Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Design Of Assembly Lines With The Concurrent Consideration Of Productivity And Upper Extremity Musculoskeletal Disorders Using Linear Models, Zhan Xu

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The productivity of assembly lines is considerably affected by the health condition of assembly workers, and work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) are common occupational diseases among assembly workers due to repetitive motions or heavy working loads. The conventional approaches to decreasing WMSD risks in the assembly lines include slowing the work-pace or applying job rotations. These adjustments usually focus on individual assembly workers at the station level but not the work allocation among the workers at the whole assembly line level, and thus may decrease the line productivity. To avoid these negative effects, some research started considering ergonomic characteristics at the …

Maintenance Optimization For Substations With Aging Equipment, Haifeng Ge

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Today’s electric utilities are confronted with a myriad of challenges that include aging infrastructure, enhanced expectation of reliability, reduced cost, and coping effectively with uncertainties and changing regulation requirements. Utilities rely on Asset Management programs to manage inspections and maintenance activities in order to control equipment conditions. However, development of strategies to make sound decisions in order to effectively improve equipment and system reliability while meeting constraints such as a maintenance budget is a challenge.

The primary objective of this dissertation is to develop models and algorithms to study the impact of maintenance toward equipment/system reliability and economic cost, and …