Sharif Digital Repository

The Real Option Theory (ROT) offers a modern methodology for the valuation of an investment project because it considers the value of managerial flexibility facing project uncertainties. The present work seeks to study the Expand and Swich options value for a polymer plant investment project. Perhaps the most critical step of ROT is the estimation of the project volatility. This work also makes an effort to estimate the project volatility in different cases considering different possibilities of modeling the uncertain variables. The main uncertain variables that can positively affect the project value are the price of the raw material, the price of the product and the demand growth of the... 

Goal of this project is to present a method for dynamic transmission planning in restructured environment by system regulator. Congestion, fair competition in power market, stakeholders’ desires in transmission expansion, transmission investment traits, creating incentive for investment and transcos revenue are considered in this work. Presentation of methodology for reliability evaluation is necessary because of increasing uncertainties due to restructuring. Remedial action method is suggested for uncertainties analysis and reliability index presented for measuring degree of reliability. The method has been applied to the IEEE 14-bus system. ... 

In power system operation, the term "operation planning" carries a wide range of meaning. For some utilities, operation planning denotes primarily short-term planning tasks (up to several days), such as load forecasting, unit commitment, hydro-thermal coordination, transaction pricing, fuel allocation, and security analysis while for other companies operational planning is interpreted in a wider context, and include mid-term planning activities (up to several months), such as maintenance planning, fuel budgeting, rate forecasting, network planning, relay coordination, etc. The mid-term planning provides the link between the long-term and short-term planning programs. The duration of this... 

The recent advances in communications and processing technologies have paved the way for a new business model in IT industry. In this new model, frequently called “software as a service” or in short SAAS, software is hosted on servers operated by a software vendor instead of customers and all required transactions take place through the network, especially through World Wide Web. There are several differences between traditional business models and SAAS, including pricing and revenue model. Given the fact that vendor’s can monitor the customer usage, new and more complicated price structures such as usage-based pricing is possible, In this new business model. Although this pricing structure... 

Due to the high level abstraction inherent in most formal specifications and the need to formally specify and develop nondeterministic systems, such as concurrent, probabilistic, and game-like ones, nondeterminism comes into formal specifications inevitably. As it will be shown in this thesis, after developing programs constructively from implicitly nondeterministic specifications, which have been written in the CZ (constructive Z) specification language, only one of the allowable, specified behaviors will appear in final programs. In this way, the implementer will be provided with only one of the possible implementations that is not necessarily the best one. When the nondeterminism involved... 

Increasing the fuel cost and concerns about pollutions have facilitated the use of renewable energies. Wind power as a renewable energy has been considered as a good representative for conventional resources of electrical energy. The biggest obstacles for efficient use of the wind energy are changeability and uncontrollability in wind farm generation and to be far from the demand center. Also, conventional approaches cannot be applied to analyze the effects of this energy on power system. With increment in the penetration of the wind energy in power system, the necessity of considering its effects, especially large scale wind farm, in transmission expansion planning (TEP) studies is... 

Most of the researches on project planning and scheduling have supposed that there is a complete and fixed information about the activities duration and amount of resources needed for project, but in reality we face lots of uncertainty in activities duration and required resources. In previous researches there are some cases which lead to more than one schedule for project, but in most of them they offer no solution for choosing between the schedules. In this project we are trying to make a nonlinear model of project environment by using Weibull distribution as activities duration and then we determine the input information by using the methods of probability encoding in decision analysis.... 

Trasmission system is one of the most important parts of the power system which not only creates an interface between generation and distribution section, but also provides a reliable and non-descriminated environment between them. In recent years, restructuring is introduced in many countries of the world. The competition is begun in generation section while, the transmission section was remained monopoly. Private investors don't have enough incentive to invest in this section, because, the presence of uncertainties have made decision making hard for them and increased the investment risk. On the other hand, with increase in consumption and generation, need to invest in this section seems... 

Transportation networks are considered as complex systems, and in many cases they behave in such an irregular and unexpected manner. Such complexities cause problems in studying the behavior of these systems. An example of such complexities is chaos in the network flows. On the other hand, the behavior of these networks is highly affected by the incidents like accidents and bad weather. Such events affect the level of service and travel time reliability of the networks. In this research, a dynamical approach to traffic assignment has been chosen to model chaos and uncertainties in the network. By using this approach for modeling flow evolution, edge of chaos and uncertainty in supply and... 

Concerning the variety of existing buildings and the diversity in the factors which affect the behaviors of structures, subjected to earthquakes, presenting a definite method for studying their seismic vulnerabilities has not been realized yet. Selecting a method which covers all mentioned necessities is extremely wide and complex. From one side, the capacity of structural system should be determined based on its strength and deformability. On the other hand, the nonlinear behavior of structure should be predicted by selecting the probable effects of earthquake on the region. Then, the force or acceleration which causes damage of structure's components, and the whole structural system,... 

Increasing demand in power systems necessitates the Generation Expansion Planning (GEP) which is to determine the type, size, and location of new generating units in a planning horizon. The final solution of GEP is based on the minimum cost and/or optimum reliability taking into account various constraints such as capacity of units and lines, operating constraints, and budget restrictions. This paper presents a model based on scenarios for generation expansion planning and units retirement decision. The proposed model could be used by vertically integrated utilities as well as the ISOs in electricity markets to obtain generation expansion schemes. In this approach, uncertainty of units are... 

Travel demand estimation is a complicated process as travel demand is highly influenced by uncertainties. These uncertainties can be analyzed in two levels: aggregate and disaggregate. Models in aggregate level are usually influenced by uncertainties in data insufficiency in some regions of data space because of non uniform distribution of input data. Uncertainties embedded in travelers’ perceptions of some influential variables on demand estimation (such as travel time) moreover affect these models. An expert-guided algorithm to incorporate expert knowledge into adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system for compensating data insufficiency and considering uncertainties inherent in... 

In this research, a new Bayesian method for constructing confidence intervals on the parameters of any continuous distribution is first developed. The main idea behind developing this method is to model uncertainty. As an application of the proposed methodology, confidence intervals for the two parameters of the Weibull distribution along with their joint confidence interval are then derived in which data can be of type I censored data, type II censored data or uncensored. The new confidence intervals are next compared to other existing exact confidence intervals in the literature and shown to have better performances. Furthermore, we show the lengths of the existing exact confidence... 

The process of deregulation that has involved electricity many markets has introduced several new interesting research topics in power system area. This thesis addresses one of the most fascinating issues among them: the study of distributed generation both renewable and conventional integration in distribution networks. From the distribution network operator (DNO)'s point of view, it is of interest to develop a comprehensive methodology which considers various distributed generation technologies as an option for supplying the demand in distribution networks. In this thesis, the planning problem has been multi-objectively modeled. This will help the planner in decision making while knowing... 

As a matter of fact, power systems are always faced with a variety of uncertainties. These uncertainties change system parameters in an unwanted manner which may deteriorate the system security and reliability. For instance, a transmission line which is designed for a certain capacity may be suffered as a result of load increment and consequently may influence the normal operation of other network elements. In recent years, as a result of environmental considerations and especially after the oil shock at 1973 which caused the the energy prices to increase unprecedentedly, the human has taken more attention to renewable energies exploitation. Theses energies have a fluctuating nature and are... 

Quantum Mechanics, as the most famous physical theory was founded about 85 years ago; but still there are a lot of debates about its interpretation. In this work, we review some basic concepts of Quantum Mechanics in form of questions about uncertainty principle, measurement problem and complementarily. We also review Bell inequality which has great philosophical and recently technological results. Bell derived his inequality regardless of modeling the measuring apparatus; we show, by take a realistic model for measuring apparatus, Bell inequality would be deduced. Finally we review a mathematical language which was used to show the duality of wave and particle. Quantum... 

The purpose of introducing this thesis is to review the difference between Standard Quantum mechanics and Bohmian Quantum mechanics. The aim of this dissertation is not only to contrast these theories with respect to formulation, but also to briefly review their historical, philosophical and sociological aspects. This dissertation consists of two main sections. The first section is about reviewing the emergence profile of these theories and the formation of each theory along its historical path. In addition some beliefs about the founders of these theories and the impact of their beliefs on the evolution of their theories are put forward. As a complement to the above, the prevailing social... 

The multi-facility location-allocation problem is concerned with locating m facilities in the Euclidian plane and allocating n customers to them at minimum total cost. In this work, we focus on a probabilistic version of the problem, in which the locations of the customers and their arrivals are probabilistically distributed. We first formulate the problem as a continuous location-allocation problem. Then, we give an approximated discrete model in which facilities can be located on a set of candidate points. The proposed model has two objective functions which can be calculated only through simulation. Considering the NP-hard nature of the problem and the functions’ unique properties, we use... 

Since 1980s the electricity market has been gradually evolving from a monopoly market into a liberalized one for encouraging competition and improving efficiency. This brings the opportunity for generation companies (Gencos) to make more profits while embracing more risks of not being dispatched. Therefore, it has become a core interest for the Gencos to develop optimal bidding strategies to maximize the profits and minimize the risks while participating in such a competitive market. Error of determining day-ahead electricity price is one of the sources of the risk. Energy price has a high impact on bidding strategy optimization process. So it should be determined with low error which is not...