Sharif Digital Repository

Facility layout problem is a well-known optimization problem which generally deals with the arrangement of the facilities required in an organization. This problem has received much attention during the past decades. However, the researchers have mainly focused on the case where a single floor is available. While, in the competitive world, it is clear that using multi-floor structure layouts are much more efficient and in some cases necessary due to the nature of the functions and activities performed in the firms. Hence, this issue has recently attracted much attention and is becoming increasingly popular. Nevertheless, the lack of a review study on this subject for directing the new... 

Multi-floor facility layout problem concerns the arrangement of departments on the different floors. In this paper, a new mathematical model is proposed for multi-floor layout with unequal department area. Maximising the number of useful adjacencies among departments is considered as the objective function. The adjacencies are divided into two major categories: horizontal and vertical adjacencies. The horizontal adjacency may be occurred between the departments assigned to same floors while the vertical can be happened between departments assigned to any consecutive floors. A minimum common boundary length (surface area) between any two horizontal (vertical) adjacent departments is... 

Routinely, behavior of floor diaphragms is assumed completely rigid in their plane, which leads to erroneous results in analysis and design of some particular buildings. In this study, 4-story RC buildings, with end shear walls and plan aspect ratio of 3, are considered in order to investigate the influence of diaphragm openings on their seismic response. It is concluded that although in-plane floor flexibility has enormous effects on pre-yielding part of pushover curve, it has no influence on post-yielding part of that. Furthermore, the opening beside shear walls has crucial impact on response of building. Hence, it would be better off avoiding opening near the shear walls; if not, the... 

The Multi-Floor Layout Problem (MFLP) is the problem of finding the position of each department in a plant floor in a multi-floor building without any overlapping between departments in order to optimize a particular objective function, more commonly the sum of the material handling costs. In this paper, a special class of MFLP, called Uncertain Multi-Floor Discrete Layout Problem (UMFDLP), is defined. In this problem, a multi-floor building is considered in which an underground store is utilized to contain main storages, and different departments can be located in the other floors in potential pre-determined locations. Furthermore, all material flows are not constant. Moreover, the... 

During the year, due to weather conditions, the temperature fluctuations at surface level cause problems in underground pipes as a result of freezing water. One of the best prevention strategies is the use of polyurethane floor insulation for keeping the temperature of clay above zero degrees Celsius. In this study to calculate the minimum thickness of polyurethane insulation layer, the differential equation of energy is solved based on principle of separation of variables using imaginary eigenvalues for consistency with the temperature distribution in multi-layer consist of asphalt, gravel and polyurethane with finite thickness and clay as a semiinfinite medium with periodic thermal... 

The progressive-edge-growth (PEG) algorithm of Hu et al. is modified to improve the error floor performance of the constructed low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. To improve the error floor, the original PEG algorithm is equipped with an efficient algorithm to find the dominant elementary trapping sets (ETS's) that are added to the Tanner graph of the under-construction code by the addition of each variable node and its adjacent edges. The aim is to select the edges, among the candidates available at each step of the original PEG algorithm, that prevent the creation of dominant ETS's. The proposed method is applicable to both regular and irregular variable node degree distributions.... 

Effective marketing is quite vital in many building construction projects that depend on the pre-sale cash in-flow. However, the unsafe condition of the under-construction projects postpones in-person customer visits to the completion date and complicates the marketing process. This safety concern is especially critical for the upper floor units. Although virtual tours of the buildings are used to show the project specifications, they do not convey the impression that customers receive in the real ambiance of in-person visits. This research proposes a novel method called semi-augmented reality to address the safety issue of the under-construction projects during the marketing process. In... 

Single floor facility layout problem (FLP) is related to finding the arrangement of a given number of departments within a facility; while in multi-floor FLP, the departments should be imbedded in some floors inside the facility. The significant influence of layout design on the effectiveness of any organization has turned FLP into an important issue. This paper presents a three- (two-) stage mathematical programming method to find competitive solutions for multi- (single-) floor problems. At the first stage, the departments are assigned to the floors through a mixed integer programming model (the single floor version does not require this stage). At the second stage, a nonlinear programming... 

In this research, the effect of beam buckling in a predefined direction is used to reduce occupant injuries in frontal crashes of an ultra-low-floor (ULF) city bus. In ULF buses, the floor structure consists of several longitudinal long beams, which in case of a frontal crash may buckle due to the axial impact. The direction of rotational acceleration of the driver seat due to buckling is highly affected by the position of the driver seat. A finite element model of an ULF bus was developed using LS-Dyna. The driver model, a Hybrid III 50 th male dummy with deformable jacket and abdomen, was restrained to the seat with a 3-point belt. An Elastic-Plastic material model was used for the bus... 

Damage to structures with the concept of inelastic behavior and consequently hysteresis energy is very close. Therefore, it can be said that hysteresis energy at these levels can be a significant criterion for designing or controlling the structure. In this research, the first three steel frames of 4, 8, and 12 floors with the medium bending frame system have been designed with the statically equivalent method according to valid international regulations; then, all frames have been subjected to nonlinear dynamic analysis by seven accelerometers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the distribution of damage, energy, relative displacement, roof displacement, and base shear in the... 

In this paper, we propose a novel wireless random access scheme, combining the CSMA/CA mechanism with two control signals for initiating new transmissions and announcing receiver busy status, respectively. We also develop a time-space framework of performance analysis, enabling separate study of the temporal and spatial efficiency of the random access, i.e. the scheme's ability for contention resolution and efficient performance in time, and its ability to provide for concurrent transmissions in space. Based on this framework and using both analysis and simulation, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF, in terms of the overall afforded throughput, and also in terms... 

In this study, the performance of a proposed friction damper with two slip loads in controlling the seismic response of steel moment resisting buildings structures under moderate and intense earthquake excitations is investigated. The proposed friction damper initially operates with a smaller slip load and could shift to the higher slip load after a certain amount of slippage when subjected to intense ground motions. In this regard, the hysteresis behavior of the proposed double slip loads (DSL) friction damper is modeled and after necessary verifications is imported to the material library of OpenSees software to be used for parametric study. To evaluate the performance of the proposed DSL... 

In this paper, the V-shape development model approach for designing an automotive floor panel made by laminated structure is investigated to attain the best trade-off between the system and subsystem level requirements while improving the local and global performance of the vehicle. For this purpose, the bending and torsional stiffness of the body structure, as well as mass, strength, and vibration attenuation of the floor panel, are considered as design objectives at the system and subsystem levels. A multi-objective discrete optimization of a laminated configuration is performed using the Taguchi-based grey relational analysis. Material grades and thicknesses of the sandwich panel face...