Digital Commons Network^™

English Learner Course Scheduling: Practice, Implications, And Aspirations, Aziza Simmons

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership Dissertations

Educating English learners (ELs) is a complex, multifaceted job that takes into account numerous constructs, some tangible and others not. For this endeavor to work optimally, all parties need to work closely and rely on each other with the end result in mind: offering a quality and equitable education to ELs that addresses their academic and language needs and propels them to reach their full potential (Baecher, 2014; Dirocco, 1998). One influential factor is course scheduling for content and career areas (Minaya-Rowe, 2015). Using qualitative case study methodology, this dissertation investigates the current process for scheduling ELs through in-depth semi-structured …

Asymmetric Information Sharing In Dialysis Paratransit Using An Agency Approach, Mary Lind, Rhonda Hensley

Center for Advanced Transportation Mobility

Dialysis patient transit services presents an agency problem (Eisenhardt, 1989) where the county paratransit operator is the agent that provides the principal, the dialysis center, transport of dialysis patients to their centers under conditions of incomplete and asymmetric information. The agent (paratransit) collects riders in need of paratransit services for doctor appointments (Social Service and Elder Services), dialysis appointments (principal), and other transit needs under conditions of incomplete and asymmetric information where the pickups are scheduled with a limited number of vehicles. Asymmetric scheduling information between the dialysis centers (principal) in a county, the para-transit authority (agent), and the patient’s …

Large-Scale Non-Linear Dynamic Optimization For Combining Applications Of Optimal Scheduling And Control, Logan Daniel Beal

Theses and Dissertations

Optimization has enabled automated applications in chemical manufacturing such as advanced control and scheduling. These applications have demonstrated enormous benefit over the last few decades and continue to be researched and refined. However, these applications have been developed separately with uncoordinated objectives. This dissertation investigates the unification of scheduling and control optimization schemes. The current practice is compared to early-concept, light integrations, and deeper integrations. This quantitative comparison of economic impacts encourages further investigation and tighter integration. A novel approach combines scheduling and control into a single application that can be used online. This approach implements the discrete-time paradigm from …

Multi-Robot Coordination And Scheduling For Deactivation & Decommissioning, Sebastian A. Zanlongo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Large quantities of high-level radioactive waste were generated during WWII. This waste is being stored in facilities such as double-shell tanks in Washington, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Due to the dangerous nature of radioactive waste, these facilities must undergo periodic inspections to ensure that leaks are detected quickly. In this work, we provide a set of methodologies to aid in the monitoring and inspection of these hazardous facilities. This allows inspection of dangerous regions without a human operator, and for the inspection of locations where a person would not be physically able to enter.

First, …

Methods To Support The Project Selection Problem With Non-Linear Portfolio Objectives, Time Sensitive Objectives, Time Sensitive Resource Constraints, And Modeling Inadequacies, Neil C. Ranly

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force relies upon information production activities to gain insight regarding uncertainties affecting important system configuration and in-mission task execution decisions. Constrained resources that prevent the fulfillment of every information production request, multiple information requestors holding different temporal-sensitive objectives, non-constant marginal value preferences, and information-product aging factors that affect the value-of-information complicate the management of these activities. This dissertation reviews project selection research related to these issues and presents novel methods to address these complications. Quantitative experimentation results demonstrate these methods’ significance.

Labor Planning Outcomes: Systemic Management Models, Human Interactions, And Knowledge Sharing, Richard J. Tarpey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project takes a systemic approach to hospital labor planning and allocation rather than sub-optimizing the individual components of workload demand forecasting, scheduling, and staffing separately. The research considers all three components within their interdependent, dynamic, cyclical systemic nature to develop a better labor planning and allocation cycle (LPAC) management model across the various subsystems of the hospital. We used an Action Design Research (ADR) method to the guided emergence of innovative artifacts – Systemic LPAC Management Model and LPAC Performance Metrics – that we evaluate and improve through interventions in situ with practitioners. The Systemic LPAC Management Model leveraged …

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 …

Optimization Methods For Predictive Maintenance Scheduling Of Building Heating/Cooling Equipment With Performance Decay, Yaqing Wu, Christos T. Maravelias, Yuqiu Jiang, Jingduo Fan, Michael J. Wenzel, Elbsat N. Mohammad, Robert D. Turney

International High Performance Buildings Conference

While various models and methods have been proposed for operating and controlling building heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, equipment decay (e.g., chiller tube fouling or boiler scaling), which results in lower energy efficiency and higher cost, has received limited attention. Accordingly, in this paper, we present an optimization model (mixed-integer linear programming, MILP) for predictive maintenance of HVAC systems with sufficient thermal energy storage (TES). We simultaneously consider the operation and maintenance schedule because of their close mutual interdependence. In addition, a method to accurately approximate equipment operation is provided for long-term scheduling. The proposed model offers decisions …

Integrated Scheduling And Control In Discrete-Time With Dynamic Parameters And Constraints, Logan Beal, Damon Petersen, David R. Grimsman, Sean Warnick, John Hedengren

Faculty Publications

Integrated scheduling and control (SC) seeks to unify the objectives of the various layers of optimization in manufacturing. This work investigates combining scheduling and control using a nonlinear discrete-time formulation, utilizing the full nonlinear process model throughout the entire horizon. This discrete-time form lends itself to optimization with time-dependent constraints and costs. An approach to combined SC is presented, along with sample pseudo-binary variable functions to ease the computational burden of this approach. An initialization strategy using feedback linearization, nonlinear model predictive control, and continuous-time scheduling optimization is presented. The formulation is applied with a generic continuous stirred tank reactor …

Implementation Of Industry Technology Into The Construction Management Department, Kristen D. Forster

Construction Management

With technology being one of the fastest growing items in the construction industry it is important to keep on top of what is utilized most commonly. To fully prepare graduates for the work force, the Construction Management Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo needs to focus efforts on supplying students with the most commonly used industry technologies. Utilizing these programs in the current curriculum will ensure that graduates from the Construction Management Department are prepared to take on the work force with the most relevant software under their belts. Students who understand how to use these industry sanctioned technologies …

San Pedro Roman Catholic Primary School Photovoltaic Project (Belize), John Angelo M. Pezzini

Construction Management

In December 2016, the California Polytechnic State University National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) Student Chapter, along with Construction Management faculty and alumni/industry members, installed a photovoltaic system in San Pedro, Belize. This student-led team won the Student Passport Initiative grant from ELECTRI International, with the purpose of designing and constructing a photovoltaic system for the San Pedro Roman Catholic Primary School, in order to reduce dependence on the grid, encourage carbon neutrality, and aim for net-zero energy consumption. This paper will discuss the preconstruction tasks associated with the project, focusing mainly on maintaining the schedule, the installation of the system …

Savecase, Matthew Napoli

Program of Industrial Design Capstones

Concept for Reducing Harmful Smartphone Use & Enhancing Productivity

Implementation Of Industry Technology Into The Construction Management Department, Kristen D. Forster

Construction Management

With technology being one of the fastest growing items in the construction industry it is important to keep on top of what is utilized most commonly. To fully prepare graduates for the work force, the Construction Management Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo needs to focus efforts on supplying students with the most commonly used industry technologies. Utilizing these programs in the current curriculum will ensure that graduates from the Construction Management Department are prepared to take on the work force with the most relevant software under their belts. Students who understand how to use these industry sanctioned technologies …

Poly Canyon Observation Deck, Jordan H. Morofsky

Construction Management

The Poly Canyon Observation Deck is a project that I have been moving through preconstruction for the past year. It started as a solo project but quickly evolved into an interdisciplinary project involving two architectural engineers and myself. Together we developed a project proposal that we presented to Cal Poly Facilities along with our building permit application. They have approved our proposal and have awarded us a provisional building permit which will be approved after they review the 100% construction documents. We have been working the past two quarters to finalize the design, select materials, and perform a complete structural …

Effects Of Incorporating Patient Acuity Into The Rn Assignment Process, Melissa L. Forton

Evidence-Based Practice Project Reports

As the largest sector of healthcare, nurses are the primary providers of patient care. By 2025, it is estimated that there will be a shortage of over 250,000 registered nurses (RNs) (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2011). Factors contributing to the nursing shortage include increased complexity of patients and decreased staffing that leads to decreased job satisfaction (Fox & Abrahamson, 2009). Over half of neonatal intensive care nurses reported missing at least one nursing task per shift when staffing was inadequate or patient acuity was high (TubbsCooley, Pickler, Younger, & Mark, 2015). The purpose of this evidence-based practice (EBP) …

From Surviving To Thriving: Top Tips For Newer Chairs, Ethan Krase, Gian Pagnucci

Academic Chairpersons Conference Proceedings

This session shares concrete strategies for helping department chairs navigate common problems more effectively and efficiently. With attention to managing email, handling complaints, constructing schedules, building relationships, and working with upper administration, the presenters offer practical tips to help newer chairs succeed.

The Developmental Test Scheduling Problem, Joseph E. Schoenbeck

Theses and Dissertations

Developmental testing of aircraft systems in the United States Air Force requires a complex set of resources for each test. The optimal scheduling of those resources is the job of the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base. With more than 20 different Combined Task Forces requesting resources for roughly 300 flying missions each week, manual scheduling is a difficult task. The current process takes a team of schedulers several days to get a workable result from which they can start tailoring the final schedule. While concepts and techniques can be taken from industry scheduling problems, the body of …

Scheduling In Mapreduce Clusters, Chen He

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

MapReduce is a framework proposed by Google for processing huge amounts of data in a distributed environment. The simplicity of the programming model and the fault-tolerance feature of the framework make it very popular in Big Data processing.

As MapReduce clusters get popular, their scheduling becomes increasingly important. On one hand, many MapReduce applications have high performance requirements, for example, on response time and/or throughput. On the other hand, with the increasing size of MapReduce clusters, the energy-efficient scheduling of MapReduce clusters becomes inevitable. These scheduling challenges, however, have not been systematically studied.

The objective of this dissertation is to …

Training Student Workers For Cross-Departmental Success In An Academic Library: A New Model, Kindra Becker-Redd, Kirsten Lee, Caroline Skelton

Library Staff Publications

Many academic libraries rely on a student workforce for everyday operations, interacting with patrons, and assistance with larger projects. Training these students for such multifaceted and customer-service-focused positions can be a challenge. This article traces an overhaul of training procedures made during the transition to a centralized, services desk workflow. All aspects of training a large student workforce, from planning and presentation to assessment, are outlined. Interactive group sessions and peer-to-peer reinforcement of procedures have proven to be most effective in training student workers for varied roles in an academic library.

A Multi-Method Scheduling Framework For Medical Staff, Wael Rashwan, John Fowler, Amr Arisha

Conference Papers

Hospital planning teams are always concerned with optimizing staffing and scheduling decisions in order to improve hospital performance, patient experience, and staff satisfaction. A multi-method approach including data analytics, modeling and simulation, machine learning, and optimization is proposed to provide a framework for smart and applicable solutions for staffing and shift scheduling. Factors regarding patients, staff, and hospitals are considered in the decision. This framework is piloted using the Emergency Department(ED) of a leading university hospital in Dublin. The optimized base staffing patterns and shift schedules actively contributed to solving ED overcrowding problem and reduced the average waiting time for …

Smartphone-Based Self Rescue System For Disaster Rescue, Xitong Zhou

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Recent ubiquitous earthquakes have been leading to mass destruction of electrical power and cellular infrastructures, and deprive the innocent lives across the world. Due to the wide-area earthquake disaster, unavailable power and communication infrastructure, limited man-power and resources, traditional rescue operations and equipment are inefficient and time-consuming, leading to the golden hours missed. With the increasing proliferation of powerful wireless devices, like smartphones, they can be assumed to be abundantly available among the disaster victims and can act as valuable resources to coordinate disaster rescue operations. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based self-rescue system, also referred to as RescueMe, …

Minimizing Total Number Of Tardy Jobs In Two-Stage Flow Shop Using Simulated Annealing And Column Generation, Shashwot Uprety

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research considers a scheduling problem where jobs need to be grouped in batches and scheduled in a two-stage flow shop with batch processing machines. The jobs are batched in such a way that machine capacity is not violated. The batches are scheduled in such a way to reduce the total number of tardy jobs. The problem under study, denoted as F2 | Batch | ΣUi in scheduling literature, has received less attention. The problem under study is NP-hard. Consequently, commercial solvers used to solve mathematical formulations to find an optimal solution require prohibitively long run times.

In this thesis, …

A Framework To Audit Scheduling Events In The Linux Operating System, Edward G. Hudgins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Soft real-time systems have responsiveness requirements that are desirable but not critical for operational effectiveness. This Thesis describes a new scheduler logging framework named "Integrated Process Scheduler Archiver" (IPSA) intended to assist with this analysis. Due to human sensitivity to interface delays on gesture-driven devices, mobile devices are a common case of soft-real time systems. Mobile systems generally do not incorporate real-time schedulers, but instead utilize over-provisioning and a variety of scheduling heuristics to generally provide acceptable responsiveness. These devices are highly multi-programmed Energy limitations on mobile limit the extent of overprovisioning, thereby increasing the sensitivity of system behavior to …

Device-To-Device Communication In 5g: Towards Efficient Scheduling, Jana Fayek, Mohamad Aoude, Mohamad Raad, Raad Raad

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

5G wireless networks are expected to carry large traffic volumes due to the growth of mobile devices and the increasing demand for high data rates from applications. Device to device communication is one of the suggested technologies to support this increasing load and enhance the capacity of networks. However, the implementation of D2D communication reveals many barriers that include communication scheduling, for which the architecture remains complex and obscure. In this paper, an overview of the available literature on the implementation of networks supporting D2D communication is presented, emphasizing the complexity of the offered solutions. This paper also offers a …

Channel Autocorrelation-Based Dynamic Slot Scheduling For Body Area Networks, Hongyun Zhang, Farzad Safaei, Le Chung Tran

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

As a promising technology in the context of m-health and e-medical, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have a stringent requirement in terms of transmission reliability. Meanwhile, the wireless channel in WBANs is prone to deep fading due to multiple reasons, such as shadowing by the body, reflection, diffraction, and interference. To meet the challenge in transmission reliability, the dynamic slot scheduling (DSS) methods have attracted considerable interest in recent years. DSS method does not require extra hardware or software overhead on the sensor side. Instead, the hub optimizes the time-division multiple access slots by selecting the best permutation at the …

Impact Of Critical Path Method (Cpm) Of Scheduling On On-Time Completion Of Transportation Projects, Fahim Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

This study addresses the effectiveness of Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling on project delivery. Specifically, the on-time completion of projects with and without a CPM schedule is explored. The paper uses data from 2,097 South Carolina transportation projects let after February 2008 and substantially completed by August 2015. The delay analysis uses the original contract completion date as well as the completion date adjusted by change orders. Chi-Squared tests are used to examine the relationship between CPM scheduled projects and delayed projects, and t-tests are used to compare the mean delay (in days) between CPM scheduled and unscheduled projects. The …

Effects Of Class Scheduling And Student Achievement On State Testing, Elizabeth Anne Childers

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The purpose of this research study was to determine the effectiveness of four different class schedules on students' academic achievement on end-of-course testing and whether a specific class schedule is more conducive to student academic achievement on state-mandated standardized tests. Georgia Department of Education provided archived public data for the 2009-2012 school years for a high school with an approximate population of 1,400 students. This high school implemented different class schedules; a 4x4 block schedule, A/B block schedule, a mixed block and traditional period day, or traditional period schedule. The main research question was focused on students' state standardized end-of-course …