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Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Systems Thinking In Engineering Design: Differences In Expert Vs. Novice And Relationship To Personality Traits, Yuzhen Luo Dec 2020

Systems Thinking In Engineering Design: Differences In Expert Vs. Novice And Relationship To Personality Traits, Yuzhen Luo

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Systems thinking is the ability to see the big picture and the related elements when designing, and how these relationships form the big picture. In engineering design, systems thinking is valuable to both industry, as well as engineering education. As such, it creates opportunities for researchers to better understand systems thinking of both professional engineers in industry, who are assumed to be the experts, and engineering students in higher education, who are assumed to be the novices. The purpose of this study was to compare and identify the differences between expert and novice systems thinking in engineering design. Additionally, the …


A Phenomenological Study Of Professional Identity Change In Released-Time Seminary Teachers, Mark Daniel Mason May 2012

A Phenomenological Study Of Professional Identity Change In Released-Time Seminary Teachers, Mark Daniel Mason

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many practitioners commonly deal with implementing a change that is imposed by an organization. Some imposed changes require practitioners to alter more than what they do in practice but also to change their identity. Many researchers have studied identity change through the lens of sociocultural theory, specifically utilizing communities of practice theory (CoP). However, the majority of these studies used CoP theory as a vehicle to implement the imposed change. Yet some studies have found that after the trial period ends many practitioners revert back to the way they performed in practice prior to the study. One reason for this …


Coping With The Curse Of Dimensionality By Combining Linear Programming And Reinforcement Learning, Scott H. Burton May 2010

Coping With The Curse Of Dimensionality By Combining Linear Programming And Reinforcement Learning, Scott H. Burton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Reinforcement learning techniques offer a very powerful method of finding solutions in unpredictable problem environments where human supervision is not possible. However, in many real world situations, the state space needed to represent the solutions becomes so large that using these methods becomes infeasible. Often the vast majority of these states are not valuable in finding the optimal solution. This work introduces a novel method of using linear programming to identify and represent the small area of the state space that is most likely to lead to a near-optimal solution, significantly reducing the memory requirements and time needed to arrive …