Sharif Digital Repository

Design hybrid systems to supply electrical energy for off grid domestic consumer in the remote villages in Iran are the main objective of this work. The hybrid systems considered in this study consist of photovoltaic array, wind turbine, battery and diesel generator. Measured wind speed data used for wind turbine energy production model. The hybrid system optimized to supply 6, 14, 20, 40 and 60 families in Bojnoord, Moorchehkhoort, Kish, Langrood, Khash and Meshkinshahr. The main purpose of optimization is to find the economic system, able to fulfill the energy requirements of a given load distribution; so Iran’s current economy and cost, considered. The optimized results for studied cities... 

The behavior of pile foundations under earthquake loading is an important issue that affects the performance of structures. Design procedures have been developed for evaluating pile behavior under earthquake loading; however, the application of these procedures to cases involving liquefiable ground is uncertain. The performance of piles in liquefied soil layers is much more complex than that of non-liquefying soil layers because not only the superstructure and the surrounding soil exert different dynamic loads on pile, but also the stiffness and shear strength of surrounding soil diminishes over time due to both non-linear behavior of soil and pore water pressure generation. In this... 

Industrial wastewater treatment has always been one of the significant human being problems for the years. In particular, sewage containing heavy metals that, if discharged into nature, would have irreversible effects on the ecosystem and human health. Due to their toxic nature, heavy metals will reduce the efficiency of wastewater treatment systems if they are not efficiently treated. Also, the removal of Nitrate from the wastewater, which is one of the most stable nitrogen oxides, has always been a serious human problem in the treatment of effluents due to their high solubility in water. The simultaneous presence of nitrate and heavy metals in the effluent will cause many problems in the... 

Determining a promotion planning is a critical decision for retail managers. This plan should decide on the amount and duration of promotions for each product in a way that maximizes profit compared to a non-promotion scenario. In this study, the promotion optimization problem in a retail environment is formulated as a non-linear integer programming problem. The objective function is to maximize profit from product sales during the sales period. The problem also includes several business-related constraints that limit the number of promotions. In this study, a reinforcement learning approach, specifically Deep Q-Network, has been used to solve the mathematical model. The implementation... 

Pricing and revenue management are among the most important decisions for any economic enterprise. Several factors can influence decisions in this area and change the company’s pricing strategy, including uncertainties in product demand and customer preferences. This factor becomes particularly significant when the product is newly launched. Therefore, over time, customer preferences and willingness to pay may increase through various advertisements such as customer reviews and word-of-mouth. With rising demand, the seller has the opportunity to raise prices in the next periods. However, price increases can lead to unfair pricing perceptions by customers, hence reducing their purchasing... 

One of the important factors that are effective in the continuation of businesses is their profitability. Pricing, as an important component of the business process, greatly impacts profitability. Therefore, by using a suitable pricing method, retailers and service providers can increase their profits and avoid issues such as inventory congestion, imposed discounts, or lost sales opportunities. In this research, the two-tariff pricing system in internet services is investigated and determined by taking into account the randomness of customer consumption. The problem includes a set of Internet sales plans, each plan has a fixed price for a certain amount of data and a variable price for... 

Designing and evaluating the segmented production structures of the production system due to the variety of production systems is one of the important issues that have been considered in recent decade. In this research, the paradigm of designing a segmented production system has been studied to increase the adaptation of the organizational structure of production systems to changing and diverse behavior of the market as well as to increase the responsiveness to demand in the organization. The segmented production system provides production units to small, flexible and decentralized production units. The segmentation process used in this research uses an axiomatic design structure. The... 

The growing demand for scalable and cost-effective computing resources has led to the widespread adoption of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model in cloud computing. One of the pricing models for resources, or virtual machines, in this service is the Spot model, which allows customers to access unused cloud server capacity at significantly lower costs compared to other models. However, despite their affordability, these virtual machines do not come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and may experience interruptions during use. Such interruptions increase the time required for customers to complete their tasks. In this study, we utilize discrete-event system simulations to examine... 

Pricing plays an important and essential role in the profit and income of companies. The importance of pricing is not only related to its role in the company's profitability, but it also changes the customer's understanding and loyalty towards the company and can create the company's reputation or destroy it. Determining the right price will increase product sales and increase customer loyalty and create a competitive advantage for the company. One of the most important and influential variables in product pricing is the amount of demand. The main challenge of companies for product pricing is the uncertainty in their demand. In order to deal with this problem, data-driven pricing is used.... 

In recent years, requirement engineering and goal modeling have gained more attention among different organisations. Therefore, different methods have been designed to discover stakeholders’ requirements and translate them into process and organizational goals. Various goal models have been introduced to represent these goals and their relations towards each other. Still, these methods are manual representations of different process scenarios and do not relate to the actual behavior. In 2014, Map Miner Method (MMM) was introduced to discover intentional process models from event logs. MMM uses Hidden Markov Model (HMM) as a means to represent the process as a map model of strategies and... 

Cyclones are efficient devices in order to separate suspended particles and droplets from gas media and this effieciency is mainely because of spiral flow nature affecting the particles and droplets and taking them towards the wall. Therefore, particles and droplets move downwards toward down outlet by the gravity force. In consequence, they are being separated of the gas flow and relatively pure gas flow exits the cyclone. In this project, GAMBIT software has been used to produce three dimensional meshes including coarse, medium and fine sizes for two different geometries of cyclone. After simulation, little differences between the obtained results were revealed, showing that modeling is... 

The design and control of collective robots for different purposes has been one of the most interesting subjects in recent years. Interacting particles (both in engineering and nature) can not only be self-organized, but also show a myriad of amazing features. A lot of different types of collective motion can be seen in nature (like fishes, birds, bacteria, insects, to name but a few) which interacting with each other to form complicated patterns with ingenious purpose like foraging, predator escaping and so forth. Understanding these natural phenomena (like vortex formation) can be helpful in designing artificial systems, the usage of which are underwater or space vehicles performing a... 

Recommending routes to city taxis in order to improve their performance in finding passengers can reduce traffic, pollution and waiting time for passengers, as well as this, increasing the efficiency of taxis can increase their income. In this study, by analyzing trajectory data obtained from 536 taxis in San Francisco over a period of one month, we generated networks of cells, each of which has time-dependent characteristics such as the probability of finding a passenger, the capacity of each cell, or the amount of demand exists is in the cell and the average speed of passing through that cell. also, the connections between these cells in order to make more use of the experiences of taxi...