Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

An Integrated Framework For Freight Forwarders:Exploitation Of Dynamic Information For Multimodal Transportation, Farshid Azadian

Wayne State University Dissertations

Advent of real-time information broadcasting technologies, growth in demand for air-cargo, and increased congestion and variability on air-road network, are the main forces compelling today's air-freight forwarders to improve their operational decision-making to be more competitive and responsive to needs of customers. This research studies the air-cargo transportation on both road (short-haul) and air (long haul) network from the perspective of a mid-size freight forwarder.

We develop a routing algorithm for congestion avoidance on air-network based on historical data and introduce an innovative approach to incorporate real-time information to enable dynamic routing of cargo on a stochastic air-network. In the …

Sampling Based Progressive Hedging Algorithms For Stochastic Programming Problems, Nezir Aydin

Wayne State University Dissertations

Many real-world optimization problems have parameter uncertainty. For instances where the uncertainties can be estimated to a certain degree, stochastic programming (SP) methodologies are used to identify robust plans. Despite advances in SP, it is still a challenge to solve real world stochastic programming problems, in part due to the exponentially increasing number of scenarios. For two-stage and multi-stage problems, the number of scenarios increases exponentially with the number of uncertain parameters, and for multi-stage problems also with the number of decision stages.

In the case of large scale mixed integer stochastic problem instances, there are usually two common approaches: …

Decision Support Models For The External Variety Of Configurable Products, Erkan Isikli

Wayne State University Dissertations

The decision of what configurations of a product to offer is a difficult one for marketing and sales departments. In this study, we developed decision support models that can help decision makers when using operational models to manage external variety of configurable products. Our main objective is to reduce the number of product variants offered in a proper way so that inventory and demand models do not suffer from the curse of dimension. Due to its ability and flexibility, our framework can be employed under various marketing actions. We applied our framework to both qualitative and quantitative data.

A Framework For Personalized Dynamic Cross-Selling In E-Commerce Retailing, Arun K. Timalsina

Wayne State University Dissertations

Cross-selling and product bundling are prevalent strategies in the retail sector. Instead of static bundling offers, i.e. giving the same offer to everyone, personalized dynamic cross-selling generates targeted bundle offers and can help maximize revenues and profits. In resolving the two basic problems of dynamic cross-selling, which involves selecting the right complementary products and optimizing the discount, the issue of computational complexity becomes central as the customer base and length of the product list grows. Traditional recommender systems are built upon simple collaborative filtering techniques, which exploit the informational cues gained from users in the form of product ratings and …

Throughput Analysis And Bottleneck Management Of Production Lines, Hatice Ucar

Wayne State University Dissertations

Companies are increasing their manufacturing excellence in order to stay competitive in the globalizing market. Plants are becoming more complex year by year due to increasing product classes, hardware complexity, etc... The design and operation of manufacturing systems is of greater importance today than it was in the past. Many studies have been carried out on the design and operation of manufacturing systems by academicians and practitioners over the years, however, there is still no agreement on how to best predict and improve the factory performance (Gershwin, 2000). The studies are based on either analytical approaches or simulation-based approaches. Success …

Development Of A Computer-Aided Design Supporting System For Transformative Product Design, Keunho Choi

Wayne State University Dissertations

Modern product innovation is often delivered by fusing technologies from different domains. To meet the current speedy pressure of product innovation, the conceptual design is a very critical stage to develop an innovative product. This research presents a new design paradigm, Transformative Product Design (TPD), to meet the demands in the conceptual design. TPD aims to design a new product from a combination out of a base product and reference products, which have been developed.

To expedite the TPD paradigm, Interaction Network is introduced to represent a product design by following a representative product design representation method in the teleological …

Rfid-Based Business Process And Workflow Management In Healthcare:Design And Implementation, Xiaoyu Ma

Wayne State University Dissertations

The healthcare system in the United States is considered one of the most complex systems and has encountered challenges related to patient safety concerns, escalating costs, and unpredictable outcomes. Many of these problems share a common cause - a lack of efficient business process management and visibility into the real-time location, status, and condition of medical resources. The goal of this research is to propose a newly integrated system to model, automate, and monitor healthcare business processes using an automatic data collection technology to record the timing and location of activities and identify their various resources.

This dissertation makes several …