Comparison of methods for estimating loss from water storage by evaporation and impacts on reservoir management

Reservoirs are the key infrastructure of water resources management. A controlling variable of reservoir operation is evaporation, which in semi‐arid and arid regions may consume a large fraction of reservoir storage annually. This paper assesses the role of evaporation and the choice of evaporation methods on reservoir operation. The operation of the reservoir is calculated with the standard operation policy (SOP). Several efficiency criteria are employed to rank the evaporation‐calculation methods with the technique for the order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The method presented in this paper is illustrated by applying its application to Karkheh reservoir, the largest in Iran.     

Toward a general framework for jointly processor-workload empirical modeling

The Journal of Supercomputing - The complexity of state-of-the-art processor architectures and their consequent vast design spaces have made it difficult and time-consuming to explore the best...     

Design and implementation of a navigation control system for slag pot carriers based on combination of active RFID and WiFi technologies

The supervision and management of staff and equipment will always result in performance enhancement. In Mobarakeh Steel Company which is located in Iran, the produced slag at electric arc furnaces was transported using slag pot carriers. In the absence of a control system to supervise the performance of these vehicles, managing replacement of slag pots was a challenging and difficult task. Although maintenance of slag pot carriers was expensive and needed specific expertise, there was no online supervisory system to avoid probable failures in vehicles. In order to improve the performance of the supervisory system of the slag pot carriers, a WiFi network was developed in the trajectory of slag pot carriers. Furthermore, the installed RFID-tags alongside the path of the travelling carriers have been read via the RFID-readers installed on the slag pot carriers. Then, the position and speed of the slag pot carriers were calculated and transmitted to the developed software. The performance of the slag pot carriers was improved by implementing the proposed new technology. In addition, stop time rate caused by obstruction of the roads was reduced by 80%. Thereby, systematic, efficient, and optimized slag pot replacement and personnel rotation schedules were developed and the desired productivity was achieved..     

On the plastic analysis of concentrically braced frames with shear panel,obtaining predetermined collapse mechanism

Conventional design methods do not ensure that the desired collapse mechanism is developed at target displacement. In this paper, a case study is presented to analyze concentrically braced frames with steel shear panel (CBFSP). Also, extensive investigation in the failure modes are made, to have the global yielding mode at the final state. For this purpose, each of one‐story, three‐story, six‐story and nine‐story CBFSP models were decomposed into three parts where the members' closed‐form equations of internal forces were identified and superimposed. On the basis of the kinematic theorem of plastic collapse, the possible mechanisms and the related energy equations were defined to estimate the lateral load multiplier. First, the shear panels, columns, vertical and horizontal boundary elements were designed using the values of internal forces and seismic loads. Next, sections of the beams and braces were selected by constraining, where the mechanism equilibrium curve of the desired mechanism had to be placed below the others within the admissible roof displacement. Finally, for assessment of the precision of the method, results of the pushover analysis of the finite element models were compared with the theoretical ones. The findings show that, despite more effort for design, the investigated method is reliable and satisfactory. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hybrid redundancy approach to increase the reliability of FPGA based speed controller core for high speed train

With the progress of the railway technology, the railway transportation is becoming more efficient, intelligent and faster. High speed trains, as a major part of the railway transportation, are engaged with passenger＇s safety, and therefore the reliability issue is very important in such vital systems. In this paper, a dependable speed controller core based on FPGA has been developed for high speed trains. To improve the reliability and mitigate single upset faults on basic speed controller, this paper proposes a new effective method which is based on hardware redundancy. In the proposed Hybrid Dual Duplex Redundancy （HDDR） method, the original controller is quadruplicated and correct values are voted through the comparator and error detection unit. We have analyzed the proposed system with Reliability, Availability, Mean time to failure and Security （RAMS） theory in order to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed scheme. Theoretical analysis shows that the Mean Time To Failure （MTTF） of the proposed system is 2.5 times better than the traditional Triple Modular Redundancy （TMR）. Furthermore, the fault injection experimental results reveal that the capability of tolerating Single Event Upsets （SEUs） in the proposed method increases up to 7.5 times with respect to a regular speed controller.     

An efficient architecture for designing reverse converters based on a general three-moduli set

In this paper, a high-speed, low-cost and efficient design of reverse converter for the general three-moduli set {2^α, 2^β − 1, 2^β + 1} where α < β is presented. The simple proposed architecture consists of a carry save adder (CSA) and a modulo adder. As a result it can be efficiently implemented in VLSI circuits. The values of α and β are set in order to provide the desired dynamic range and also to obtain a balanced moduli set. Based on the above, two new moduli sets {2^n+k, 2²ⁿ − 1, 2²ⁿ + 1} and {2²ⁿ⁻¹, 2²ⁿ⁺¹ − 1, 2²ⁿ⁺¹ + 1}, which are the special cases of the moduli set {2^α, 2^β − 1, 2^β + 1} are proposed. The reverse converters for these new moduli sets are derived from the proposed general architecture with better performance compared to the other reverse converters for moduli sets with similar dynamic range.     

Numerical solutions for linear system of first-order fuzzy differential equations with fuzzy constant coefficients

In this paper, a novel iterative method is proposed to obtain approximate-analytical solutions for the linear systems of first-order fuzzy differential equations (FDEs) with fuzzy constant coefficients (FCCs) while avoiding the complexities of eigen-value computations. A theorem for the convergence and the validity of the approach is also presented in detail. Numerical experiments and comparisons with exact solutions reveal that the proposed method is capable of generating accurate results.     

Pseudo equality algebras: revision

Recently Jenei introduced a new structure called equality algebras which is inspired by ideas of BCK-algebras with meet. These algebras were generalized by Jenei and Kóródi to pseudo equality algebras which are aimed to find a connection with pseudo BCK-algebras with meet. We show that such pseudo equality algebras are an equality algebras. Therefore, we define a new type of algebras, called JK-algebras, which more precisely reflects the relation to pseudo BCK-algebras with meet in the sense of Kabziński and Wroński. We describe congruences via normal closed deductive systems, and we show that the variety of JK-algebras is subtractive, congruence distributive and congruence permutable.     

Optimal control of viscous Burgers equation via an adaptive nonmonotone Barzilai–Borwein gradient method

An adaptive nonmonotone spectral gradient method for the solution of distributed optimal control problem (OCP) for the viscous Burgers equation is presented in a black-box framework. Regarding the implicit function theorem, the OCP is transformed into an unconstrained nonlinear optimization problem (UNOP). For solving UNOP, an adaptive nonmonotone Barzilai–Borwein gradient method is proposed in which to make a globalization strategy, first an adaptive nonmonotone strategy which properly controls the degree of nonmonotonicity is presented and then is incorporated into an inexact line search approach to construct a more relaxed line search procedure. Also an adjoint technique is used to effectively evaluate the gradient. The low memory requirement and the guaranteed convergence property make the proposed method quite useful for large-scale OCPs. The efficiency of the presented method is supported by numerical experiments.     

No-reference image quality assessment based on localized discrete cosine transform for JPEG compressed images

In this paper, we propose a new no-reference image quality assessment for JPEG compressed images. In contrast to the most existing approaches, the proposed method considers the compression processes for assessing the blocking effects in the JPEG compressed images. These images have blocking artifacts in high compression ratio. The quantization of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients is the main issue in JPEG algorithm to trade-off between image quality and compression ratio. When the compression ratio increases, DCT coefficients will be further decreased via quantization. The coarse quantization causes blocking effect in the compressed image. We propose to use the DCT coefficient values to score image quality in terms of blocking artifacts. An image may have uniform and non-uniform blocks, which are respectively associated with the low and high frequency information. Once an image is compressed using JPEG, inherent non-uniform blocks may become uniform due to quantization, whilst inherent uniform blocks stay uniform. In the proposed method for assessing the quality of an image, firstly, inherent non-uniform blocks are distinguished from inherent uniform blocks by using the sharpness map. If the DCT coefficients of the inherent non-uniform blocks are not significant, it indicates that the original block was quantized. Hence, the DCT coefficients of the inherent non-uniform blocks are used to assess the image quality. Experimental results on various image databases represent that the proposed blockiness metric is well correlated with the subjective metric and outperforms the existing metrics.