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

Workshop - Building Reflective Team Skills With A T-Group, Ray Luechtefeld, Steve Eugene Watkins Oct 2007

Workshop - Building Reflective Team Skills With A T-Group, Ray Luechtefeld, Steve Eugene Watkins

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

ABET criteria require that engineering graduates have the ability to "function on multidisciplinary teams" and "communicate effectively". An important component of these skills is the ability to reflect on one's personal actions and the dynamics occurring within the group. This workshop is intended to provide participants with a practical exercise that can help students become more self-reflective and aware of group dynamics, while demonstrating the use of the "virtual facilitator" system to improve group dialogue. The workshop will engage the participants in a self- directed learning exercise modeled after T-Groups. This exercise will help participants: 1) Become aware of their …


Expert System For Team Facilitation Using Observational Learning, Ray Luechtefeld, R. K. Singh, Steve Eugene Watkins Oct 2007

Expert System For Team Facilitation Using Observational Learning, Ray Luechtefeld, R. K. Singh, Steve Eugene Watkins

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

While ABET criteria require that engineering graduates be able to "function on multidisciplinary teams" and "communicate effectively", the need for effective team skills goes far deeper. One solution is the use of a computationally intelligent "virtual facilitator" that contains a subset of the expert knowledge of a skilled facilitator. The "virtual facilitator" models behaviors of an expert facilitator to engineering student teams as they are working together. Albert Bandura's theory of observational learning suggests that skills can be developed through observation of expert "others" engaged in practice. Preliminary research indicates that students can increase beneficial team behaviors (such as inquiry) …


Encouraging Lifelong Learning For Engineering Management Undergraduates, Susan L. Murray, Stephen A. Raper Jun 2007

Encouraging Lifelong Learning For Engineering Management Undergraduates, Susan L. Murray, Stephen A. Raper

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The current ABET guidelines place an emphasis on life-long learning for our undergraduate students. What is life-long learning? How can we encourage students to consider global issues, current events, or even anything "that isn't going to be on the next test"? In this paper we present survey results evaluating habits of undergraduate students entering an engineering management program and seniors related to life-long learning including attending professional society meetings, reading trade publications, reading business related books, and other learning outside of the classroom activities. This paper also presents a two semester effort to increase life-long learning activities among undergraduate engineering …


Short-Term Stock Market Timing Prediction Under Reinforcement Learning Schemes, Hailin Li, Cihan H. Dagli, David Lee Enke Apr 2007

Short-Term Stock Market Timing Prediction Under Reinforcement Learning Schemes, Hailin Li, Cihan H. Dagli, David Lee Enke

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

There are fundamental difficulties when only using a supervised learning philosophy to predict financial stock short-term movements. We present a reinforcement-oriented forecasting framework in which the solution is converted from a typical error-based learning approach to a goal-directed match-based learning method. The real market timing ability in forecasting is addressed as well as traditional goodness-of-fit-based criteria. We develop two applicable hybrid prediction systems by adopting actor-only and actor-critic reinforcement learning, respectively, and compare them to both a supervised-only model and a classical random walk benchmark in forecasting three daily-based stock indices series within a 21-year learning and testing period. The …


Systems Architecting Heuristics For Systems Engineering Management And Embedded Systems Engineering, Mark S. Anderson, Cihan H. Dagli Apr 2007

Systems Architecting Heuristics For Systems Engineering Management And Embedded Systems Engineering, Mark S. Anderson, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Software development for United States Air Force (USAF) weapon systems is a "right here, right now" prize captured by those who can rapidly develop requirements and deliver a quality product. The Air Logistics Centers (ALCs) located at Tinker Air Force Base (AFB), Oklahoma, Warner-Robins AFB, Georgia, and Hill AFB, Utah develop requirements utilizing 3400 funding to capture this prize. The ALCs identify these requirements as corrective maintenance or perfective and adaptive maintenance. Colleen A. Calimer and John L. BeVier introduce the concept of the "Embedded Systems Engineer" in their 2004 INCOSE paper "Embedded Systems Engineering: Managing Systems Complexity, Change, and …


System Evaluation And Description Using Abstract Relation Types (Art), Joseph J. Simpson, Ann K. Miller, Cihan H. Dagli Apr 2007

System Evaluation And Description Using Abstract Relation Types (Art), Joseph J. Simpson, Ann K. Miller, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Two abstract relation types (ART) are developed to represent, describe and establish a computational framework for a system. An abstract relation type is closely related to and builds upon two fundamental ideas. The first idea is the binary relation and structural modeling techniques developed by John N. Warfield. The second idea is the concept of abstract data types. These two ideas are combined to create an abstract relation type that provides a structured representation and computational method for systems and system components. The complete system description approach is based on six abstract relation types: context, concept, functions, requirements, architecture, and …


Understanding Behavior Of System Of Systems Through Computational Intelligence Techniques, Nil H. Kilicay, Cihan H. Dagli Jan 2007

Understanding Behavior Of System Of Systems Through Computational Intelligence Techniques, Nil H. Kilicay, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The world is facing an increasing level of systems integration leading towards systems of systems (SoS) that adapt to changing environmental conditions. The number of connections between components, the diversity of the components and the way the components are organized can lead to different emergent system behavior. Therefore, the need to focus on overall system behavior is becoming an unavoidable issue. The problem is to develop methodologies appropriate for better understanding behavior of system of systems before the design and implementation phase. This paper focuses on computational intelligence techniques used for analysis of complex adaptive systems with the aim of …


Adaptive Neural Network Based Stabilizing Controller Design For Single Machine Infinite Bus Power Systems, Wenxin Liu, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, David A. Cartes, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow Jan 2007

Adaptive Neural Network Based Stabilizing Controller Design For Single Machine Infinite Bus Power Systems, Wenxin Liu, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, David A. Cartes, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Power system stabilizers are widely used to generate supplementary control signals for the excitation system in order to damp out the low frequency oscillations. In power system control literature, the performances of the proposed controllers were mostly demonstrated using simulation results without any rigorous stability analysis. This paper proposes a stabilizing neural network (NN) controller based on a sixth order single machine infinite bus power system model. The NN is used to approximate the complex nonlinear dynamics of power system. Unlike the other indirect adaptive NN control schemes, there is no offline training process and the NN can be directly …


An Evaluation Of Mahalanobis-Taguchi System And Neural Network For Multivariate Pattern Recognition, Jungeui Hong, Rajesh Jugulum, Kioumars Paryani, K. M. Ragsdell, Genichi Taguchi, Elizabeth A. Cudney Jan 2007

An Evaluation Of Mahalanobis-Taguchi System And Neural Network For Multivariate Pattern Recognition, Jungeui Hong, Rajesh Jugulum, Kioumars Paryani, K. M. Ragsdell, Genichi Taguchi, Elizabeth A. Cudney

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Mahalanobis-Taguchi System is a diagnosis and predictive method for analyzing patterns in multivariate cases. The goal of this study is to compare the ability of the Mahalanobis- Taguchi System and a neural-network to discriminate using small data sets. We examine the discriminant ability as a function of data set size using an application area where reliable data is publicly available. The study uses the Wisconsin Breast Cancer study with nine attributes and one class.


Effective Use Of Process Capability Indices For Supplier Management, Elizabeth A. Cudney, David Drain Jan 2007

Effective Use Of Process Capability Indices For Supplier Management, Elizabeth A. Cudney, David Drain

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Process capability indices were originally invented to enable an organization to make economically sound decisions for process management. Process capability is a comparison of the voice of the process with the voice of the customer. Current practice is to use Cp and Cpk regardless of the validity of the underlying assumptions necessary for their use. Even if all necessary assumptions are satisfied, important problems can be missed if these indices are the sole process evaluation examined. Customer-supplier axioms are introduced to motivate more useful process evaluations and foster long-term harmonious relationships. This paper explores the alternative capability indices Cpm, Cpmk, …


Breaking The Cycle-Preventing Failures By Leveraging Historical Data During Conceptual Design, Daniel A. Krus, Katie Grantham Jan 2007

Breaking The Cycle-Preventing Failures By Leveraging Historical Data During Conceptual Design, Daniel A. Krus, Katie Grantham

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Major engineering accidents are often caused by seemingly minor failures propagating through complex systems. One example of this is an accident involving a Bell 206 Rotorcraft where a fuel pump failure led to the severing of the tail boom. Cataloguing and communicating the knowledge of potential failures and failure propagations is critical to prevent further accidents. The need for effective failure prevention tools is not specific to rotorcrafts, however. Failure reporting systems have been adopted by various industries to aid and promote failure prevention. The catalogued failures usually consist of narratives describing which part of a product failed, how it …