Engineering Commons^™

Meal Duration: Implications For Restaurant Revenue Management, Dale F. Billings

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A comprehensive revenue management strategy addressing space, product, price and time, has been shown to increase profits within the hospitality sector. While the literature shows that the restaurant industry has frequently addressed space, product, and price when looking at financial strategy, the effect of the variable of time on revenue generation has not been adequately studied. Restaurants shy away from the practice of using time as a commodity, particularly regarding meal duration, due to fears of reducing customer satisfaction.

This project explores the use of time as a commodity in restaurant revenue management. In particular, it examines consumers’ feelings about …

Feasibility Of Collaborative Alliance Association For Non-Competitive Small Business Contractors, Brody Allen Gill

Construction Management

Small business construction contracting firms around the country struggle with growing their business successfully. This is a result of unknown results from new business practices and few resources to initiate programs that can improve productivity and efficiency. A simple solution could give small business construction contractors the opportunity to share ideas, compare company analytics and promote professional networking in a non-competitive, collaborative alliance. The goal of this project is to determine if a collaborative alliance association using data benchmarking would be an effective solution for non-competitive small business contractors to grow their businesses. Thereafter being proven effective, is such an …

Automation Of Data Analysis In Formula 1, Adam Joseph Mourad, Prescott Jeanne Delzell, Patrick Conner Mccabe

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This paper explores economic solutions for Formula 1 racing companies who are interested in data visualization tools. The research was conducted on the current development of data gathering, data visualization, and data interpretation in Formula 1 racing. It was found that a large chunk of racing companies within the league needs an affordable, effective, and automated visualization tool for data interpretation. As data collection in Formula 1 arises, the need for faster and more powerful software increases. Racing companies profit off-brand exposure and the more a racing team wins, the more exposure they receive. The goal of the paper focuses …

Hvac System Energy Audit For Leverett Elementary School, Connor Smalling

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Leverett Elementary School is located in Fayetteville, AR. The school needs significant upgrades to its infrastructure. The Fayetteville Public School District has voted to pursue an Energy Services Performance Contract (ESPC) in order to finance the desired upgrades to Leverett Elementary, among other schools in the district.

The scope of this thesis was to perform an energy audit on the existing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. By using an energy modeling software, eQuest, the building and the existing base system were modeled to determine utility consumption. Three different HVAC system alternatives were analyzed against the base system by …

The High Rise Storage System, Justin H. Harmon

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Interdisciplinary Student Competition For California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo, Forest G. Gobble

Construction Management

Cal Poly has a reputation for producing some of the best qualified graduates in their respective fields of study. While this is very important, curricular activities involving collaboration between students within the same college are limited (excluding same major). Beyond that, collaboration opportunities across colleges are even more rare. When graduates enter the workforce, many are thrust into highly collaborative environments across various disciplines. Industry professionals have shown a strong desire for young people who have had exposure to realistic problems and experience working with other professions outside of their own field of expertise. The question needing answering is, would …

The Need For A Real Estate Development Capstone Course, Will Robert Kieckhefer

Construction Management

Cal Poly has extremely well-known programs in Construction Management, Business, Engineering, and Architecture. All of these programs have contributed multiple leaders to the building industry every year yet have neglected to integrate the different disciplines that overlap within the industry. The research the author has collected to support the need for a real estate development capstone course included in-person interviews, online research, personal experience, and team surveys. The research concluded the need for a real estate development capstone course that would integrate students from the school of Business, Architecture, and Construction Management. In order to build a successful project, all …

Exploration Of Implementation And Reporting Of Hours Of Work And Hours Of Rest Onboard Ships, Bikram Singh Bhatia

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Two Essays On Distribution, Fulfillment And Pricing Decisions For Retailers With E-Commerce Channel, Khosro Pichka

Theses and Dissertations

E-commerce has grown rapidly in the past decade. In 2015, e-commerce was accounted for 7.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S., which is massively higher than 0.2 percent in 1998 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2017). Worldwide e-commerce sales also show the same trend and reached $2.356 trillion in 2018 and are expected to grow steadily (Statista 2017). This trend has impacted major areas of operations management including supply chain management and revenue management. Today, e-commerce companies cannot satisfy their customers’ demand using traditional distribution systems. Therefore, retailers with e-commerce channels (e-tailers), cooperate with third party logistic service providers …

Generalized Relay Network Design And Collaborative Dispatching In Truckload Transportation, Amin Ziaeifar

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

The truckload industry faces a serious problem of high driver shortage and turnover rate which is typically around 100\%. Among the major causes of this problem are extended on-the-road times where drivers handle several truckload pickup and deliveries successively; non-regular schedules and get-home rates; and low utilization of drivers dedicated time. These are by-and-large consequences of the driver-to-load dispatching method, which is based on point-to-point dispatching or direct shipment from origin-to-destination, commonly employed in the industry. In this dissertation, we consider an alternative dispatching method that necessitates careful design of an underlying network. In this scheme, a truckload on its …

Big-Data Talent Analytics In The Public Sector: A Promotion And Firing Model Of Employees At Federal Agencies, Rabih Neouchi

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

Talent analytics is a relatively new area of focus to researchers working in analytics and data science. Talent Analytics has the potential to help companies make many informed critical decisions around talent acquisition, promotion and retention. This work investigates data science to predict “shiny star” employees in the U.S. public sector, defined as top-notch performers over the years of a given time span. Its scope falls within talent analytics, also called people analytics, a relatively new research area.

We clean a data set made available by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and present two models to predict the …

Identifying And Quantifying Personnel Skills Gaps, Martin Joseph Mckenney

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

One of the issues organizations face is identifying the required skills needed for a position and then evaluating whether their personnel have these skills or if there is a “skills gap”. The skills gap is the distance between the position requirements and the skills currently possessed by the worker in that position. While multiple models have been created over the years to address facets of the problem, none of them provide a comprehensive framework to clearly identify the required skills and worker qualifications and then evaluate the degree of similarity. A composite skills gap model has been developed using the …

A Comparison Of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, The Analytic Hierarchy Process, The Analytic Network Process, And New Hybrid Approaches For A Case Study Involving Radon, Jesse Ray Toepfer

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the use of three new combinational hybrid approaches to solve a rational decision problem. Even though Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the Analytic Network Process (ANP), are all long established theories, their practical applications continue to grow and generate new knowledge. As a case study approach, there exists a knowledge gap concerning the use of these MCDM methods in the area of environmental remediation, and more especially, in situations that involve radioactive materials. From this, and as borne out by the literature review discussed herein, a problem statement is thus …

Systems Approach To Evaluating Mih-Cp (Mobile Integrated Healthcare – Community Paramedicine): A Case Study Of East Baton Rouge Parish (Ebrp) Emergency Medical Services (Ems) Community Paramedicine Program Initiative, Oluwakemi Aiyedun

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study applied a holistic method of healthcare program assessment, known as systems approach, to evaluate the efficacy of the East Baton Rouge Parish (EBRP) EMS Community-integrated Health Program (CIHP). The author developed assessment metrics following the Quadruple Aim Framework: IHI (Institute for Healthcare Improvement) Triple Aim + Provider Experience.

Results showed that the CP program in this study delivers high ratings on patient experience and provided a 51% return on investment (ROI) through reduced emergency service utilization, ED visits and inpatient hospital admissions. However, findings did not demonstrate meaningful improvement in patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and self-efficacy …

A Study Of Onboarding And Turnover Mediating Variables In U.S. Air Force Officers, Brett S. Bowers

Theses and Dissertations

Employee retention, while always a concern in the workplace, has become a greater challenge for organizations in recent years. Today’s working class has displayed a propensity to change jobs more rapidly than previous generations, exacerbating not only turnover rates but also the costs associated with them (Frankel, 2016). This challenge is especially relevant to the United States Air Force, which has experienced difficulty retaining young officers in recent years. The problems resulting from this voluntary turnover are exceedingly impactful to the military command structure, as senior leaders must work their way up from the lowest ranks. As such, the Air …

Research On Double-Stack Container Transport Organization In International Multimodal Transport, Xi Zhu

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Operational Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Inferential, Sequential, And Adversarial Approaches, Andrew J. Keith

Theses and Dissertations

Modern security threats are characterized by a stochastic, dynamic, partially observable, and ambiguous operational environment. This dissertation addresses such complex security threats using operations research techniques for decision making under uncertainty in operations planning, analysis, and assessment. First, this research develops a new method for robust queue inference with partially observable, stochastic arrival and departure times, motivated by cybersecurity and terrorism applications. In the dynamic setting, this work develops a new variant of Markov decision processes and an algorithm for robust information collection in dynamic, partially observable and ambiguous environments, with an application to a cybersecurity detection problem. In the …

Systemic Risk In Financial Networks, Tathagata Banerjee

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I have used the network model based approach to study systemic risk in financial networks. In particular, I have worked on generalized extensions of the Eisenberg--Noe [2001] framework to account for realistic financial situations viz. pricing of corporate debt while accounting for network effects, asset liquidation mechanisms during fire sales, dynamic clearing and impact of contingent payments such as insurance and credit default swaps. First, I present formulas for the valuation of debt and equity of firms in a financial network under comonotonic endowments. I demonstrate that the comonotonic setting provides a lower bound to the price …

Computer Vision Machine Learning And Future-Oriented Ethics, Abagayle Lee Blank

Honors Projects

Computer Vision Machine Learning (CVML) in the application of facial recognition is currently being researched, developed, and deployed across the world. It is of interest to governments, technology companies, and consumers. However, fundamental issues remain related to human rights, error rates, and bias. These issues have the potential to create societal backlash towards the technology which could limit its benefits as well as harm people in the process. To develop facial recognition technology that will be beneficial to society in and beyond the next decade, society must put ethics at the forefront. Drawing on AI4People’s adaption of bioethics for AI, …

Machine Learning With Multi-Class Regression And Neural Networks: Analysis And Visualization Of Crime Data In Seattle, Erkin David George

Honors Projects

This article examines the implications of machine learning algorithms and models, and the significance of their construction when investigating criminal data. It uses machine learning models and tools to store, clean and analyze data that is fed into a machine learning model. This model is then compared to another model to test for accuracy, biases and patterns that are detected in between the experiments. The data was collected from data.seattle.gov and was published by the City of Seattle Data Portal and was accessed on September 17, 2018. This research will be looking into how machine learning models can be used …

Financial Feasibility Of Leed Certified Buildings For Developers And Investors, Erik P. Henriksen

Construction Management

This is a case study on a small to mid-size private equity firm that deals with real estate development as well as investment to find out the financial feasibility of LEED certified buildings in today’s building climate. Interviews with two investment analysts at this firm who are versed in LEED certification about how it is looked at in their company as well as the broader industry will give insights into the feasibility of developing or investing in environmentally friendly buildings. This impacts the real estate and construction industries due to the fact that developers and investors are often times a …

Effects Of Supplemental Bid Documentation, Alexis M. Bynum

Construction Management

As the complexity of construction projects increases, more work is being subcontracted out by general contractors who oversee the construction of the project. Research suggests that a variety of factors are impacting subcontractors when putting together a bid. These factors were considered in determining a proposed solution for simplifying the bid process. This case study attempts to analyze the bidding process of construction projects in order to improve the accuracy of bids. Traditionally, bid documents include plans and specifications. This study analyzes the effects of adding a scope of work, as ascertained by the general contractor for each trade, to …

Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Studying Spanish And Construction In Tandem, Daniel Joseph Eide

Construction Management

Does Spanish bilingualism have measurable fiscal value in the U.S. construction industry? Studying and becoming proficient in Spanish is feasible, affordable, and can be accomplished at Cal Poly in conjunction with a Construction Management major. In a dynamic industry that values versatile employees, where communication is key to success, the capability of speaking Spanish is a substantial value-add in the workforce. Using qualitative and quantitative data analysis, it is concluded that individuals who possess English and Spanish-speaking abilities in the U.S. construction industry can expect a 3 percent wage premium when compared to English-only speakers. This study weighs the costs …

Wireless Channel Characterization Based On Crowdsourced Data And Geographical Features, Rita Enami

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

To design and plan wireless communication systems, an accurate propagation estimate is required of a deployment region. Propagation prediction models consist of two types of fading: large-scale and small-scale fading. With large-scale fading, the path loss information is crucial for cell planning, coverage estimation, and optimization. With small-scale fading, the statistical fluctuation on the local variations of the average signal level can have a dramatic effect on protocol decisions and resulting performance. To obtain accurate estimates of both types of fading, typically field measurements are needed that use drive testing, which is expensive in terms of time and cost. Recently, …

Benchmarking Oecd Countries’ Sustainable Development Performance: A Goal-Specific Pca Approach, Shyam Lamichhane

Master's Theses

In this thesis, the current status of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries’ sustainable development performance towards reaching the recently announced 2030 Agenda (17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)) was investigated. Over 90 social, economic and environmental sustainability indicators were considered for the performance assessment of OECD countries towards reaching the targeted SDGs. The current weighted averaging approach used in the recent SDG Index and Dashboards Report was used as the benchmark and its limitations were discussed. To overcome the limitations, a novel Goal Specific Principal Component Analysis (GS-PCA) approach was proposed to create composite sustainability index …

Stability In Government, Emerging Technology, And Decentralized Economies: An Analysis Of Alternative Uses Of Cryptocurrencies, Mickayla Stogsdill

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Ecocar Mobility Challenge Communications Plan, Whitney M. Brothers

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Fashion Merchandising: An Augmented Reality, Naeha A. Sayed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a continuous and constant transformation in the field of Augmented Reality (AR), both in the Retail, and the Manufacturing sector. It has started to influence everything from fashion runway shows to online shopping. Consumers dynamics have shifted in the fashion industry, the ways becoming more dominant than the old observant ones- the simple buying experience no longer satisfies them. Due to the emergence of the new digital platforms and technological enhancements, the consumers are looking for more- be it a more exciting buying experience or more user interaction or more enhanced products. This technological change starts with the …

Essays On Time Series And Machine Learning Techniques For Risk Management, Michael Kotarinos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Capital Asset Pricing Model combined with the Sharpe ratio is a standard method for choosing assets for selection in a portfolio. However, this method has many structural issues and was designed for a time when high dimensional computing was in its infancy. An alternative to these methods using a mix of Multi-Level Time Series Clustering, the MACBETH algorithm and traditional time series techniques was constructed that minimized data loss and allow for customized portfolio construction for investors with different risk profiles and specialized investment needs. It was shown that these methods are adaptable to cloud computing environments and allow …

Knowledge Sharing And Creative Confidence In Promoting Employees’ Creative Behavior, Elnaz Dario

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of knowledge sharing and creative confidence on the relationship between organizations’ creative environment and employees’ creative behavior. This study individually assesses the relationship between factors from heterogeneous survey participant data and compares the result for two groups; engineers and non-engineers. A theoretical framework is adopted to explain how a creative climate stimulates an individual’s creative behavior and how this relationship is moderated and mediated by knowledge sharing and creative confidence. This is a relatively unexplored concept in the current literature. The results demonstrated that knowledge sharing and creative confidence significantly …