Sharif Digital Repository

This research deals with pricing private automobiles entering a congested area in urban CBD to reduce auto-related air pollution. There are two factors affecting the pollution level: car volumes, and the weather condition. A Markov decision process is employed to find the optimal tolls and determine the prices for different states of the system, under several weather conditions. The demand for travel is elastic. It is assumed that users change modes in the short run. In longer terms, the part of the demand with shopping, recreation, or similar flexible trip purposes change the respective demand levels according to the price level. The study attempts to estimate elastic demand functions for... 

Residential location choice is one of the most important decisions that households should make. This decision has many effects on household's travel patterns and urban built environment. Considering predetermined residential locations is one of the weaknesses of these models. Joint modelling of residential and work location choices is a solution to this problem. So far, multinomial logit, nested logit and mixed logit are the structures that have been used for this joint modeling. Independence from irrevelant alternatives, forcing sequential structure and complicated calculations in large dimension problems are respectively weaknesses of mentioned structures. In this researsh a copula based... 

Trip demand analysis is among the most important parts in comprehensive transportation studies. Developing four stage models including trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice, and assignment are so common in demand analyzing. In this study, trip generation models have been studied and to analyze data, two different methods including OLR and GWR are utilized. This study aims to examine relationship between aggregate zones in order to forecast future trips. Moreover, results of modeling trip generation with two different methods, OLR and GWR, are compared. Comparing different levels of aggregation reveals that as the number of zones decreases, the results get better. Decreasing number... 

One of the most important criteria in travel analysis is the vehicle kilometer traveled (VKT). The distance which personal cars, vans or other automobiles travel is measured through this criterion. In addition, the VKT is used in transportation planning, accident analysis, transportation budgets assignment, and estimation of automobile pollutions. In this work we process origin-destination data gathered in Shiraz, Iran to estimate the VKT. To this end, we incorporate the linear regression and geographically weighted regression (GWR) methods. Through this research, data from origin-destination statistics of Shiraz, gathered by the transportation institute of Sharif University of Technology in... 

Lakes, marshes, and wetlands shrinkage and drying up due to natural and human driving forces is today one of the most important concerns in the world. Mahaarloo Salt Lake in southern part of Iran is (18 km far from south eastern of Shiraz ) drying-up and is faced with ecologic and environmental degradation. It recharges from western north by upstream basin of Shiraz and 3 rivers named Khoshk, Chenaarrahdaar, Soltaanabad and also from eastern south by Nazarabad river located in Sarvestan basin (Regional water org. of Fars 1382). In recent years, the shrinkage of Mahaarloo has been exacerbated by mismanagement of water resources, inappropriate land use, ignoring allocation of environmental... 

Origin-destination (OD) matrix is one of the most important sources of information used in planning and management of transportation networks. Estimation of a precise OD matrix is a fundamental component for enabling the administrative authorities to optimize the use of their transportation network. Traditionally, urban planners use direct approaches including household questionnaires to estimate OD matrices. These methods are time-consuming and costly. Strategies that are more recent like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID scanners and detectors include deficient precision and the additional cost of accessories. Exploiting GPS technology in spite of its high locating accuracy, due to user... 

Trip distribution is the second step of the four-step travel demand modeling. Like other travel demand models, the most important objective of trip distribution models generation is forecasting the travel data of a year in the future. On the one hand, extensive changes in cities’ urban structures and people’s travel behavior during the years brings up the essential question of how temporally stable and transferable trip distribution models are? This question becomes even more important when the more complex structure of trip distribution models compared to models such as trip generation is considered. On the other hand, it is logical to assume that the consideration of the effects of urban... 

According to increasing energy demand in Iran and the world, the role of natural gas as a relatively clean and cost-effective source has received more attention. Given the high share of the residential sector in the country's natural gas consumption, providing a model for forecasting the demand of this sector is of great importance for policy makers and decision makers in this field. In the present study, we employ three popular methods of machine learning, support vector regression, artificial neural network and decision tree to predict the consumption of natural gas in the residential sector in Tehran according to meteorological parameters (including temperature, precipitation and wind... 

Because of severe weather events (such as floods and storms), transportation infrastructures are directly and indirectly damaged, which may cause many undesirable economic and social losses for people and cities. Among various severe events, flood is known as an important factor in the breakdown (closure of roads and bridges) of the components of the transportation network. Evaluating the performance of the city's road transport network against flood events leads to a better understanding of the network's condition and allows decision-makers to identify the weaknesses in the system and reduce potential damages as much as possible. In this research, with the aim of investigating the...