Sharif Digital Repository

Trucking plays a vital role in economic development in every country, especially countries where it serves as the backbone of the economy. The fast growth of economy in Iran as a developing country has also been accompanied by an alarming situation in terms of fatalities in truck-involved crashes, among the drivers and passengers of the trucks as well as the other vehicles involved. Despite the sizable efforts to investigate the truck-involved crashes, very little is known about the safety of truck movements in developing countries, and about the single-truck crashes worldwide. Thus, this study aims to uncover significant factors associated with injury severities sustained by truck drivers... 

This paper develops a behavioral analysis of freight mode choice decisions that could provide a basis for an acceptable analytical tool for policy assessment. The paper specifically examines the way that truck and rail compete for commodity movement in the US. Two binary mode choice models are introduced in which some shipment-specific variables (e.g. distance, weight and value) and mode-specific variables (e.g. haul time and cost) are found to be determinants. The specifications of the non-selected choice are imputed in a machine learning module. Shipping cost is found to be a central factor for rail shipments, while road shipments are found to be more sensitive to haul time. Sensitivity of... 

We say that two graphs G1 and G2 with the same vertex set commute if their adjacency matrices commute. In this paper, we find all integers n such that the complete bipartite graph Kn, n is decomposable into commuting perfect matchings or commuting Hamilton cycles. We show that there are at most n - 1 linearly independent commuting adjacency matrices of size n; and if this bound occurs, then there exists a Hadamard matrix of order n. Finally, we determine the centralizers of some families of graphs. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

The commuting graph of a ring R, denoted by Γ(R), is a graph whose vertices are all noncentral elements of R, and two distinct vertices x and y are adjacent if and only if xy = yx. The commuting graph of a group G, denoted by Γ(G), is similarly defined. In this article we investigate some graph-theoretic properties of Γ(Mn(F)), where F is a field and n ≥ 2. Also we study the commuting graphs of some classical groups such as GLn(F) and SLn(F). We show that Γ(Mn(F)) is a connected graph if and only if every field extension of F of degree n contains a proper intermediate field. We prove that apart from finitely many fields, a similar result is true for Γ(GLn(F)) and Γ(SL n(F)). Also we show... 

Because of the importance of health-care processes to people life, researchers attempted to reduce death rates using risk-adjusted control charts. In this paper, the number of patients survived at least 30days after a surgery is monitored using a novel risk-adjusted geometric control chart. In this chart, the patient risk is modeled using a logistic regression. The new scheme is proposed to be used in Phase-I where a likelihood ratio test derived from a change-point model is employed. The application of the proposed chart is demonstrated in a case study. Furthermore, through simulation studies, it is shown that the proposed control chart is more effective in terms of power than the chart... 

Iran is the fourth refugee-hosting country and Afghanistan is the second refugee-source country in the world. This research is qualitative and conducted with content analysis method. Twenty-seven individuals participated in the study. They were recruited from two midterm residential drug treatment centers in Tehran. Afghan refugees who use drugs felt and experienced stigma in five areas: family, friends, workplace, neighborhood, and treatment center. The consequences include frequent treatment failure, family relationship disruption, superficial conformity with the host society, and self-stigma. It is necessary to design interventions to reduce stigma and discrimination attached to refugees.... 

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most complicated optimization mathematical models; the school bus routing problem (SBRP) is an important and practical branch of this problem. Because the number of variables and equations is vast, finding the exact solution for this problem under real conditions is difficult; only heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms can be used to solve it. Recently, the ejection chain method (ECM) has been introduced as a heuristic algorithm that efficiently finds a new neighbor solution. In a case study in developing countries, efficiency of several heuristic algorithms including ECM along with one metaheuristic algorithm-tabu search algorithm (TSA)-is... 

Improving the service quality of the public transport systems has always been an interesting research area in the field of transportation planning. Public transit system expansion and enhancement has been known as a recognized way to improve congested metropolitan areas. In order to make a transit system more attractive to people, both long and short term management strategies should be considered. Fleet re-assignment to a bus network, a noticeable component of the public transit system, was the focus of this study. It was introduced as a short term management strategy to help the operators maintain service quality without confusing the users by abrupt changes in the system. The proposed... 

We consider the deterministic pilot design problem for sparse channel estimation in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. Our design is based on minimizing the coherence measure of the Fourier submatrix associated with the pilot subcarriers. This is done by optimizing over both pilot locations and pilot powers. As finding such global minimizer is a combinatorial problem, we resort to a greedy pilot allocation method. The resulting method achieves a suboptimal solution in a sequential manner and with reasonable computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs similar to the existing methods with significantly lower computational... 

We study the pilot design problem for sparse channel estimation in OFDM systems where multiple channels are estimated at a single antenna receiver. Such design is applicable to downlink of massive-MIMO systems and also to scenarios where multiple users transmit to a base station at the same carrier frequency. In our design, we deviate from the conventional orthogonal pilot arrangements by assigning the same pilot subcarriers to all transmitters. In the proposed setting, the achieved improvement in spectral efficiency (by reducing pilot overhead) may come at the expense of a more challenging channel estimation block at the receiver. To address this challenge and distinguish between different... 

We have investigated the influence of perovskite morphology on slow and fast charge transport in the perovskite solar cells. Solar cells with different perovskite cuboid sizes (50-300 nm) have been fabricated using various methylammonium iodide concentrations. Both the low-frequency capacitance and hysteresis are maximum for the cell with the largest perovskite grains (300 nm). The low-frequency capacitance is about three orders of magnitude greater than the intermediate frequency capacitance, indicating the great role of ions on the slow responses and hysteresis. The measurement of open-circuit voltage decay indicates that for the large grains of 300 nm up to 70% of Voc remains across the... 

Because of the importance of health-care processes to people life, researchers attempted to reduce death rates using risk-adjusted control charts. In this paper, the number of patients survived at least 30 days after a surgery is monitored using a novel risk-adjusted geometric control chart. In this chart, the patient risk is modeled using a logistic regression. The new scheme is proposed to be used in Phase-I where a likelihood ratio test derived from a change-point model is employed. The application of the proposed chart is demonstrated in a case study. Furthermore, through simulation studies, it is shown that the proposed control chart is more effective in terms of power than the chart... 

Let R be a non-commutative ring. The commuting graph of R denoted by Λ (R), is a graph with vertex set R Z(R), and two distinct vertices a and b are adjacent if ab = ba. In this paper we investigate some properties of Λ(R), whenever R is a finite semisimple ring. For any finite field F, we obtain minimum degree, maximum degree and clique number of Λ(M n (F)). Also it is shown that for any two finite semisimple rings R and S, if Λ(R) ≃ Λ(S), then there are commutative semisimple rings R1 and S1 and semisimple ring T such that R ≃T × R1, S ≃ T × S1 and |R1| = |S1|. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved  

This paper presents the results of an experimental study on the flexural behavior of ten 10 × 15 × 120 (cm) steel reinforced high strength concrete beams under deflection control loading conditions. Test variable includes volumetric percentage of steel fibers (0%, 1.5%, 3%, 4%, 5%). The plain concrete strength was 30MPa. The monotonic concentrated load was applied at the center of the beam, the relative deflection was measured, and demec points were used to determine curvature of the beam. Load-deflection and moment-curvature diagrams have been obtained and plotted for each beam individually. Test results indicate that higher fiber content considerably improves flexural behavior and provides... 

Channel equalization is a crucial part of the OFDM communications protocols, which in turn requires channel estimation. In this paper, we consider the problem of orthogonal pilot design in MIMO-OFDM systems for sparse channel estimation. The pilot design in MIMO scenarios compared to the conventional SISO case has the additional constraint that the capability of recovery should be uniformly provided for all single channels. For instance, perfect estimation of a channel at the cost of another one is not permitted. This requirement is even more significant in the emerging Massive-MIMO systems. Our pilot design is based on the compressed sensing technique of minimizing the coherence measure of... 

We report on fabrication of halide perovskite solar cells using a two-step spin-spray coating rout. The applied method is one of the most straight forward procedures for fabricating uniform stoichiometry and crystalline perovskite cells. To fabricate a high quality perovskite layer, various concentrations of methyl-ammonium iodide (CH3NH3I) were sprayed on a spin coated PbI2 layer using a simple airbrush gun. The characterization results indicate that the size of cuboid perovskite morphology depends on the concentration of methylammonium iodide in the spray procedure. The photovoltaic performance of the fabricated solar cells has been measured and a high dependency on the cuboid sizes was...