Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Maximizing Financial Benefit Of Lean Six Sigma Projects Through Optimized Selection Criteria, Colin Wasiloff

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

As evolving threats across the globe keep pace with increasing budget constraints, the US Army’s major subordinate commands and their sub-organizations are constantly challenged to do more with less. Resources such as human capital, information technology, facilities, and budgeted funding are stretched as thin as ever, while requirements to serve the Warfighter remain paramount. Each dollar of financial benefit gained through cost reduction efforts at the US Army can affect the Warfighter directly. Budgeted money saved or avoided is reprogrammed both locally and atop the hierarchy at the Department of Treasury to serve the Warfighter better.

Ordinal Logistic Regression was …

Throughput And Yield Improvement For A Continuous Discrete-Product Manufacturing System, Md Shahriar J. Hossain

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A seam-welded steel pipe manufacturing process has mainly four distinct major design and/or operational problems dealing with buffer inventory, cutting tools, pipe sizing and inspection-rework facility. The general objective of this research is to optimally solve these four important problems to improve the throughput and yield of the system at a minimum cost.

The first problem of this research finds the optimal buffer capacity of steel strip coils to minimize the maintenance and downtime related costs. The total cost function for this coil feeding system is formulated as a constrained non-linear programming (NLP) problem which is solved with a search …

Effective Resource Utilization In Arkansas Public Schools, Ryan Sanders

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Teacher pay in Arkansas public schools varies widely from district to district across the state. This pay discrepancy is driven by both the funds available to a district and by how these funds are allocated. There is a standard per student budget given to districts across the state, but this budget can be supplemented by additional property taxes collected on property within a district. This leaves districts with more highly valued property at an advantage. Districts are free to allocate their budget for teacher pay as they see fit, with constraints on number of students per teacher and minimum teacher …

An Analysis Of Major Acquisition Reforms Through Text Mining And Grounded Theory Design, Amanda L. Mcgowin

Theses and Dissertations

Cost growth is an established phenomenon within Defense Acquisition that the US Government has attempted to abolish for decades through seemingly endless cycles of reform. Dozens of experts and senior leaders within the acquisition community have published their notions on the reasons for cost growth, nevertheless, legislation has yet to eradicate this presumed conundrum. For this reason, this research is aimed at identifying existing trends within past major Defense Acquisition Reform legislation, as well as in a compendium of views from leaders within the Defense Acquisition community on the efficacy of acquisition reform, to determine the possible disconnect. To accomplish …

Experimental Designs, Meta-Modeling, And Meta-Learning For Mixed-Factor Systems With Large Decision Spaces, Zachary C. Little

Theses and Dissertations

Many Air Force studies require a design and analysis process that can accommodate for the computational challenges associated with complex systems, simulations, and real-world decisions. For systems with large decision spaces and a mixture of continuous, discrete, and categorical factors, nearly orthogonal-and-balanced (NOAB) designs can be used as efficient, representative subsets of all possible design points for system evaluation, where meta-models are then fitted to act as surrogates to system outputs. The mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations used to construct first-order NOAB designs are extended to solve for low correlation between second-order model terms (i.e., two-way interactions and quadratics). The …