Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Quantitative Methods For Total Lifecycle Risk Likelihood And Impact Assessment In Sustainable Product Design Decision Making, Christian Enyoghasi

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Sustainable products promise significant economic, environmental, and societal benefits. Numerous methods are available for use during the new product development process to identify alternate product designs that optimize sustainability performance. Once any such design is selected and the product is launched, many uncertainties are likely to affect its performance over the total lifecycle. Such uncertainties give rise to risks that can influence the overall product sustainability performance. However, comprehensive quantitative methods to evaluate the likelihood or the impact of different risks to enable sustainable product design decision making are lacking.

This research aims to address this gap by developing a …

Balancing Trade-Offs In One-Stage Production With Processing Time Uncertainty, Jingjing You

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Stochastic production scheduling faces three challenges, first the inconsistencies among key performance indicators (KPIs), second the trade-offs between the expected return and the risk for a portfolio of KPIs, and third the uncertainty in processing times. Based on two inconsistent KPIs of total completion time (TCT) and variance of completion times (VCT), we propose our trade-off balancing (ToB) heuristic for one-stage production scheduling. Through comprehensive case studies, we show that our ToB heuristic with preference =0.0:0.1:1.0 efficiently and effectively addresses the three challenges. Moreover, our trade-off balancing scheme can be generalized to balance a number of …

Trade-Off Balancing For Stable And Sustainable Operating Room Scheduling, Amin Abedini

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

The implementation of the mandatory alternative payment model (APM) guarantees savings for Medicare regardless of participant hospitals ability for reducing spending that shifts the cost minimization burden from insurers onto the hospital administrators. Surgical interventions account for more than 30% and 40% of hospitals total cost and total revenue, respectively, with a cost structure consisting of nearly 56% direct cost, thus, large cost reduction is possible through efficient operation management. However, optimizing operating rooms (ORs) schedules is extraordinarily challenging due to the complexities involved in the process. We present new algorithms and managerial guidelines to address the problem of OR …

Regression Analysis Of Factors Impacting Problem Solving Engagement Within Lean Systems Implementation, David M. Parsley Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Organizations around the world have attempted to implement the concepts of the Toyota Production System (TPS), commonly referred to as Lean, with limited sustainable success. The central principles of TPS, continuous improvement and respect for people, are grounded in the Japanese values of Monozukuri and Hitozukuri. Monozukuri deals with creating or making a product, while Hitozukuri conveys the idea of developing people through learning. In order for organizations to adopt these values they must have a system that engages employees at all levels in applying problem solving to improve their work. This research uses organizational assessments obtained from a variety …

Adaptive Scheduling For Operating Room Management, Honghan Ye

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

The perioperative process in hospitals can be modelled as a 3-stage no-wait flow shop. The utilization of OR units and the average waiting time of patients are related to makespan and total completion time, respectively. However, minimizations of makespan and total completion time are NP-hard and NP-complete. Consequently, achieving good effectiveness and efficiency is a challenge in no-wait flow shop scheduling. The average idle time (AIT) and current and future idle time (CFI) heuristics are proposed to minimize makespan and total completion time, respectively. To improve effectiveness, current idle times and future idle times are taken into consideration …

Forecasting The Workload With A Hybrid Model To Reduce The Inefficiency Cost, Xinwei Pan

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Time series forecasting and modeling are challenging problems during the past decades, because of its plenty of properties and underlying correlated relationships. As a result, researchers proposed a lot of models to deal with the time series. However, the proposed models such as Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) only describe part of the properties of time series. In this thesis, we introduce a new hybrid model integrated filter structure to improve the prediction accuracy. Case studies with real data from University of Kentucky HealthCare are carried out to examine the superiority of our model. Also, …

An Efficient Heuristic To Balance Trade-Offs Between Utilization And Patient Flowtime In Operating Room Management, Feidi Dang

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Balancing trade-offs between production cost and holding cost is critical for production and operations management. Utilization of an operating room affects production cost, which relates to makespan, and patient flowtime affects holding cost. There are trade-offs between two objectives, to minimize makespan and to minimize flowtime. However, most existing constructive heuristics focus only on single-objective optimization. In the current literature, NEH is the best constructive heuristic to minimize makespan, and LR heuristic is the best to minimize flowtime. In this thesis, we propose a current and future deviation (CFD) heuristic to balance trade-offs between makespan and flowtime minimizations. Based on …

Adaptive Multi-Objective Operating Room Planning With Stochastic Demand And Case Times, Vivek Reddy Gunna

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

The operating room (OR) is accountable for most hospital admissions and is one of the most cost and work intensive areas in the hospital. From recent trends, we discover an unexpected parallel increase in expenditure and waiting time. Therefore, improving OR planning has become obligatory, particularly regarding utilization, and service level. Significant challenges in OR planning are the high variations in demand, processing times of surgical specialties, the trade-off between the objectives, and control of OR performance in long-term. Our model provides OR configurations at a strategical level of OR planning to minimize the tradeoff between the utilization and service …

Lean Fire Management: A Focused Analysis Of The Incident Command System Based On Toyota Production System Principles, Jeremiah S. Fugate

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

A primary role of the Incident Command System is to learn from past incidents, as illustrated by its origins in the wildland firefighting community. Successful emergency response operations under the Incident Command System has prompted its nationwide spread, this promulgation critically relies on the system’s capability to stabilize and continuously improve various aspects of emergency response through effective organizational learning. The objective of this study is to evaluate the potential to apply fundamental principles of the Toyota Production System (Lean manufacturing) to improve learning effectiveness within the Incident Command System. An in-depth review of literature and training documents regarding both …