Digital Commons Network^™

Examining Reported Versus Actual Attendance In College Basketball Non-Conference Games: Do Scheduling Elements Make A Difference?, Nels Popp, Stephen Shapiro, Jason Simmons, Ryan Dastrup

Journal of Applied Sport Management

This study examines factors impacting sport attendance at non-conference NCAA Division I men’s college basketball games. Non-conference college basketball games are relatively unique because athletic department personnel control many of the scheduling variables related to event popularity, including opponent, game day, and start time. As such, it is valuable for administrators to know which elements might maximize event revenue. The current study is also unique because it examines both reported attendance (tickets disseminated) and actual attendance (tickets scanned at the venue). A total of 48 schools provided ticket scan rate data for their non-conference home basketball games over three seasons …

Utilization Of Integer Programming For Scheduling Maintenance At Nuclear Power Plants, Timothy Gallacher

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis develops a thought that naturally explores three specific motifs for solving the complexities of scheduling maintenance at Nuclear Power Plants (NPP). The first chapter of this paper will develop the initial thought around creating a schedule for a given work week, including all the various constraints inherent to this problem. Such constraints include but are not limited to personnel availability, allowable component out-of-service time, and the Plant Risk Assessment. The objective function being to minimize the total cost of worker’s compensation for that given week.

The second chapter addresses the question of whether this simple schedule can be …

Heuristics For Lagrangian Relaxation Formulations For The Unit Commitment Problem, Stephen Opeyemi Fatokun

Doctoral Dissertations

The expansion of distributed energy resources (DER), demand response (DR), and virtual bidding in many power systems and energy markets are creating new challenges for unit commitment (UC) and economic dispatch (ED) techniques. Instead of a small number of traditionally large generators, the power system resource mix is moving to one with a high percentage of a large number of small units. These can increase the number of similar or identical units, leading to chattering (switching back and forth among committed units between iterations). This research investigates alternative and scalable ways of increasing the high penetration of these resources.

First, …

Quality And Productivity Improvements In Additive Manufacturing, Huseyin Kose

Doctoral Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a relatively new manufacturing technology compared to the traditional manufacturing methods. Even though AM processes have many advantages, they also have a series of challenges that need to be addressed to adapt this technology for a wide range of applications and mass production.

AM faces a number of challenges, including the absence of methods/models for determining whether AM is the best manufacturing process for a given part. The first study of this thesis proposes a framework for choosing specific AM processes by considering the complexity level of a part. It has been proven that the method …

Zone-Based Manufacturing, Abhay Rajendra Bajpai

Masters Theses

The biggest improvement possible with productivity and profit in a manufacturing environment is to decrease the production time or cycle time and increase the takt time without any significant or no loss to product quality. But this could come at a cost of unequal work distribution if it is a people-based manufacturing process. This paper provides the best possible schedule by using a heuristic model that gives an optimal schedule. Based on jobs precedence the schedule is made to have the least possible makespan for the process at any given station in an assembly line. Furthermore, the objective is to …

An Efficient Partial-Order Characterization Of Admissible Actions For Real-Time Scheduling Of Sporadic Tasks, Saajid Al Haque

Masters Theses

In many scheduling problems involving tasks with multiple deadlines, there is typically a large degree of flexibility in determining which tasks to serve at each time step. Given a cost function it is often possible to cast a scheduling problem as an optimization problem to obtain the most suitable schedule. However, in several applications, especially when the schedule has to be computed in-line or periodically adjusted, the cost function may not be completely known a priori but only partially. For example, in some applications only the cost of the current allocation of resources to the tasks could be available. Under …

Joint Optimization Of Allocation And Release Policy Decisions For Surgical Block Time Under Uncertainty, Mina Loghavi

Doctoral Dissertations

The research presented in this dissertation contributes to the growing literature on applications of operations research methodology to healthcare problems through the development and analysis of mathematical models and simulation techniques to find practical solutions to fundamental problems facing nearly all hospitals.

In practice, surgical block schedule allocation is usually determined regardless of the stochastic nature of case demand and duration. Once allocated, associated block time release policies, if utilized, are often simple rules that may be far from optimal. Although previous research has examined these decisions individually, our model considers them jointly. A multi-objective model that characterizes financial, temporal, …

Heuristic Solution For Separated Manufacturing Process, James Dee Davis

Masters Theses

Downtime is a major issue for manufactures. Downtime may occur from breakdowns, quality issues, lack of manpower, lack of materials, or in this case a lack of storage containers. A manufacturing system was studied that consists of an injection machine that supplies two assembly lines. The injection machine suffered from frequent downtime from lack of containers. The process was analyzed for root cause of downtime. After analysis of the system it was found that the injection process had high variability in production quantity and quality. The scheduling scheme called for production until all available containers were full regardless of actual …

Optimizing Boat Hull And Deck Mold Storage Scheduling With Linear Programming, Tron Bjorn Dareing

Masters Theses

With a wide range of products, Sea Ray uses a vast amount of large boat molds for each of the different boat models. Storing and transporting these molds can be an issue with introducing high variability in the production process. One of the largest problems deals with the utilization of the employees’ time with the large amount of boat production. Having the boat molds being ready for production is a critical part of the manufacturing of quality boats. There is non-value added time spent on preparing the molds for the lamination process and storing them in various areas. This problem …

East Tennessee Children's Hospital Lean, Eddie D. Eatherly, Catherine Julson, Kelsey Tjader, Jack Smodic, Lanier Loftin

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.