Sharif Digital Repository

A workflow management system is a software system which manages and coordinates the operational tasks of an organization. Typically, the def­ inition of a workflow involves human and computer resources and tools on various geographic locations, and thus the concerns of distributed systems are one of the main challenges in this domain. Following this,allocating various resources to different tasks of a workflow and schedul­ ing them in a manner which satisfies some predefined constraints is one of the new and fundamental challenges in this field.The main goal of this research is to design an agent-oriented workflow system which utilizes a novel method for resource allocation and schedul­ ing... 

A two-dimensional, two-phase, nonisothermal model was developed in this work to investigate the water transport characteristic and water distribution in a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC). Emphasis is placed on exploring the water distribution in different layers of DMF. The water and methanol crossover through the membrane were considered with the effect of diffusion, electro-osmotic drag, and convection. Governing equations including the prton and electron transport, continuity, momentum, species transport for methanol, water, and gases species, and the auxiliary equations are coupled to determine the output parameters. These parameters are the concentration distribution of the species,... 

Residential demand response is an appropriate control tool for improving system reliability. This project intends to establish a model to activate residential demand response to improve distribution network reliability. Two centralized and decentralized models are proposed. The models aim at minimizing the damage cost imposed by load curtailments following unexpected events. In the models, it is supposed that distribution system operator (DSO) and responsive customers already signed a contract authorizing the DSO alters the operation of responsive appliances whenever system reliability is jeopardized. In centralized framework, Responsive customers deliver the technical data of their... 

Restructuring in the electrical industry, is one of the most important change in this industry which cause profit based decision making in all parts of the electrical network, especially in the generation part. In a real incomplete market environment, uncertainties associated with input parameters of the GenCos’ self-scheduling problem such as market price and accessible renewable generation would be one of the most important factors that affects the profits of GenCos and energy resources. Nowadays, increased use of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as distributed generations (DGs), energy storage units, and demand response, has led to a paradigm shift within the electric power... 

In the recent years, there is a worldwide wave of considerable changes in power industries, including the operation of distribution networks. Deregulation, open market, alternative and local energy sources, new energy conversion technologies and other future development of electrical power systems must pursue different goals. Also growth in the demand and change in load patterns may create major bottlenecks in the delivery of electric energy. This would cause distribution system stress.Furthermore, in competitive electricity markets, operators determine the electricity price for specific intervals during a day, taking into account various economical and operational factors. Traditionally, a... 

In the proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEM, the produced water would be divided into two phases of vapor and liquid. distribution of both liquid and vapor phases in different cell layers affects the performance, the efficiency and the life of a fuel cell significantly. Moreover, Nano pores of the cathode catalyst layer are involved with some phenomena such as electrochemical reaction kinetics, heat and mass transfer and interface phase change. One of the most important problems in the performance of fuel cells is distribution of liquid water in the porous areas. Water flooding in fuel cells causes to delay in oxygen transport to active sites in the catalyst layer because the pores of... 

One of the most important characteristics of real-time systems is executing tasks before their specified deadlines. The tasks’ execution may require several resources like processor, I/O ports, and data structures. Some of these resources may be shared between several tasks and their availability is important in executing tasks before the deadlines. Allocating shared resources which are used in mutually exclusive manner often encounteres some problems such as priority inversion and deadlock. Resource access protocols are used to minimize or eliminate these problems. The effect of using these protocols issupporting tasks’ execution before their deadlines. To meet deadlines is of decisive... 

Occurrence of natural disasters such as flood, windstorms, tsunamis and earthquakes has caused striking effects on critical infrastructures like power systems in recent decades. There are some examples of high-impact low-possibility (HILP) events which causes catastrophic effects on power systems. Traditionally, planning and operational studies of power system have been run taking into account some reliability metrics. Although, the reliability indices can represent the ability of a system in confronting with possible failures of components, they are unable to efficiently consider the effects of severe events such as earthquake and other HILP events. Moreover, traditional power systems were... 

With the increase of renewable energy generation in power systems, the flexibility of power systems has been challenged and the high potential of resources in active distribution systems for providing flexibility has been noticed by system operators and planners to help system flexibility. In this regard, these resources can participate in the Flexible Ramp Product market which is a new product that is defined for this purpose. In this work, the management of these resources has been modeled in an active distribution system for participating in this market by considering the network constraints, the uncertainty of renewable generation and forecasted prices of products in DA and RT markets,... 

The human need for reliable and accessible energy sources for household, industrial, transportation, etc. caused the discovery of the first oil well to move towards exploitation and use of this large, cheap and available energy source, accelerated. With the start of this movement, oil and its products in the last two centuries have quickly established themselves as a major part of the energy basket of most countries in the world. The entry of crude oil and its products into the energy industry has faced new issues and challenges for decision makers in this field. One of the most important challenges has been the planning and management of the process of distribution and transfer of petroleum... 

In this thesis, we argue that in many basic algorithms for machine learning, including support vector machine (SVM) for classification, principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, and regression for dependency estimation, we need the inner products of the data samples, rather than the data samples themselves. Motivated by the above observation, we introduce the problem of private inner product retrieval for distributed machine learning, where we have a system including a database of some files, duplicated across some non-colluding servers. A user intends to retrieve a subset of specific size of the inner products of the data files with minimum communication load, without... 

Electric energy distribution system (DS) reliability has a great impact on the quality of service provided to customers. On the other hand, improving the reliability performance in a DS is an expensive task. So, determining an efficient and economical target for the reliability of DSs is imperative. This thesis aims to determine efficient and economical reliability targets for reliability indices of DS based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) considering distribution feeders as the decision-making units (DMUs). For this sake, using the fuzzy c-mean (FCM) method, feeders are clustered and the membership degrees are determined so that the target associated with each feeder gets greater impact... 

Focusing on developing the EEPS (Energy Electric and Power System) based on the SG (Smart Grid) infrastructure to achieve implementation of EI (Energy Internet) ultimately, in order to analyze and manage the energy/power consumption, requires a robust embedded EMS (Energy Management System) to implement real-time LF (Load Forecasting), prevent the power waste and realize consumption management which eventually leads toward the smart industries/buildings. STLF (Short Term Load Forecasting) is an essential component that an industrial plant requires to manage the power, regarding the load fluctuations during production, and compulsory requirement of cost mitigation. This thesis, in order to... 

In recent years, there have been many efforts for distributing a big and complex duty among some agents in order to do it more simply. Large number of these methods are in area called distributed systems, where several different agents start to work together to do a difficult or complex duty which each of them cannot do it lonely. Combination of distributed systems and artificial intelligence is known as distributed artificial intelligence.
One of the theories that has received attention recently, is called Embodiment. According this theory, in cooperation of a set of agents for performing particular task, expertise might not be integrated in a centralized controller, rather it gradually... 

There is an increasing trend nowadays toward Distributed Generation (DGs). DG poses positive and negative side effects for both utility and customers. Reduction of system expansion costs, decreasing power loss and reliability enhancement are some benefits of DGs. Connecting DGs to the distribution system can lead to some troublesome issues. Anti-islanding protection is one of these issues. Islanding is the situation in which a distribution system becomes electrically isolated from the remainder of the power system, yet continues to be energized by DG connected to it. Traditionally, a distribution system doesn’t have any active power generating source in it and it doesn’t get power in case... 

Motif finding problem in biology is a search for repeated patterns to reveal information about gene expression, one of the most complex subsystems in genomics. ChIP-seq technology abled researchers to investigate location of protein-DNA interactions but analyzing downstream results of such experiments to find actual regulatory signals in genome is challenging. For many years, applications of motif finding had models based on limiting assumption as an exchange for lower computational complexity. Results: AKAGI program is build upon upgraded methods and new general models to investigate statistical and experimental evidences for accurately finding significant patterns among biological... 

Proliferation of distributed energy resources and the developing of smart grid concepts are of a great importance. This, however, influences the future of power systems and necessitates more studies in order to cope with the changes. In this regard, uncontrollability issues are arised by introducing the renewable energy resources in the power systems. To address this issue, energy storage systems are used to mitigate negative consequences of using renewable energy resources. Accordingly, in this thesis, a new framework for determining the capacity and location of the energy storage systems is proposed. In addition, reconfiguration of distribution network is also concerned in order to... 

Since traffic lights are the only mechanized system at street level, their operation mode affects traffic congestion. Since traffic lights organize vehicles at crossways, the target of traffic light smartification is to reduce waiting time based on the density of traffic flows. There are many topics that work in this field to recognize traffic before making any decision based on traffic. Hence, if it is possible to introduce an algorithm for change static timing and predetermined timing of the traffic lights, it can affect the density of traffic at the large scale. This dissertation introduces an algorithm to reduce traffic congestion using traffic lights and correct timing. In this case,... 

Emergence of crypto-currency and blockchain technology revolutionize supply chain processes. In addition, customer needs for more information on products or services from origin to destination, highlights the necessity of transparency, originality and traceability in supply chains. This research is aimed to develop a blockchain based system ascertaining supply chain transparency and originality. To this aim, a joint pricing and closed-loop supply chain network design problem is selected as a good platform to implement it. Due to increasing concerns on environmental issues and maximizing job opportunities, sustainability is also considered in the proposed problem. To ascertain transparency... 

In distributed systems, a huge amount of data is dispersed among different nodes; centralization of this data is infeasible due to communication and storage costs. In addition, Databases with high dimensional data objects are becoming more prevalent is many areas. When the dimensionality increases, the volume of the space increases so fast that the available data becomes sparse. This sparsity is problematic from many aspects. In order to obtain a statistically sound and reliable result, the amount of data needed to support the result often grows exponentially with the dimensionality. Also organizing and searching data often relies on detecting areas where objects form groups with similar...