Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

In this study, the effect of temperature on the microstructure and electrochemical properties of the NMC batteries has been studied. An extensive set of accelerated aging tests has been carried out employing a Li-ion high energy 18650 system (2.2 Ah, negative electrode: carbon, positive electrode: Li(Ni0.5Mn0.3Co0.2) O2. Different influence factors on cycle aging, such as temperature and discharge rate have been investigated. The aged 18650 cells have been inspected via scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX), impedance spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) after disassembly to find more information about the chemical reasons of the degradation and... 

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 this work, a numerical investigation on shell side performance of a continuous helical baffle helixchanger along with smooth and helically ribbed tubes using CFD commercial code, Fluent, has been performed. The results of simulation for this type of exchanger were compared to a similar heat exchanger with segmental baffles. The geometries are created and meshed using Solidworks and Ansys Meshing softwares, respectively. Mesh generation is carried out using unstructured tetrahedral type elements. Element size (or number of elements) are chosen in such a manner that maintain accuracy and reliability of results in a reasonable run time. Simulation validation were carried out by comparison of... 

Coreference resolution is an essential step toward understanding discourses, and it is needed by many NLP tasks such as summarization, machine translation, question answering, etc. Pronoun resolution is a major and challenging subpart of coreference resolution, in which only the resolution of pronouns is considered. The existing coreference resolution approaches can be classified into two broad categories: linguistic and machine learning approaches. Linguistic approaches need a lot of linguistic information for the resolution process. Acquisition of such information is an error- prone and time-consuming process. In contrast, learning approaches need less linguistic information and provide... 

In network science, link prediction is one of the essential tasks that has been neglected. One important application of link prediction in telecommunication networks is analyzing the user's consumption pattern to provide better service. This project aims to predict future links with applications to call data using the users' call history. In previous research, there are two main approaches: 1) heuristic-based approach, and 2) deep-learning-based approach, such as graph neural networks. These methods are mainly used for processing static graphs, and therefore, we cannot generalize them to dynamic graphs. But there are many graphs which are dynamic in nature. For instance, call data records... 

In the upcoming research, with the aim of bone tissue engineering and achieving a new structure, a scaffold based on polyhema (PHEMA) and gelatin (Gel), which are biocompatible polymers for bone tissue, was made and evaluated. Also, in order to improve the bioactivity and mechanical properties, bioactive glass alone (BG45S5) or together with strontium (BG-Sr) was used in the scaffold structure. and chemical by conducting FTIR, XRD, SEM, mechanical strength, bioactivity measurement, contact angle, water absorption and degradation tests. Biological investigations were done using mesenchymal stem cells derived from human bone marrow and with the help of MTT evaluations and SEM photography. The... 

Gas transmission networks play an important role in multi-vector energy networks. Therefore, reliable and efficient control of gas transmission networks with the minimum energy consumption is utmost task and is still an active research area. This work, introduces a distributed, model-free, and game-theoretic approach comprising a simultaneous game followed by a sequential game, to achieve the control objectives in gas transmission networks. The cooperative game approach is adopted for this purpose. In the proposed method two fuzzy inference systems have been used to obtain the payoff of each player in the game of gas transmission network control, the first one has been used to determine the... 

Although Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL) has recently received attention as a tool for language learning, its role in pragmatic development has gone unnoticed. Hence, this study sought to explore the effect of RALL on pragmatic learning of greeting, thanking, and request speech acts by young Persian-speaking EFL learners. To this end, 38 preschool female and male kids (3-6 years old) were assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups. The humanoid robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag and pass the ball games. The instructional... 

Tapering the beam along its length may lead to an increase in the voltage density of piezoelectric energy harvester. In this study, the energy harvester voltage with linear variable cross section is studied by developing an analytical method in both linear and nonlinear states. In linear mode, the results are compared with the experimental results. For the development of linear and nonlinear analytic relations, the Euler–Bernoulli beam and linear voltage variations in the thickness direction are used, and for the separation of variables, the mass normalized mode shapes has been used. The results of the linear analytical method are compared with the results of past research and experimental... 

In this research, Synthesis, characterization and photoelectrochemical application of two dimensional MoS2 and WS2 nanosheets have been carefully investigated. And finally, based on theoritical and experimental analysis results, the mechanisms of the observed photoelectrochemical (PEC) activities were suggested.The ab initio density functional calculations about Mo1-xWxS2 monolayer deposited over a TiO2 (110) substrate revealed a shift in band position of the Mo1-xWxS2 in favor of photoelectrochemical water splitting. Moreover, increase of W concentration in Mo1-xWxS2 could improve the charge separation and increase the effective mass ratio leading to an extension of the electron–hole...