Sharif Digital Repository

Incorporating outsourcing in scheduling is addressed by several researchers recently. However, this scope is not investigated thoroughly, particularly in the job shop environment. In this paper, a new job shop scheduling problem is studied with the option of jobs outsourcing. The problem objective is to minimise a weighted sum of makespan and total outsourcing cost. With the aim of solving this problem optimally, two solution approaches of combinatorial optimisation problems, i.e. mathematical programming and constraint programming are examined. Furthermore, two problem relaxation approaches are developed to obtain strong lower bounds for some large scale problems for which the optimality is... 

Outsourcing as a useful strategy in the industry can be integrated into scheduling problems. Moreover, batch outsourcing is a practical assumption owing to the logistics issues for transferring the parts between the manufacturer and the subcontractors. However, this assumption is rarely addressed in the scheduling literature. In this paper, a novel single machine scheduling problem with the option of batch outsourcing is studied. The objective is to minimize the sum of the total completion time of the jobs and the total outsourcing cost. To solve the problem, first, two mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models, named MP1 and MP2, are developed, which respectively use a straightforward... 

Green and sustainability issues are being considered extensively in industry and in the literature. Most of the green-related effects in the manufacturing sector can be modeled by the costs associated with the production machines due to their resource consumption and/or pollutant emission, as a part of the operation cost. Accordingly, taking into account the machine processing costs alongside the other production criteria is one of the main approaches to consider green issues in the production management problems. In the same way, scheduling as one of the major operational problems in the factories can benefit this point of view to involve sustainability aspects. In this paper, the... 

Advanced accident tolerant cladding materials have brought up the potential to delay the deleterious consequences of loos of coolant accidents related to slowing down hydrogen formation from reaction of zirconium with steam in order to minimize the additional heat generation and improve fuel and cladding retention of fission products. The performance improvement offered by these advanced materials may expand the operating envelope of existing light water reactors. This paper examines the neutronic performance of the VVER-1000 light water reactor for the application of accident tolerant cladding in order to realize the endurance of severe accident conditions. This study includes a detailed... 

The airflow rate through a two-story building with a courtyard, with and without trees, was estimated and compared with that of a building without a courtyard. The building and the courtyard were of square shapes, each 10 m to the side. The courtyard walls were 3m high and two separate trees of spherical, cylindrical and conical shapes were considered in the yard. The courtyard was directly south of the building and a wind angle of zero degree was considered when the wind was blowing directly from the south. It was found that when the wind angles were between 0 to ±90 degrees, the airflow rate through the building was reduced when compared with the building without a courtyard. The presence... 

The passive cooling effects of a courtyard of a small building were determined numerically, employing an energy-analysis software developed for that purpose. The passive cooling features considered were the shading effects of courtyard walls and two large trees (of various shapes) planted immediately next to the south wall of the building, the presence of a pool, a lawn and flowers in the yard, and the wind shading effects of the walls and trees. It was found that these features alone cannot maintain thermal comfort during the hot summer hours in Tehran, but reduce the cooling energy requirements of the building to some extent. They have an adverse effect of increasing the heating energy... 

In practical scheduling problems, some factors such as depreciation cost, green costs like the amount of energy consumption or carbon emission, other resources consumption, raw material cost, etc., are not explicitly related to the machine processing times. Most of these factors can be generally considered as machine costs. Considering the machine cost as another objective alongside the other classical time-driven decision objectives can be an attractive work in scheduling problems. However, this subject has not been discussed thoroughly in the literature for the case the machines have fixed processing costs. This paper investigates a general unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem... 

The pipe-spool fabrication process is a critical operational section in the piping projects that usually used to accelerate and discipline the installation process, especially, when we have a particular deadline for the project. For this reason, the fast and optimal scheduling of the fabrication activities with considering the real conditions and using manual or traditional methods is a significant problem for the decision-makers. In this paper, we use a novel linear programming model to schedule the spool fabrication activities based on the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). Because FJSP is a challengeable NP-hard problem, we solve the proposed mathematical model with a heuristic... 

The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of bonding temperature and holding time on the metallurgical and mechanical properties for weld joints of 5 mm aluminum to copper using Sn interlayer. The bonding temperature varied from 500 to 600 °C whilst the holding time varied from 30 to 120 min under 8 MPa uniaxial load in 1 × 10−4 torr vacuum. The microstructure analysis, phase analysis and distribution of elements in the interface were performed by scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and element map analysis. It was found that diffusion welding parameters had a significant effect on shear strength. The attained data of tensile strength tests showed... 

In copper electrorefining process, some additives are added to the electrolyte to improve the morphology of cathode deposits as well as the quality of products. In the present investigation, the effects of thiourea, glue and chloride ions (as additives) on the passivation of industrial copper anodes under high current densities have been reported. Experiments were conducted at 65 °C; using a synthetic electrolyte containing 40 g/l Cu2+ and 160 g/l H2SO4. Results obtained from chronopotentiometry experiments showed that increasing the concentration of chloride ion leads to increase in passivation time. The results also indicated that from a certain level on, namely 2 ppm, the increase in... 

Many organizations today use a variety of security and monitoring tools at various levels of defense. These tools often generate heterogeneous alerts and logs when an attack occurs. Because of the large volume and dispersion of these alerts and logs, the manual cross-correlation of them is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. The main challenge is that heterogeneous alerts and logs generated as a result of an attack stage do not necessarily have common features, or there are no explicit relationships between them that can be used for cross-correlation. In this paper, we overcome this deficiency by presenting HAL-RD, a novel technique that uses resource dependencies to cross-correlate... 

Scattered radiations are one of the most important factors in the degradation of the image quality of mammography systems. Some techniques have been proposed for the reduction of such rays. Magnification mode can be done by increasing the air gap which determined by the distance of the breast and image intensifier. It is one of the useful techniques to elevate the produced image quality due to the rejection of scattered photons. Monte Carlo N-Particle eXtended transport code (MCNPX) version 2.7.0 is a software package for the simulation of physical processes. In this work, this computer code is used for analyzing the effects of magnification mode on mammographic image quality. To this...