Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Machine Learning Approach For Predicting Clinical Trial Patient Enrollment In Drug Development Portfolio Demand Planning, Ahmed Shoieb

Masters Theses

One of the biggest challenges the clinical research industry currently faces is the accurate forecasting of patient enrollment (namely if and when a clinical trial will achieve full enrollment), as the stochastic behavior of enrollment can significantly contribute to delays in the development of new drugs, increases in duration and costs of clinical trials, and the over- or under- estimation of clinical supply. This study proposes a Machine Learning model using a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) that is trained on a dataset of 100,000 patient enrollment data points including patient age, patient gender, patient disease, investigational product, study phase, blinded …

A Two-Phase Multicommodity Flow Approach For Classroom Assignment, Hannah Smith

Masters Theses

A common problem faced by universities is the assignment of courses to campus-hosted spaces. An optimal solution is difficult to reach, given the number of constraints present. Increasing student enrollment across campus leads to a need for a model that optimally assigns courses to spaces that maximizes the total number of courses taught in person. This paper poses a solution to this problem by generating a two-phase model to allocate courses to campus-hosted spaces. The two-phase approach to classroom assignment consists of a minimum-weighted bipartite matching for priority assignment and a multicommodity flow model to assign remaining courses. The optimal …

A Study Of The Link Between Poor Quality And Poor Performance Of Various Health Care Indicators, Lamara L. Glass

Masters Theses

Abstract

Purpose of the Research

The purpose of present research investigation is to explore the correlation between poor performance indicators and poor quality in the Health care industry and to present an idea on improving the quality of the outcome in health care services by altering the KPIs.

The Nature of the Problem

The quality of healthcare may be evaluated using a variety of parameters, including safety, efficacy, and person-centeredness. For example, the former relates to the degree of precision with which procedures may produce desired results. External comparisons between different health care facilities, as well as KPIs specified for …

Decomposition Approach To Parametric Nonconvex Regression; Nuclear Resonance Analysis, Jordan L. Armstrong

Masters Theses

Parameterized nonconvex regression is a difficult problem for any optimization solver packages, often resulting in approximations and linearizations of the problem in order to be able to arrive a solution, if the problem is even solvable at all. These changes to the initial problem are largely dependent upon having appropriate domain knowledge and still often times result in a sizable gap between the achieved solution and the best true solution. We propose a novel method of decomposing the global problem into small, overlapping windows. Thus, the independent windows are now solvable. Subsequently, we offer a novel, sequential method of parameter …

Periodic Replenish And Recount Policy To Address Record Inaccuracy From Stock Loss, Colton K. Ku

Masters Theses

Inventory record inaccuracy (IRI) often arises in retail environments due to unaccounted stock loss. Theft, misplacement, spoilage, and transaction errors will reduce the true inventory values without changing the inventory record. As previous inventory replenishment policies assume perfect record accuracy, increasing IRI can cause unexpected stockout events, mistimed reorders and replenishment freezes. Solutions to rectifying IRI vary from the use of improved tracking technologies to prevent it initially occurring at all to recounting programs which estimate true inventory value. Unfortunately, in retail environments, high‑tracking technology is unsuitable and continuous counting programs are too costly. To address the limitations of current …

Uht Milk: Supply Chain Based Shelf Life Assessment And Risk Mitigation, Sagar Rameshwar Padghan

Masters Theses

Transportation and storage conditions in the perishable food supply chain play a vital role in product shelf life. This study focuses on UHT milk, a variant of milk that has a shelf life of up to 12 months in ideal conditions. However, poor transportation and storage practices can diminish its shelf life and result in quality losses resulting from milk spoilage. UHT milk literature focuses on chemical and physical analysis of changes in milk. There have been limited number of studies that characterize supply chain effects on the shelf life of milk and other perishable products.

This study analyzes supply …

Examining The Empirical Relationship Between Subjective Fatigue And Employee Work Engagement In A Heavy Workload Manufacturing Environment, Prashanth Balasubramanian

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the empirical relationship between Subjective Fatigue and Employee work engagement among employees working under heavy workload conditions in Tennessee, USA. The questionnaire was developed by reviewing extant literature and the factors that were chosen were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Post elimination of the weakly loaded factors, a questionnaire based on the selected factors was designed to measure the subjective levels of fatigue. The data was collected from two manufacturing company sites from East Tennessee and was subjected to analysis using IBM SPSS and SmartPLS softwares. As a part of the SEM …

Aligning Skills In Personnel With The Lean System's Requirements, Anjushree Bangre

Masters Theses

The sustainability of lean systems for long term is a major concern across various organizations implementing lean manufacturing methods. This issue can be attributed to inadequate infrastructure, inefficient process management, unsuitable personnel management methods and strategic tools. There is a strong need for addressing the risks for lean system sustainability. The resolution of the risks from a 'soft side' (people) perspective has not been addressed. The primary focus of this study is on the people-related risks.

The current study elicits a five-phase approach to enhance the implementation of the lean system by accounting for these risks. The first phase classifies …

Developing Leading And Lagging Indicators To Enhance Equipment Reliability In A Lean System, Dhanush Agara Mallesh

Masters Theses

With increasing complexity in equipment, the failure rates are becoming a critical metric due to the unplanned maintenance in a production environment. Unplanned maintenance in manufacturing process is created issues with downtimes and decreasing the reliability of equipment. Failures in equipment have resulted in the loss of revenue to organizations encouraging maintenance practitioners to analyze ways to change unplanned to planned maintenance. Efficient failure prediction models are being developed to learn about the failures in advance. With this information, failures predicted can reduce the downtimes in the system and improve the throughput.

The goal of this thesis is to predict …

Developing A Platform For Integrating Disability Issues Into City Municipality Decisions; Case Study: City Of Knoxville, Sravanthi Pamu

Masters Theses

The People with Disabilities (PWD) & Senior Citizen (SC) are isolated from the mainstream society, and they face several barriers in everyday life. There is no communication platform for them to express their concerns, in turn, participate in the city municipality policy decisions related to PWD- & SC-friendly city development. The purpose of this research is to integrate disability and senior citizen issues in the city of Knoxville to the city council decisions. The comprehensive literature search is done to identify the frequently mentioned disability and age-friendly city factors. An effective survey was designed to identify the issues in collaboration …

Impacts Of The Heterogeneity In Consumer Valuation Of Fuel Economy On Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards Compliance, Nawei Liu

Masters Theses

This study investigated potential impacts of the heterogeneity in consumer valuation of fuel economy on the compliance with fuel economy standards with two analytical approaches. One approach is to provide theoretical analysis of the heterogeneity impacts on the market acceptance of high-efficiency vehicles. The other approach utilizes a consumer choice based simulation method to analyze the heterogeneity impacts on the compliance with the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards for the entire light duty vehicle fleet in the U.S. Our findings suggest two possible conditions which are defined based on relative acceptance of high-efficiency vehicles in the market, and they …

Two Multi-Objective Stochastic Models For Project Team Formation Under Uncertainty In Time Requirements, Fahimeh Rahmanniyay

Masters Theses

Team formation is one of the key stages in project management. The cost associated with the individuals who form a team and the quality of the tasks completed by the team are two of the main concerns in team formation problems. In this study, two mathematical models to optimize simultaneously cost and quality in a team formation problem are developed. Because team formation problem arises in uncertain environment, different scenarios are defined for the time requirement of the project. Two-stage stochastic programming and multi-stage stochastic programming are applied to solve the first and the second model respectively. The presented models …

Viability Of Additive Manufacturing For Production And Tooling Applications: A Development Of The Business Case, Christopher Charles Griffin

Masters Theses

As marketplace competition drives industrial innovation to increase product value and decrease production costs, emerging technologies foster a new era through Industry 4.0. One aspect of the movement, additive manufacturing, or 3D [three-dimensional] printing, contains potential to revolutionize traditional manufacturing techniques and approach to design. However, uncertainties within the processes and high investment costs deter corporations from implementing and developing the technology. While several industries are benefitting from additive manufacturing’s current state, as the technology continues to progress, more companies will need to evaluate it for industrial viability and adoption. As such, there exists a need for a framework to …

Reducing Wait Time Prediction In Hospital Emergency Room: Lean Analysis Using A Random Forest Model, Gajanan Arha

Masters Theses

Most of the patients visiting emergency departments face long waiting times due to overcrowding which is a major concern across the hospital in the United States. Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a common phenomenon across hospitals, which leads to issues for the hospital management, such as increased patient s dissatisfaction and an increase in the number of patients choosing to terminate their ED visit without being attended to by a medical healthcare professional. Patients who have to Leave Without Being Seen (LWBS) by doctors often leads to loss of revenue to hospitals encouraging healthcare professionals to analyze ways to improve …

A Mixed Integer Linear Programming Approach For Developing Salary Administration Systems, Taner Cokyasar

Masters Theses

Determining salary increases of executive personnel is a challenging decision process for many companies. Salary administration policies that aid in the determination of salary increases and other compensation benefits have a wide variety of advantages for both a company and its employees. This thesis develops a mathematical programming approach to create a salary administration system that recognizes the importance of performance and potential of employees for future promotions as major components of a salary increase policy for executive personnel. A number of companies all over the world use salary administration systems that integrate work performance and potential for advancement to …

A Neural Network For Collaborative Forecasting, Abdulrahman M. Enani

Masters Theses

As the supply chain activities’ backbone, demand forecasting must be accurate. This paper proposes an artificial neural network forecasting model, which integrates and synchronizes shared information, such as sales or consumption rate among different partners, to improve the forecasting’s accuracy. This information sharing is part of the collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) model, which is a supply chain model aiming to enhance the supply chain’s efficiency by jointly planning and forecasting between two or more supply chain partners that will be used as the base for production and replenishment activities. The model is validated using a tuna product sales …

Automatic Sleep Stages Classification, Maryam Zokaeinikoo

Masters Theses

In this thesis, we first develop an efficient automated classification algorithm for sleep stages identification. Polysomnography recordings (PSGs) from twenty subjects were used in this study and features were extracted from the time{frequency representation of the electroencephalography (EEG) signal. The classification of the extracted features was done using random forest classifier. The performance of the new approach is tested by evaluating the accuracy of each sleep stages and total accuracy. The results shows improvement in all five sleep stages compared to previous works.

Then, we present a simulation decision algorithm for switching between sleep interventions. This method improves the percentage …

Optimizing Cash Flows And Minimizing Simultaneous Turnovers In Operating Room Scheduling, Mohit Shukla

Masters Theses

Currently, the scheduling of surgical suites follows either an open booking or block booking framework. Under block booking, medical departments (or surgeons) that provide certain types of services (e.g. ophthalmology, orthopedics, cardiology) are assigned fixed blocks of time that are used to divide access to the operating rooms (ORs) among different specialties. Two integer-programming based methods of generating block schedules are investigated in this research. The first approach focuses on optimizing cash flows, an area not studied previously within the OR scheduling domain. Results indicate that while there is some utility of this approach in improving the liquidity of a …

Standardizing Functional Safety Assessments For Off-The-Shelf Instrumentation And Controls, Andrew Michael Nack

Masters Theses

It is typical for digital instrumentation and controls, used to manage significant risk, to undergo substantial amounts of scrutiny. The equipment must be proven to have the necessary level of design integrity. The details of the scrutiny vary based on the particular industry, but the ultimate goal is to provide sufficient evidence that the equipment will operate successfully when performing their required functions.

To be able to stand up to the scrutiny and more importantly, successfully perform the required safety functions, the equipment must be designed to defend against random hardware failures and also to prevent systematic faults. These design …

Truckload Carrier Selection, Routing And Cost Optimization, Zhixin Han

Masters Theses

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the routing decision combined with common carrier selection for dedicated contract carriers to reduce full truckload routing cost on pickup and delivery service within time windows in a multiple depots scenario. Mixed Integer Programming and some heuristic algorithms such as the genetic algorithm and annealing algorithm have been successfully used to solve vehicle routing problems for a long time, but researchers seldom simultaneously focus on issues of carrier selection, multiple depots, time window, and the government regulations for a dedicated contract carrier. Therefore, this thesis involved constraints of pickup and delivery with …

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 …

Integration Of Maintenance Into Design And Sustainability Of Buildings, Dinesh Reddy Patlolla

Masters Theses

Custodial maintenance is an important aspect of operational maintenance in a facility. Custodial maintenance improves an organization's discipline, performance and keeps surroundings healthy. That being said maintaining clean surroundings involves considerable cost. Custodial maintenance cost forms significant portion of building budgets, however these costs are often neglected. This research deals with the identification of variables that affect maintenance costs in a facility and reduction of maintenance costs. The minimization of cost is done by giving the administrator or facilities manager the option of selecting alternatives in frequency of maintenance, level of maintenance and the number of people required to complete …

Economic And Environmental Optimization In The Supply Of Switchgrass In Tennessee, Jia Zhong

Masters Theses

The low efficiency of collection, storage and transportation in the switchgrass supply chain has hindered the commercialization of a switchgrass-based biofuel industry, even given its ecological and environmental advantages in carbon sequestrate, soil quality, water use, and pollution pressure. Thus, designing a switchgrass-based supply chain balancing both environmental and economic performance is important to expedite the development of the cellulosic biofuel industry to meet the national energy plan.

The objectives of this study are to 1) determine economic cost and multiple environmental outcomes in feedstock supply chains and 2) identify the relation between the economic and environmental performances. The first …

Modelling Supercomputer Maintenance Interrupts: Maintenance Policy Recommendations, Jagadish Cherukuri

Masters Theses

A supercomputer is a repairable system with large number of compute nodes interconnected to work in harmony to achieve superior computational performance. Reliability of such a complex system depends on an effective maintenance strategy that involves both emergency and preventive maintenance. This thesis analyzes the maintenance records of four supercomputers operational at The National Institute of Computational Science located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We propose to use the generalized proportional intensities model (GPIM) to model the maintenance interrupts as it can capture both the reliability parameters and maintenance parameters and allows the inclusion of both emergency and preventive maintenance. …

Value Stream Segmentation And New Product Development, Richard Lee Vaughn

Masters Theses

This research paper expands upon prior research into the pursuit of the successful new product launch. It reviews the evolution of how new product launches were handled in the past and the best practices used today. The article “Value Stream Segmentation Focuses on Customer Needs” expands upon the success and failure of the practices and poses a new concept for future new product launches. The concept of “value stream segmentation” is how a company should use value stream mapping to streamline its processes to achieve a successful new product launch. By analyzing and segmenting market requirements, a business that is …

A Stochastic Model For Self-Scheduling Problem, Lili Zhang

Masters Theses

The unit commitment (UC) problem is a typical application of optimization techniques in the power generation and operation. Given a planning horizon, the UC problem is to find an optimal schedule of generating units, including on/off status and production level of each generating unit at each time period, in order to minimize operational costs, subject to a series of technical constraints. Because technical constraints depend on the characteristics of energy systems, the formulations of the UC problem vary with energy systems. The self-scheduling problem is a variant of the UC problem for the power generating companies to maximize their profits …

Benefits Of Obtaining An Advanced Degree In Engineering Management, Inna Majdalani

Masters Theses

In this study, an attempt to evaluate factual benefits of an advanced degree in the field of Engineering Management has been made. The study concentrated on estimation of economic and non-monetary benefits, reported by various groups of Engineering Management alumni of The University of Tennessee. The comparison between age, gender and career variation groups was completed, and the possible reasons for these findings were discussed. Also, additional data pertaining to program cost coverage, demographics, composition of alumni pool, and appreciation of the Engineering Management program in their post-graduation careers was collected and analyzed. The study suggests that, even though there …

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 …

A Lean Information Management Model For Efficient Operations Of An Educational Entity At The University Of Tennessee, Harshitha Muppaneni

Masters Theses

A software based Management Information System (MIS) is designed and implemented in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Tennessee to handle different types of data requests that are currently processed through multiple steps. This thesis addresses the current resource intensive data management model in educational institutions and proposes a decentralized and customized solution. The proposed software based data management system provides information to authorized sources in the requested format with minimal or no time consumption. The quantification of the new systems’ impact is done by comparing it with current data management process using Graph Theoretic Approach …

A Multi-Echelon Inventory System With Supplier Selection And Order Allocation Under Stochastic Demand, Cong Guo

Masters Theses

This article addresses the development of an integrated supplier selection and inventory control problems in supply chain management by developing a mathematical model for a multi-echelon system. In particular, a buyer firm that consists of one warehouse and N identical retailers wants to procure a type of product from a group of potential suppliers, which may require different price, ordering cost, lead time and have restriction on minimum and maximum total order size, to satisfy the stochastic demand. A continuous review system that implements the order quantity, reorder point (Q, R) inventory policy is considered in the …