Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, improvement in operational condition of distribution networks considering daily growth in electrical energy usage with financial limits appears as a huge challenge for network operators. Under these kind of circumstances, operators need to have efficient and inexpensive plans more than ever. Considering high share of power losses in overall pro-duced power, utilities always tried to minimize losses in Iran and other points of world. In addition, numerous equipment in distribution networks compared with the transmission level, impose high costs to reliability plans. Therefore, reliability improvement plans have been paid low attention by distribution network operators. This lower... 

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... 

Approximate Agreement (AA) is one of the most important issues in distributed networks in which non-faulty processes execute a voting algorithm to reach the values that are very close to each other. AA for Partially Connected Networks (PCNs) is very limited because a node may not have a complete view of the whole network which makes it difficult to reach the convergence. This research proposes a convergent Fuzzy algorithm for synchronous distributed networks in the presence of faulty or Byzantine processes. When each node receives a new value from its neighbors,it runs the convergent Fuzzy algorithm. If the received value is not in the expected range of values, the processor can discard the... 

The ever-growing prevalence of gas-fired power plants has paved the way for significant changes in the electrical energy network applications in recent years. As a result, the mutual dependency between natural gas distribution systems and electrical energy distribution systems has been intensified. Thus, the integrated gas and electrical distribution system is faced with notable threats from natural disasters that can lead to disruptions in meeting the critical demands of the consumers as well as high monetary costs. The occurrence of unpredicted natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes affects the performance of energy infrastructures. Given the low possibility of these... 

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... 

In a distributed system, each solution for the problem of Byzantine Agreement requires that some of correct processes reach a common decision value from a set of proposed values while Byzantine processes may behave arbitrary. This problem is one of the most fundamental problems in the theory of distributed systems. While the problem has been widely studied in fully-connected fixed networks, few studies have been carried out in the context of self-organizing mobile networks such as Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks.
This research presents a randomized consensus protocol with three additional modules for the case of dynamic networks: Participant Detectors, Failure Detectors and Maintainer. We assume... 

In recent years, the pace of increment in electrical energy consumption is getting faster. Establishing new power-plants to keep a balance between generation and consumption not only has a high investment cost but also is a time consuming procedure. Thus, several studies have focused on the demand side management. Residential consumers possess remarkable portion of total electricity consumption. Accordingly, at first, the appropriate residential demand response program is selected based on presented experimental criteria. In the next step, since the network reliability is an important issue to the operators, the impact of implementation of the demand response program is studied on the... 

Implementing distribution automation system (DAS) in distribution networks needs a huge investment which usually cannot be funded entirely in a short period of time. So distribution companies (DISCOs) should develop long term plans to equip their network with automation technologies as far as economically justifiable. Similarly, DISCOs have network capacity expansion (NCX) plans which specify the scheme of construction of feeders and substations. Since considering DAS may lead to more efficient NCX plans, the planner should revise the NCX plan through the DAS planning. On the other hand, for DAS planning it is necessary to consider a NCX plan as a platform to determine the time and location... 

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... 

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... 

In this work, a non-isothermal model of natural gas in pipelines including mass, momentum and energy balance equations are used as model equations for modeling and state estimation in gas pipeline systems. An algorithm is proposed to handle the discontinuities that appear in the dynamic model of a GTN. The states of GTN are estimated using the continuous/discrete form of the extended Kalman filter for two benchmarks and some heuristic rules for sensor placement in a GTN are concluded. Also, a framework for distributed and decentralized state estimation in high-pressure and long-distance gas transmission networks (GTNs) is proposed. Some heuristic rules are suggested for system decomposition... 

Optimizing multi-period modern distribution system is a challenging task due to high costs of constructions in urban areas and importance of fast and cheap goods delivery to customers. Various logistic techniques have been proposed to solve this issue. In this study, a new method is suggested to convert the strategic problem of finding depot location into a tactical problem. In addition, a vehicle routing method for multi-period distribution systems in high demand periods have been developed. For modeling this location-routing problem two objective functions have been considered as fallows minimizing the total time in the system to satisfy customer demand and operating costs. To solve this... 

Distribution power systems are undergoing a fundamental transition with the introduction of microgrids (MGs) and proliferation of renewable energy sources inspired mainly by privacy and environmental concerns. In this regard, energy management methods employed by utilities should take into account the intermittent nature of RESs power production while coping with the independent operation of MGs. Transactive energy (TE) is an emerging concept which utilizes economic-based mechanisms to facilitate the dynamic and decentralized management of active agents of the system. However, the energy transactions between transactive agents could have adverse impacts on the technical aspect of the system... 

Current trend of energy consumption and aging infrastructure of electricity grids mandates high amounts of investment in transmission and distribution networks. On the other hand, with increased awareness about environmental issues, share of renewable energy resources in power generation portfolio has risen in recent years. Microgrids, as one of the most promising solutions to tackle these issues, are able to accommodate high penetration levels of renewable energy sources and distributed generation in distribution systems. However, microgrids sizes are limited due to some operational considerations and as a result, efficient management of distribution systems with high penetration of... 

The growing usage of nonlinear loads has resulted in increasing voltage and current harmonic levels in distribution systems. Additionally the faults occurring in the distribution system cause voltage sag at the point of customer supply. These two power quality disturbances impose considerable costs on consumers through disrupting the correct performance of sensitive loads, causing unintended outages and decreasing the devices’ useful lifetime. Besides the aforementioned power quality issues, the electric power loss has a determining role in operational costs. In this thesis, based on feeder reconfiguration and shunt passive filters, a strategy is proposed in order to reduce the average... 

Fossil fuel are energy resources in decline. In recent years, fuel cell have become as a source of energy to replace conventional systems .Among the various types of fuel cells, PEMFCs (proton exchange membrane fuel cells) possess a series of highly advantageous features such as a low-operating temperature, sustained operation at high-current density, low weight, compactness, potential for low cost and volume, long stack life, fast start-ups and suitability for discontinuous operation. Water management is one of the most critical and challenging problems. There is a delicate balance between the membrane hydration and avoiding cathode from flooding. Cathode flooding occurs when the water... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

Fuel Cell with Polymer membrane uses a reaction with Hydrogen and Oxygen as reactants to produce electricity. As the product of this reaction is water, this fuel cell produce clean energy. But if the produced water accumulates it can cause problems for fuel cell which can lead to complete failed of fuel cell. On the other hand water shortage in PEM fuel cell also can cause problems. So we need to have continues water management inside of PEM fuel cell. For this sake having knowledge about water inside of PEM fuel cell and specially the Gas Diffusion Layer which is the layer with responsibly to help the fuel cell to manage the water, is necessary. One of the ways for gaining that knowledge...