Sharif Digital Repository

Environmental degradation due to economic activities is a key challenge facing sustainable development. The fossil fuel production sector is a very polluting industry. In this research, the future trends of pollution accumulation in the region due to direct/indirect oily discharge into the semi-enclosed area of the Persian Gulf are studied. The purpose of the study was not only to alert policy-makers about potential future threats in the region but also to conduct a trial to develop potential solutions to these problems. Four different environmental cases were studied via the principle of system dynamic modeling simulation. The cases consisted of three situations: relaxed, simple policy, and... 

In order to be adapted to changes in user requirements and/or the environment, many software systems need to run continuously while they evolve. Most current approaches for such dynamic reconfiguration assume that the evolved system will behave as expected and thus will be reliable if the reconfiguration is consistent. This assumption may not correspond to reality because the delivered quality estimated previously could vary due to parameter changes at runtime. To ensure that the system acts correctly in the field after the reconfiguration, reliability of changes has to be checked at runtime. Existing approaches, however, are not applicable in highly available systems due to the possibility... 

Maintenance costs in airlines change as time passes. As airplane ages, it needs more often and more expensive checks. Due to these growing expenses, airlines are getting more interested in cost analysis. Under financial pressure, they avoid buying new airplanes and try to maintain the old ones, but sometimes try to cut the maintenance costs by ignoring or delaying some checks. In other words, they are more disposed to spend small amount of money frequently through time, than to spend a great deal on a new airplane with low maintenance costs. Therefore, in such situations, the following questions raise that what solution is more efficient as we look dynamically to the system? For answering... 

Achievement of industries in production and offering products depends on different factors like having an appropriate maintenance system. This issue should be reached through the most appropriate and practical methods. In this study, based on how the external parameters would influence the productivity of a maintenance system the researcher aims at designing a dynamic system model to analyze the productivity of a maintenance system using acquired information from a car device company by determination of the percentage of parameters and indexes and their influence on maintenance system productivity. The proposed model is simulated for a system with parameters of precise value according to... 

Considering the problem of funding start-ups because of their nature, some entrepreneurs developed crowdfunding in which funding is done via social network. Crowdfunding is a complicated and dynamic phenomenon. In addition, studies conducted on crowdfunding are not significant in number and they have been conducted in exploratory and partial manner. As a result, it is necessary to adopt an approach capable of understanding complex dynamic phenomena so as to be able to explain a crowdfunding. The present paper designs a system dynamics model of crowdfunding for support of new Iranian knowledge-based IT startups so as to highlight the complexities and dynamics of crowdfunding. The results of... 

Over the last two decades, mathematical modeling has become a popular tool in study of blood coagulation. This paper describes the coagulation pathway and presents a mathematical model for the generation of blood clot in human vasculature. Parameters of interest in this study include procoagulants and anticoagulants whose activity may be enhanced by various activator enzymes. The process of human blood clotting involves a complex interaction between these parameters and continuous time and state processes. In this work, we propose to model these highly inter-relational processes by a set of nonlinear chemical rate equations. We have modeled this process as a dynamical system, as chemical... 

Ways to reduce an airline's cost has been studied for years. In fact, in order to achieve this goal, ones need to know different types of airline's costs including; fuel and oil, maintenance, Ticketing, passenger services, etc. and their impact on the total cost of an airline. According to announcement of ICAO [1], "maintenance cost (about 11% of total cost) is the second major cost after fuel and oil". Therefore, this may attract airline owners' attention to find ways to control maintenance cost and eventually the total cost of an airline. Though, there are many systematic approaches to analyze cost reduction and making policies, in this article, SD modeling is applied to develop a... 

The inherent complexities of multi-reservoir flood control systems and their operation conditions along with the improvements of optimization methods have led to a positive trend on better development of these models. This trend tends to provide the operators of these systems with more practical solutions. Although optimization models can provide appropriate solutions for operation of multi-reservoir systems, the exact implementation of these solutions in real world is not guaranteed. This arises mainly due to high level risk of flood situation, real time operation constraints, high level uncertainties of inflows that usually are overlooked in optimization models, and so on. These problems... 

In this study, a novel approach based on a modified Kalman filter algorithm is presented to directly estimate and measure the surface topography of samples by trolling mode atomic force microscopy. Trolling mode atomic force microscopy was introduced as an atomic force microscopy alternative to overcome imaging problems in liquid environments by reducing the liquid-resonator interaction forces. In conventional imaging techniques, the time to reach the steady state periodic motion of the oscillating probe restricts scanning speed. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel imaging technique for trolling mode atomic force microscopy based on the system dynamics model and using the... 

Unlike a single-body approach, modeling based on a two-body approach has been employed to prepare the required system dynamic model as a time update equation in the applied filtering technology and measurement data for the estimation process. This more precise mathematical model enabled better understanding about the dynamics of the change in the aircraft mass properties during the airdropping operation. The problem is defined as estimation of the optimal mass properties parameters for the best possible fit of the model output to the real data. The parameter estimation problem is investigated by a nonlinear filtering methodology in two sequential steps. In the first step, the single extended...