Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Computational Modeling Approaches For Task Analysis In Robotic-Assisted Surgery, Mahtab Jahanbani Fard

Wayne State University Dissertations

Surgery is continuously subject to technological innovations including the introduction of robotic surgical devices. The ultimate goal is to program the surgical robot to perform certain difficult or complex surgical tasks in an autonomous manner. The feasibility of current robotic surgery systems to record quantitative motion and video data motivates developing descriptive mathematical models to recognize, classify and analyze surgical tasks. Recent advances in machine learning research for uncovering concealed patterns in huge data sets, like kinematic and video data, offer a possibility to better understand surgical procedures from a system point of view. This dissertation focuses on bridging the …

Technology Decisions In New Product Development, Amir Sanayei

Wayne State University Dissertations

Selecting the right technology is one of the most important and challenging decisions in new product development (NPD) process that can greatly affect all downstream design activities which have a great impact on product success in the market place. Although new technologies may bring more competitive advantage by offering higher performance to price, they also make the NPD process more risky and challenging. We model the technology selection problem of a firm that is defining its new product in the presence of the technology uncertainty. At each review stage, firm has the options: select and commit to any technology alternatives …

A Framework To Improve A Nation's Competitiveness Through Quality Awards And Performance Improvement Tools, Amr Alamri

Wayne State University Dissertations

Each country, represented by its government, aims to serve its citizens better. This is achieved by better utilization of resources and higher productivity. The ability to do so will lead to a competitive nation. Recently, countries were able to compare themselves in terms of competitiveness using international indexes and references. These references gave countries a benchmark to know where they exist compared to other nations. They help governments to understand their strengths and weaknesses within the competitiveness components. However, nations differ in the actions which are to be taken in order to improve their competitiveness. Governments establish and regulate many …

Lean Thinking For Lead-Time Reduction And Efficient Knowledge Creation In Product Development, Satish Kumar Tyagi

Wayne State University Dissertations

There are many distinct differences between manufacturing process and Product Development (PD) process, so lean tools have to be customized to deliver results in the later domain. The main focus of this dissertation is to extend them to manage and improve the PD process in order to develop the product faster while improving or at least maintaining the level of performance and quality. For aforesaid purpose, value stream mapping (VSM) method is used to explore the wastes, inefficiencies, non-valued added steps in a single, definable process out of complete PD process. Besides numerous intangible benefits, VSM framework will help the …

Modeling And Optimization Of Non-Profit Hospital Call Centers With Service Blending, Yanli Zhao

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the operations problems in non-profit hospital call centers with inbound and outbound calls service blending.

First, the routing policy for inbound and outbound calls is considered. The objective is to improve the system utilization under constraints of service quality and operators' quantity. A collection of practical staffing assignment methods, separating and mixing staffing policy are evaluated. Erlang C queuing model is used to decide the minimum number of operators required by inbound calls. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments illustrate that through dynamically assigning the inbound and outbound calls to operators under optimal threshold policy, mixing staffing …

Reliability Analysis And Optimal Maintenance Planning For Repairable Multi-Component Systems Subject To Dependent Competing Risks, Nailong Zhang

Wayne State University Dissertations

Modern engineering systems generally consist of multiple components that interact in a complex manner. Reliability analysis of multi-component repairable systems plays a critical role for system safety and cost reduction. Establishing reliability models and scheduling optimal maintenance plans for multi-component repairable systems, however, is still a big challenge when considering the dependency of component failures. Existing models commonly make prior assumptions, without statistical verification, as to whether different component failures are independent or not. In this dissertation, data-driven systematic methodologies to characterize component failure dependency of complex systems are proposed. In CHAPTER 2, a parametric reliability model is proposed to …

A Prediction Modeling Framework For Noisy Welding Quality Data, Junheung Park

Wayne State University Dissertations

Numerous and various research projects have been conducted to utilize historical manufacturing process data in product design. These manufacturing process data often contain data inconsistencies, and it causes challenges in extracting useful information from the data. In resistance spot welding (RSW), data inconsistency is a well-known issue. In general, such inconsistent data are treated as noise data and removed from the original dataset before conducting analyses or constructing prediction models. This may not be desirable for every design and manufacturing applications since every data can contain important information to further explain the process. In this research, we propose a prediction …

Developing An Automated Forecasting Framework For Predicting Operation Room Block Time, Azad Sadr Haghighi

Wayne State University Theses

Operating rooms are the most important part of the hospitals, since they have highest influence on financial state of the hospital. Because of high uncertainty in surgery cases demands and their durations, the scheduling of the surgeries becomes a very challenging and critical issue in hospitals. One of the most common approaches to overcome this uncertainty is applying block times which is the time intervals allocated to surgery groups in the hospital. Assigning sufficient amount of the time to each block, is very important, since overestimating lead to wasting resources and on the other hand underestimation causes the overtime staffing …

A Customer Choice Modeling Framework For Assortment Planning Of Configurable Products In Automotive Industry, Farah Dubaisi

Wayne State University Theses

Due to the increased competition in the auto industry, proliferation of the vehicle models and increased customer need for choice and customization, it has become more critical than ever to offer a variety of features and customization flexibility while at the same time restraining and, even better, cutting down the costs. Product complexity, in the automotive industry, can be measured by the size of the assortment offered, i.e., set of vehicle configurations a customer can choose from (e.g., for a given model of a brand). While complexity fosters growth with increased alignment of product characteristics and customer needs, it results …

Predictive Analytics For Disease Condition Of Patients In Emergency Department, Azade Tabaie

Wayne State University Theses

Emergency Departments (EDs) in hospitals are experiencing severe crowding and prolonged patient waiting times. The reported crowding in hospitals shows patients in hospital hallways, long waiting times and full occupancy of ED beds. ED crowding has several potential unfavorable effects including patients and staff frustration, lower patient satisfaction and poor health outcomes. The primary motivations behind this study are shortening the patients’ waiting time and improving patient satisfaction and level of care.

The very initial interaction between clinicians and a patient is recorded on nurse triage notes which contain details of the reason for patient’s visit including specific symptoms and …

Formal Design Concept And Participant Behavior Analysis For Crowdsourcing Design, Jihoon Kim

Wayne State University Dissertations

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a new design resource for conceptual design process and multiple crowdsourcing services provide an opportunity for design idea collection and concept generation by crowds. However, few formal methods are available to extract and evaluate design concepts from the activities of the design crowd. Scarcity of information and non-guaranteed quality of contributions are often challenges to be tackled. To overcome the challenges, the research aims to answer how a system systematically extracts and represents the explicit or implicit hidden design concepts from crowdsourcing design activities and how crowdsourcing design activities of participants are captured as design information …

Frontiers In Operations Research For Overcoming Barriers To Vehicle Electrification, Mahyar Movahed Nejad

Wayne State University Dissertations

Electric vehicles (EVs) hold many promises including diversification of the transportation energy feedstock and reduction of greenhouse gas and other emissions. However, achieving large-scale adoption of EVs presents a number of challenges resulting from a current lack of supporting infrastructure and difficulties in overcoming technological barriers. This dissertation addresses some of these challenges by contributing to the advancement of theories in the areas of network optimization and mechanism design.

To increase the electric driving range of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), we propose a powertrain energy management control system that exploits energy efficiency dif- ferences of the electric machine and …

A Decision Modeling For Phasor Measurement Unit Location Selection In Smart Grid Systems, Seung Yup Lee

Wayne State University Theses

As a key technology for enhancing the smart grid system, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) provides synchronized phasor measurements of voltages and currents of wide-area electric power grid. With various benefits from its application, one of the critical issues in utilizing PMUs is the optimal site selection of units.

The main aim of this research is to develop a decision support system, which can be used in resource allocation task for smart grid system analysis. As an effort to suggest a robust decision model and standardize the decision modeling process, a harmonized modeling framework, which considers operational circumstances of component, is …

Improving Emergency Department Patient Flow Through Near Real-Time Analytics, Shanshan Qiu

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

IMPROVING EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT PATIENT FLOW THROUGH NEAR REAL-TIME ANALYTICS

This dissertation research investigates opportunities for developing effective decision support models that exploit near real-time (NRT) information to enhance the "operational intelligence" within hospital Emergency Departments (ED). Approaching from a systems engineering perspective, the study proposes a novel decision support framework for streamlining ED patient flow that employs machine learning, statistical and operations research methods to facilitate its operationalization.

ED crowding has become the subject of significant public and academic attention, and it is known to cause a number of adverse outcomes to the patients, ED staff as well as …

An Analytics Approach To Designing Patient Centered Medical Home, Saeede Ajorlou

Wayne State University Dissertations

Recently the patient centered medical home (PCMH) model has become a popular team based approach focused on delivering more streamlined care to patients. In current practices of medical homes, a clinical based prediction frame is recommended because it can help match the portfolio capacity of PCMH teams with the actual load generated by a set of patients. Without such balances in clinical supply and demand, issues such as excessive under and over utilization of physicians, long waiting time for receiving the appropriate treatment, and non continuity of care will eliminate many advantages of the medical home strategy. In this research, …

An Analytics Approach To Reducing Hospital Readmission, Issac Shams

Wayne State University Dissertations

One of the significant sources of waste in the Unites States health care systems is preventable hospital readmission. About 2.3 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries are re-hospitalized within 30 days after discharge which incurs an annual cost of $17 billion. However, it is reported by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that about 75% of such readmissions can and should be avoided because they are the results of factors such as poor planning for follow up care transitions, inadequate communication of discharge instructions, and failure to reconcile and coordinate medications. Hence, reducing unnecessary rehospitalization through care transition and systems engineering principles has …

Global E-Mentoring: Overcoming Virtual Distance For An Effective Mentoring Relationship, Nancy Philippart

Wayne State University Dissertations

Mentoring can enhance an employee's career development and advancement but traditional face-to-face mentoring has become less relevant because of globalization, increased employee mobility and technology-enabled work. A new mentoring model enabled by technology has emerged to meet the needs of today's complex, fast changing global workplace. Although e-mentoring has several advantages over traditional mentoring, the absence of regular face-to-face interactions requires different strategies to develop an effective mentoring relationship. Moreover, additional complexities arise when this virtual mentoring is global.

This research utilizes the construct of virtual distance, the "psychological separation" that has been found to impact performance outcomes of geographically …

Demand Modeling And Capacity Planning For Innovative Short Life-Cycle Products, Saman Alaniazar

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on demand modeling and capacity planning for innovative short life-cycle products. We first developed a new model in the class of stochastic Bass formulations that addresses the shortcomings of models from the extant literature. The proposed model considers the common fact that the market potential of a product is not fixed and might change during a life-cycle due to exogenous (e.g., economic- or competitors-related) or endogenous (e.g., quality-related) factors. Allowing this parameter (market potential in the Bass model) to follow a geometric random walk, we have showed that the future demand of a product in each period …

Exact And Representative Algorithms For Multi Objective Optimization, Ozgu Turgut

Wayne State University Dissertations

In most real-life problems, the decision alternatives are evaluated with multiple conflicting criteria. The entire set of non-dominated solutions for practical problems is impossible to obtain with reasonable computational effort. Decision maker generally needs only a representative set of solutions from the actual Pareto front. First algorithm we present is for efficiently generating a well dispersed non-dominated solution set representative of the Pareto front which can be used for general multi objective optimization problem. The algorithm first partitions the criteria space into grids to generate reference points and then searches for non-dominated solutions in each grid. This grid-based search utilizes …

Optimization Of Strategic Planning Processes For Configurable Products: Considerations For Global Supply, Demand, And Sustainability Issues, Edward Lawrence Umpfenbach

Wayne State University Dissertations

The assortment planning problem is to decide on the set of products that a retailer or manufacturer will offer to its customers to maximize profitability. While assortment planning research has been expanding in recent years, the current models are inadequate for the needs of a configurable product manufacturer. In particular, we address assortment planning for an automobile manufacturer. We develop models to integrate assortment planning and supply chain management, designed for use by a large automaker in its strategic planning phase. Our model utilizes a multinomial logit model transformed into a mixed integer linear program through the Charnes-Cooper transformation. It …

Engineering Problem Solving And Sustained Learning: A Mixed Methods Study To Explore The Dynamics Of Engineering Knowledge Creation, Rachel Itabashi-Campbell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation research explores processes by which engineering problem solving (EPS) results in sustained organizational learning. Approaching from a constructionist perspective, the study empirically examines the knowledge creation dynamics instigated by product-related problems using a mixed methods research approach. The research has identified the Japanese concept of ba, defined in this study as "shared experiential space," as a key construct that explains the phenomena of interest. A new framework that the study has developed, which interprets EPS as an epistemic journey to attain system-wide improvements, is highly complementary to the traditional structured routine based approaches to engineering operations and …

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.

An Integrated Framework For Configurable Product Assortment Planning, Seyed Ali Taghavi Behbahani

Wayne State University Dissertations

A manufacturer's assortment is the set of products or product configurations that the company builds and offers to its customers. While the literature on assortment planning is growing in recent years, it is primarily aimed at non-durable retail and grocery products. In this study, we develop an integrated framework for strategic assortment planning of configurable products, with a focus on the highly complex automotive industry. The facts that automobiles are highly configurable (with the number of buildable configurations running into thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions) with relatively low sales volumes and the stock-out rates at individual dealerships (even …

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 …

Self Learning Strategies For Experimental Design And Response Surface Optimization, Adel Alaeddini

Wayne State University Dissertations

Most preset RSM designs offer ease of implementation and good performance over a wide range of process and design optimization applications. These designs often lack the ability to adapt the design based on the characteristics of application and experimental space so as to reduce the number of experiments necessary. Hence, they are not cost effective for applications where the cost of experimentation is high or when the experimentation resources are limited. In this dissertation, we present a number of self-learning strategies for optimization of different types of response surfaces for industrial experiments with noise, high experimentation cost, and requiring high …