neutron detectors. Noise source identifications (such as the type, location and propagating velocity) as well as the calculation of the dynamical parameters (such as moderator temperature coefficient in PWRs and Decay Ratio in BWRs) are of the main applications of the neutron noise analysis in power reactors.
Investigating the propagation noise in PWRs (specifically...