Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Toughening Of Poly(L-Lactic Acid) With Cu3Btc2 Metal Organic Framework Crystals, Ajay Kathuria, Mohamad G. Abiad, Rafael Auras

Industrial Technology and Packaging

Poly(l-lactic acid) (PLLA) and metal organic framework (MOF) composites were prepared by melt extrusion of PLLA with 5, 10 and 20% w/w of activated Cu₃(BTC)₂ MOF. The morphology and stability of injection-molded samples were evaluated using thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), gel permeation chromatography, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The composites showed improved toughness during the tensile tests as compared to the neat PLLA matrix. Toughness mechanism of the composites was studied using SEM and rheological studies. SEM images indicated that cavitation induced by debonding at the interface of PLLA and MOF particles during …

Acuta Enews December 20132 Vol. 42, No. 12

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Board Approves Slate of Nominees

1 A Gift from ACUTA to You!

2 Nominate Now for Ruth A, Michalecki Leadership Award i

3 What's on Your Desk?

4 From the Listserv

6 RF Video Distribution Solution for the University of the South

7 Info Links

8 Board Report

9 Welcome New Members

9 Check It Out

An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we illustrate how massive agent-based simulation can be used to investigate an exciting new application domain of experience management in theme parks, which covers topics like congestion control, incentive design, and revenue management. Since all visitors are heterogeneous and self-interested, we argue that a high-quality agent-based simulation is necessary for studying various problems related to experience management. As in most agent-base simulations, a sound understanding of micro-level behaviors is essential to construct high-quality models. To achieve this, we designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind real-world experiment that helps us understand how typical visitors behave in a theme-park environment. …

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' …

Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increase in the frequency of disruptions in the recent times and their impact have increased the attention in supply chain disruption management research. The objective of this paper is to understand as to how a disruption might affect the supply chain network - depending upon the network structure, the node that is disrupted, the disruption in production capacity of the disrupted node and the period of the disruption - via decision trees. To this end, we first developed a 5-tier agent-based supply chain model and then simulated it for various what-if disruptive scenarios for 3 different network structures (80 trials …

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …

Social Media For Supply Chain Risk Management, Xiuju Fu, Rick S. M. Goh, J. C. Tong, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, H. Y. Xu, Sifei Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid increase of online social network users worldwide, social media feeds have become a rich and valuable information resource and attract great attention across diversified domains. In social media data, there are abundant contents of two-way and interactive communication about products, demand, customer services and supply. This makes social media a valuable channel for listening to the voices from the market and measuring supply chain risks and new market trends for companies. In this study, we surveyed the potential value of social media in supply chain risk management (SCRM) and examined how they can be applied to SCRM …

Acuta Enews November 2013 Vol. 42, No. 11

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 The Concept of Context-Aware Computing

2 Nominate Now for Ruth A. Michalecki Leadership Award

3 Collaboration Is Not Automatic

4 Nominations for Board of Directors: Deadline November 18

5 Free Webinar: The Evolution of Control Systems Security Brief

5 What's on Your Desk?

6 Bring 8 Fall Seminar Sessions to Your Desktop or Tablet

6 Thanks to Fall Seminar Exhibitors 6 Sponsors

6 Get Your Logos Here

7 Info Links

8 Add Names from Your Campus to Your ' ACUTA Roster

8 Board Report

9 Welcome New Members

9 Check It Out

Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are typically used to model routing and trip planning problems. OP is a variant of the well known traveling salesman problem where the goal is to compute the highest reward path that includes a subset of nodes and has an overall travel time less than the specified deadline. Stochastic orienteering problems (SOPs) extend OPs to account for uncertain travel times and are significantly harder to solve than deterministic OPs. In this paper, we contribute a scalable mixed integer LP formulation for solving risk aware SOPs, which is a principled approximation of the underlying stochastic optimization problem. Empirically, …

Deployed Communications In An Austere Environment: A Delphi Study, Andrew Soine, James Harker, Alan R. Heminger

Faculty Publications

The information and communications technology (ICT) field is undergoing a period of tremendous change. The exponential growth rate of ICT capability in recent decades, which has had an undeniable effect on every aspect of our society, will likely have ramifications for military operations in austere environments. 1 The Air Force’s 689th Combat Communications Wing commissioned a study to forecast the future of mobile ICT in such environments. Researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology chose to employ the Delphi technique as the methodology for executing this task. The following scenario, based on the results of that study, demonstrates how …

Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches For Smoothing Congestion In Resource Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu, William Yeoh, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by sel sh agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed in- centives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the re- source sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilib- rium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the uncon- strained version (no budget) of the …

The Effect Of Distribution On Product Temperature Profile In Thermally Insulated Containers For Express Shipments, Jay Singh, Sanjiv Jaggia, Koushik Saha

Industrial Technology and Packaging

An uninterrupted cold chain is a continual series of storage and distribution activities that maintain a specific temperature or temperature range. Cold chain solutions typically involve excessive packaging to ensure that the desired product temperature is maintained through the distribution process, thereby increasing the logistics-related costs. There is a myriad of solutions available for shipping temperature-sensitive products, including those constructed with a variety of packaging materials as well as refrigerants. Although static characteristics for thermally insulated packaging solutions such as the R-values of package systems as well as the melting points and heat absorption rates of various refrigerants have been …

Acuta Enews October 2013 Vol. 42, No. 10

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Nominate for Board of Directors

1 PD and More from ACUTA

2 Nominations Open for institutional Excellence Award

3 What's on Your Desk?

4 Using Social Media During Times of Crisis

5 Why You Should Customize Lync' qualified Phones

6 Board Report

7 Info Links

8 Welcome New Members

8 Check It Out

Modeling The Impact Of Simulated Educational Interventions On The Use And Abuse Of Pharmaceutical Opioids In The United States: A Report On Initial Efforts, Wayne Wakeland, Alexandra E. Nielsen, Teresa D. Schmidt, Dennis Mccarty, Lynn Webster, John Fitzgerald, J. David Haddox

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Three educational interventions were simulated in a system dynamics model of the medical use, trafficking, and nonmedical use of pharmaceutical opioids. The study relied on secondary data obtained in the literature for the period of 1995 to 2008 as well as expert panel recommendations regarding model parameters and structure. The behavior of the resulting systems-level model was tested for fit against reference behavior data. After the base model was tested, logic to represent three educational interventions was added and the impact of each intervention on simulated overdose deaths was evaluated over a 7-year evaluation period, 2008 to 2015. Principal findings …

Acuta Enews September 2013 Vol. 42, No. 9

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Big Data Means Big Advances

2 Nominations Open for 2014 institutional Excellence Award

2 Seeking Presenters for Winter Seminar

3 Webinar: The Evolution of Control Systems Security Brief

3 Register to Attend Fall Seminar

4 What Exactly Is a Microsoft Lync Phone?

6 Info Links

7 Overheard on the Listserv

8 Board Report

9 Welcome New Members

9 Check It Out

On The Allocation Of Exclusive-Use Counters For Airport Check-In Queues: Static Vs. Dynamic Policies, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we propose a static policy for the optimal allocation of a fixed number of exclusive-use check-in counters dedicated to a single flight. We first provide the motivation for considering the static policy by showing that the dynamic policy already available in the literature suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The objective is to minimize the (expected) total cost of waiting, counter operation, and passenger delay costs which we show to be convex in the number of counters allocated. In those cases where the passenger delay cost is difficult to estimate, we propose an alternative formulation and minimize …

Study Of A Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell Combined Heat, Hydrogen And Power System: End-Use Application, Tarek A. Hamad, Abdulhakim Amer A. Agll, Yousif M. Hamad, Sushrut Bapat, Mathew Thomas, Kevin B. Martin, John W. Sheffield

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

To address the problem of fossil fuel usage and high greenhouse gas emissions at the Missouri University of Science and Technology campus, using of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources can lower energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Biogas, produced by anaerobic digestion of wastewater, organic waste, agricultural waste, industrial waste, and animal by-products is a potential source of renewable energy. In this work, we have discussed the design of CHHP system for the campus using local resources. An energy flow and resource availability study is performed to identify the type and source of feedstock required to continuously run the …

Acuta Enews August 2013 Vo. 42, No. 8

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue.,,

1 Sewanee Campus Celebrates IEA Award

2 Regulatory Webinar on Section 255

2 ACUTA Webinar: What's on the Radar?

2 Sneak Peek at 2014 ACUTA journal Topics i

Vendor System lntegrations Accelerate in the Safety 6 Security Industry j

Seeking Presenters for Winter Seminar

4 Deja vu All Over Again: Can We Please Put SDNs in Context?

5 Some Thoughts about Fiber Optics

6 lnfo Links

6 Mark Your Calendar for Fall Seminar

7 Looking for a Few Good Coordinators

7 Board Report

8 Welcome New Members

8 Check It Out

The Role Of Third Party Logistics Providers (3pls) In The Adoption Of Green Supply Chain Initiatives, Edward Sweeney, Pietro Evangelista, Maria Huge-Brodin, Karin Isaksson

Practitioner Journals

The increasing importance of environmental sustainability has sharpened the focus on the need for innovative approaches to the purchasing of transport and logistics services. This article points out some of the challenges that purchasers of transport and logistics services, as well as their suppliers in the third party logistics (3PL) industry, are facing. These include the need for closer collaboration between 3PLs and their customers, as well as developing systems for the robust assessment of the environmental sustainability of services. The article is based on several years’ research experience inIreland,ItalyandSweden.

A Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm For Vehicle Resource Allocation In Sustainable Transportation Planning, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Pang Jin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sustainable supply chain management has been an increasingly important topic of research in recent years. At the strategic level, there are computational models which study supply and distribution networks with environmental considerations. At the operational level, there are, for example, routing and scheduling models which are constrained by carbon emissions. Our paper explores work in tactical planning with regards to vehicle resource allocation from distribution centers to customer locations in a multi-echelon logistics network. We formulate the bi-objective optimization problem exactly and design a memetic algorithm to efficiently derive an approximate Pareto front. We illustrate the applicability of our approach …

Evaluation Of Team Quality, Shiva Rama Krishna Murthy Bhagavatula

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

The ever-increasing competitive pressure and sizes of the global markets have forced organizations from both manufacturing and healthcare sectors to rely more on teams. Therefore the success or the failure of an organization depends largely on the overall quality of the teams within that organization. This increased attention towards teams has forced many organizations to focus on improving the overall quality of their teams. This study has three main objectives. The first objective is to structure a comprehensive list of attributes affecting the overall quality of a team in manufacturing and healthcare sectors. The second objective is to use a …

Scalable Randomized Patrolling For Securing Rapid Transit Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhi Yuan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mass Rapid Transit using rail is a popular mode of transport employed by millions of people in many urban cities across the world. Typically, these networks are massive, used by many and thus, can be a soft target for criminals. In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling randomised patrols for improving security of such rail networks. Similar to existing work in randomised patrols for protecting critical infrastructure, we also employ Stackelberg Games to represent the problem. In solving the Stackelberg games for massive rail networks, we make two key contributions. Firstly, we provide an approach called RaPtoR for …

Flotra: Flower-Shape Trajectory Mining For Instance-Specific Parameter Tuning, Lindawati Lindawati, Feida Zhu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The performance of a heuristic algorithm is highly dependent on its parameter configuration, yet finding a good parameter configuration is often a time-consuming task. In this paper we propose FloTra, a Flower graph mining for graph search Trajectory pattern extraction for generic instance-specific automated parameter tuning. This algorithm provides efficient extraction of compact and discriminative features of the search trajectory, upon which problem instances are clustered and the corresponding optimal parameter configurations are computed. Experimental evaluations of our approach on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) show that our approach offers promising improvement over existing parameter tuning algorithms. In this work, …

Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Orienteering Problem (OP), as originally defined by Tsiligirides, is the problem of cross-countr sport in which participants get rewards from visiting a predefined set of checkpoints. As Orienteering Problem can be used to describe a wide variety of real-world problems like route planning for facility inspection, patrolling of strategic location, and reward-weighted traveling salesman problem, it has attracted continuous interests from researchers and a large number of variants and corresponding algorithms for solving them have been introduced.

Riskvis: Supply Chain Visualization With Risk Management And Real-Time Monitoring, Rick S. M. Goh, Zhaoxia Wang, Xiaofeng Yin, Xiuju Fu, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Sifei Lu, Xiaorong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With increased complexity, supply chain networks (SCNs) of modern era face higher risks and lower efficiency due to limited visibility. Hence, there is an immediate need to provide end-to-end supply chain visibility for efficient management of complex supply chains. This paper proposes a visualization scheme based on multi-hierarchical modular design and develops a supply chain visualization platform with risk management and real-time monitoring, named RiskVis, for realizing better Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM). A Supply Chain Visualizer (SCV) with a graphical visualization platform is mounted as a part of a SCRM management decision-making dashboard and it provides senior management a …

Interacting Knapsack Problem In Designing Resource Bundles, Truong Huy D. Nguyen, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many real-life businesses, the service provider/seller keeps a log of the visitors’ behavior as a way to assess the efficiency of the current business/operation model and find room for improvement. For example, by tracking when visitors entering attractions in a theme park, theme park owners can detect when and where congestion may occur, thus having contingency plans to reroute the visitors accordingly. Similarly, a Cable TV service provider can track channel switching events at each household to identify uninteresting channels. Subsequently, the repertoire of channels up for subscription can evolve over time to better serve the entertainment demand of …

“Network-Theoretic” Queuing Delay Estimation In Theme Park Attractions, Ajay Aravamudhan, Archan Misra, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Queuing is a common phenomenon in theme parks which negatively affects visitor experience and revenue yields. There is thus a need for park operators to infer the real queuing delays without expensive investment in human effort or complex tracking infrastructure. In this paper, we depart from the classical queuing theory approach and provide a data-driven and online approach for estimating the time-varying queuing delays experienced at different attractions in a theme park. This work is novel in that it relies purely on empirical observations of the entry time of individual visitors at different attractions, and also accommodates the reality that …

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Resource Allocation Policies, Kar Way Tan, Wei Hao Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we consider the problem of allocating doctors in the ambulatory area of a hospital's emergency department (ED) based on a set of policies. Traditional staffing methods are static, hence do not react well to surges in patient demands. We study strategies that intelligently adjust the number of doctors based on current and historical information about the patient arrival. Our main contribution is our proposed data-driven online approach that performs adaptive allocation by utilizing historical as well as current arrivals by running symbiotic simulation in real-time. We build a simulation prototype that models ED process that is close …

Entropy Applications In Industrial Engineering, Saeed Zamiri Marvizadeh

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

Entropy is a fundamental measure of information content which has been applied in a wide variety of fields. We present three applications of entropy in the industrial engineering field: dispatching of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGV), ranking and selection of simulated systems based on the mean performance measure, and comparison between random variables based on cumulative probability distributions.

The first application proposes three entropy-based AGV dispatching algorithms. We contribute to the body of knowledge by considering the consequence of potential AGV moves on the load balance of the factory before AGVs are dispatched. Kullback-Leibler directed divergence is applied to measure the …

Acuta Enews July 2013 Vol. 42, No. 7

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Let's Talk about Data Security

2 ACUTA Reaches Out to Local Schools

2 Regulatory Webinar on Section 255

2 Welcome, Owen West

3 20 Universities Form SIP Steering Committee i

3ACUTA Discount for SIP Certification

4 Info Links

4 Annual Dues Reminder Mailed July 1

5 loyn/RCSvs. webRTC: Solving Directory Services

6 Do You ROCKZi?

6 Mark Your Calendar for Fall Seminar

7 Board Report

8 Welcome New Members

8 Check It Out