Sharif Digital Repository

Efficient location of medical services is an issue of paramount importance in healthcare strategic planning. In this research, a mathematical model is developed for the location of multi-service health centers, assuming probabilistic demand and service time. Since patients may be shifted to another service after receiving a service by doctors’ order, health system is considered a Jackson queueing network. We assume that patients have “probabilistic choice behavior” and the primary factors contributing to their choice of one center over another are their proximity to the center and the number of medical services offered by the center. The proposed mixed integer nonlinear programming model... 

Real-world, large-scale problems often have coefficient matrices with special structures that can be obtained by reordering their rows and columns. One fundamental problem in the field of combinatorial optimization is the Set Packing Problem (SPP), which takes on added significance in view of its far-reaching applications in routing and scheduling problems, scheduling surgical procedures, the winner determination problem, forestry, production management, etc. The coefficient matrix of this problem has low density (the number of 1’s is much less than the number of 0’s in the matrix); therefore, by reordering the matrix, one can aggregate its 1’s in order to exploit special structures like... 

This chapter at first proposes a framework to solve set covering problems (SCPs) with block-angular structures through solving their sub-problems and then develop the method for solving general SCPs without this structure. The proposed framework generates a guaranteed solution for the SCPs with block-angular structure based on a theorem which relates the optimal solution of the original problem to the optimal solutions of its sub-problems. Therefore, since sub-problems involve much fewer constraints and variables than the original problem, the complexity to solve the original SCP is much reduced. In addition, a method to exploit the block-angular structure of SCPs is proposed, using... 

This chapter at first proposes a framework to solve set covering problems (SCPs) with block-angular structures through solving their sub-problems and then develop the method for solving general SCPs without this structure. The proposed framework generates a guaranteed solution for the SCPs with block-angular structure based on a theorem which relates the optimal solution of the original problem to the optimal solutions of its sub-problems. Therefore, since sub-problems involve much fewer constraints and variables than the original problem, the complexity to solve the original SCP is much reduced. In addition, a method to exploit the block-angular structure of SCPs is proposed, using... 

The set covering problem (SCP) has quite a large coefficient matrix in practical problems, but due to its low density, most of its entries are zero. Drawing on this observation, some methods can be developed to exploit special structures of the coefficient matrix of an SCP in such a way that they contain smaller dense subproblems. Against this backdrop, in this paper, three structures, namely 'partitioned', 'semi-block angular', and 'block angular', are proposed. To begin with, some heuristic methods are presented to exploit these structures of the coefficient matrices of SCPs; then, by optimally solving the smaller subproblems of these structures, their solutions are used to solve the whole... 

In this paper, a decomposition technique based on constraint partitioning is developed to solve the crew pairing problem (CPP) which has an overriding importance in the airline industry as it determines the crew cost. The method is based on the observation that in large-scale problems, the constraints can be partitioned to some sub-problems which involve special subsets of variables. The resultant structure is called the 'partitioned structure'. Therefore, in the proposed method, first, a feasible solution is generated for a reduced CPP with a 'partitioned structure' through the optimal solutions of its sub-problems. Then, at each step, the feasible solution is improved through... 

In this paper, the effects of flame retardant fillers mixture, zinc borate and aluminum hydroxide, on polypropylene including various ratios of their accumulated concentrations, have been studied. Maleic anhydrate grafted polypropylene and calcium stearate have been used to increase filler-matrix interactions and filler dispersion in matrix. Effects of filler types and their concentrations on fire resistibility of different composite samples have been determined via limiting oxygen index test method. Effects of foregoing parameters on the mechanical properties of prepared samples were also investigated. Recorded data shows that adding polypropylene, containing aluminum anhydrate lump,... 

Using multiple antennas at the transmit and receive sides of a passive radar brings both the benefits of MIMO radar and passive radar. However one of the obstacles arisen in such configuration is the receive antennas placement in proper positions so that the radar performance is improved. Here we just consider the case of positioning one receiver among multiple illuminators of opportunity. Indeed it is a start for the solution of optimizing the geometry of the multiple receivers in a passive radar  

SbCl3 supported on montmorillonite K-10 is an efficient catalyst for the ring opening of epoxides with aromatic amines under solvent-free conditions and microwave irradiation to give the corresponding b-amino alcohols in high yields with high regioselectivity  

In this paper, we consider an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with wireless power transfer (WPT) where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based radar serves a group of energy-limited communication users in addition to its sensing functionality. In this architecture, the radar senses the environment in phase 1 (namely sensing phase) and mean-while, the communications users (nodes) harvest and store the energy from the radar transmit signal. The stored energy is then used for information transmission from the nodes to UAV in phase 2, i.e., uplink phase. Performance of the radar system depends on the transmit signal as well as the receive filter; the energy of the transmit... 

One of the important obstacles in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radars is the issue of designing proper transmit signals. Indeed, the capability of signal design is a significant advantage in MIMO radars, through which, the system can achieve much better performance. Many different aspects of this performance improvement have been considered yet, and the transmit signals have been designed to attain such goal, e.g., getting higher SNR or better detector's performance at the receiver. However, an important tool for evaluating the radar's performance is its ambiguity function. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmit signal design, in order to optimize the ambiguity function... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

It is a well known fact that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides improves the detection performance. However, in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, proper positioning of transmitters and receivers is a big challenge that can have significant influence on the performance of the overall system. In addition, determining the power of each transmitter under a total power constraint is a problem that should be solved in order to enhance the performance and coverage of such a system. In this paper, we design the Neyman-Pearson detector under the Rayleigh scatter model and use it to introduce a criterion for the antenna placement at both transmit and receive...