Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Resource Allocation In Subsidy Welfare Programs: Managerial Insights For Nonprofits, Governments, And Service Providers, Wei Wei

Doctoral Dissertations

Subsidy welfare programs provide financial assistance to economically disadvantaged individuals and families to access essential and life-altering services (e.g., education, child care, and housing) that they might not otherwise have access to. Access to these services is considered critical to achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. As such, these high-quality services are directly related to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted as a universal call to action to end poverty, save the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere." In particular, the need for these affordable and high-quality services has been …

Role Of Low Carbon Energy Technologies In Near Term Energy Policy, Olaitan P. Olaleye

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first part of this thesis, we use a multi-model framework to examine a set of possible future energy scenarios resulting from R&D portfolios of Solar, Nuclear, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Bio-Fuels, Bio-Electricity and Batteries for electric transportation. We show that CCS significantly complements Bio-Electricity, while most of the other energy technology pairs are substitutes. From the probabilistic analysis of future energy scenarios we observe that portfolios with CCS tend to stochastically dominate those without CCS; portfolios with only renewables tend to be stochastically dominated by others; and that there are clear decreasing marginal returns to scale. We …

Guidelines For Scheduling In Primary Care: An Empirically Driven Mathematical Programming Approach, Hyun Jung Alvarez Oh

Doctoral Dissertations

Primary care practices play a vital role in healthcare delivery since they are the first point of contact for most patients, and provide health prevention, counseling, education, diagnosis and treatment. Practices, however, face a complex appointment scheduling problem because of the variety of patient conditions, the mix of appointment types, the uncertain service times with providers and non-provider staff (nurses/medical assistants), and no-show rates which all compound into a highly variable and unpredictable flow of patients. The end result is an imbalance between provider idle time and patient waiting time. To understand the realities of the scheduling problem we analyze …

Runway Operations Management: Models, Enhancements, And Decomposition Techniques, Farbod Farhadi

Doctoral Dissertations

Air traffic loads have been on the rise over the last several decades and are expected to double, and possibly triple in some regions, over the coming decade. With the advent of larger aircraft and ever-increasing air traffic loads, aviation authorities are continually pressured to examine capacity expansions and to adopt better strategies for capacity utilization. However, this growth in air traffic volumes has not been accompanied by adequate capacity expansions in the air transport infrastructure. It is, therefore, predicted that flight delays costing multi-billion dollars will continue to negatively impact airline companies and consumers. In airport operations management, runways …

Development Of A Cost Minimizing Strategy To Mitigate Bird Mortalities In A Wind Farm, Karamvir Singh

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Wind is the second largest renewable energy source after solar. It is one of the fastest growing sources of electricity in the world and currently of wind energy is installed in the United States and an additional is under construction (Office of Energy and Environment Affairs, 2011). For the growth of wind electricity, one of the most prominent environmental concerns relates to the death of birds, bats and other avian species resulting from collision with turbine blades.

This thesis develops a model that provides the optimal strategy of turning the turbines off in a wind farm for certain periods to …