Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Leveraging Contracting Strategies With Private Shipyards For Increasing Naval Fleet Operational Availability, Kaitlynn M. Castelle, Joseph M. Bradley, Sanjeev Gupta

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A major rethink of NAVSEA’s shipyard contracting strategy is required to support the critical need of improving our naval fleet availability. Operational Fleet material availability is reduced when various parts of the “NAVSEA production system” operate at cross-purposes. By increasing alignment between major players (i.e., NAVSEA and the private shipyards), major improvements in delivery performance, cost, and even throughput can be realized. Developing strategies and specific actions to do so is a rich field given the current state of the system. We take an analytical as well as evidence-based approach to propose strategies that can be successful given the peculiar …

The Resilient City: A Platform For Informed Decision-Making Process, Paul Niculescu-Mizil Gheorghe, Jarutpong Vasuthanasub, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

As over half of the world’s inhabitants lives in metropolises, the rapid growth in urbanization has made cities becoming more and more exposed and vulnerable to a broad spectrum of threats and hazards. In order to respond to such difficulties, a concept of resilience is considered a significant component for the long-term planning and sustainable development of the cities. “Resilient City” is a new paradigm that challenges the idealistic principle of stability and resistance to change implicitly in sustainable development and success. However, building a resilient city requires a holistic approach, as well as the appropriate adoption of knowledge and …

Natural Resources Governance Employing Blockchain-Based Decision-Making, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Natural resources are essential structures of socio-economic systems which shape the well-being of humanity, environment, and the economy. Human actions have become the critical responsibility for environmental changes and pressuring many planetary boundaries. Having a systematic approach can provide a governance platform including the inherent characteristics of the resource, the historically established form of use, and transaction costs. A natural resource governance framework is developed by applying Blockchain technology as the primary goal of this study to regulate and manage the extraction and trades. Blockchain technology provides a distributed concurrency monitoring system for sustainable resource management. Persistent and pervasive cooperation …

Development Of A New Instrument To Assess The Performance Of Systems Engineers, Niamat Ullah Ibne Hossain, Morteza Nagahi, Raed Jaradat, Charles Keating

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Complex systems continue to confound the capabilities of systems engineers to deal with and navigate a new generation of problems. Thus, there is an emerging need to develop a cadre of effective systems engineers capable of efficiently addressing complex systems problems. This paper introduces a new system engineering instrument that assesses the performance of systems engineers. The instrument is based on the set of performance indicators examining six fundamental system engineering attributes. This instrument would provide a baseline to understand the current state of the systems engineering skills for a systems engineer and indicate developmental areas to enhance those skills. …

Healthcare Robotics: Key Factors That Impact Robot Adoption In Healthcare, Sujatha Alla, Pilar Pazos

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the current dynamic business environment, healthcare organizations are focused on improving patient satisfaction, performance, and efficiency. The healthcare industry is considered a complex system that is highly reliant of new technologies to support clinical as well as business processes. Robotics is one of such technologies that is considered to have the potential to increase efficiency in a wide range of clinical services. Although the use of robotics in healthcare is at the early stages of adoption, some studies have shown the capacity of this technology to improve precision, accessibility through less invasive procedures, and reduction of human error during …

History And Current Status Of Human Readiness Levels, Judi E. See, Holly Handley

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

[First slide]

• HRLs have been proposed as an analogue to TRLs to provide similar benefits.
• TRLs are routinely used throughout the DOD, DOE, Industry, and academia
• Value of TRLs is widely recognized.

Benefits of TRLs

Demonstrating high maturity for new technologies increases changes of program success.

• Use a common terminology across diverse organizations
• Promote testing and verification to asses maturity
• Gauge progress to plan future level of effort needed to achieve maturity
• Help manage schedule and cost risks
• Provide assurance that technologies will function as intended.

• HRLs are designed to complement TRLs during technology development.
• Mirror simple nine-level TRL scale …

Sems Says...: We Welcome Your Feedback, Brian K. Smith, Chinweike Eseonu, Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, Pilar Pazos-Lago

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The article offers information on the IISE Annual Conference Expo 2019 to be held on May 18-21, 2018 in Orlando, Florida, for industrial and systems engineers.

A Structured Methodology For Tailoring And Deploying Lean Manufacturing Systems, Kenneth John Gembel Ii

Wayne State University Dissertations

The seminal works of Peter Drucker and James Womack in the 1990’s outlined the lean manufacturing practices of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) to become a world leader in manufacturing. These philosophies have since become the springboard for a significant paradigm shift in approaching manufacturing systems and how to leverage them to optimize operational practices and gain competitive advantage. While there is no shortage of literature touting the benefits of Lean Manufacturing Systems (LMS), there has been significant difficulty in effectively deploying them to obtain and sustain the performance that TMC has achieved.

This body of work provides a novel methodology …

Point-Of-Care Assessment At A Free, Out-Of-Hours Orthopedic Clinic, Whitney M. Graves, Zachary K. Winkelmann, Kenneth E. Games

Clinical Practice in Athletic Training

Access to healthcare is a challenge for many Americans living in rural communities. Hospital systems have created programs and developed models to improve access to care. However, documentation of the role of these clinics serving different populations and various types of communities is quite scarce. The purpose of this article is to describe the patient satisfaction and procedures assessed at the point-of-care during a 14-week, out-of-hours free orthopedic clinic in the Southeastern United States. One hundred and twenty-nine patients attended the orthopedic clinic and completed a patient satisfaction survey following their patient encounter. At the end of the 14-week, 89% …

Effect Of Model Of Care And Comorbidities On Multiple-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment In Nigeria, Oluremilekun Comfort Kusimo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a public health problem in several countries such as Angola, India, China, Kenya, and Nigeria. Due to the increasing high burden of MDR-TB, most of these countries do not have adequate capacities to manage MDR-TB patients effectively. This study investigated the effect of model of care; human immunodeficiency virus comorbidity; and demographic factors such as age, gender, and marital status on the treatment outcomes of MDR-TB patients in Nigeria. The study was based on the analysis of secondary data of 402 MDR-TB patients accessed from the data systems of the National Tuberculosis, Buruli Ulcer, and Leprosy …

Detecting Special-Cause Variation 'Events' From Process Data Signatures, Timothy M. Young, Olga Khaliukova, Nicolas André, Alexander Petutschnigg, Timothy G. Rials, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The ability to detect the special-cause variation of incoming feedstocks from advanced sensor technology is invaluable to manufacturers. Many on-line sensors produce data signatures that require further off-line statistical processing for interpretation by operational personnel. However, early detection of changes in variation in incoming feedstocks may be imperative to promote early-stage preventive measures. A method is proposed in this applied study for developing control bands to quantify the variation of data signatures in the context of statistical process control (SPC). Control bands based on pointwise prediction intervals constructed from the Bonferroni Inequality and Bayesian smoothing splines are developed. Applications using …

A State Aggregation Approach For Stochastic Multiperiod Last-Mile Ride-Sharing Problems, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The arrangement of last-mile services is playing an increasingly important role in making public transport more accessible. We study the use of ridesharing in satisfying last-mile demands with the assumption that demands are uncertain and come in batches. The most important contribution of our paper is a two-level Markov decision process framework that is capable of generating a vehicle-dispatching policy for the aforementioned service. We introduce state summarization, representative states, and sample-based cost estimation as major approximation techniques in making our approach scalable. We show that our approach converges and solution quality improves as sample size increases. We also apply …

Foundations For A Game Theoretic Framework For Agile Acquisition, Scott Rosen, Kelly Horinek, Alexander Odeh, Les Servi, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

This article investigates the concept of developing a game theoretic framework that is based on the application of buyer and seller utility functions to support the bidding process in government acquisition. The results of a literature survey of utility function approaches, with potential to provide a suitable foundation to a game theory framework for acquisition, are presented. The utility function methods found most promising were further adapted and tested: the Best-Worst method, the Multi-Swing Method, and Functional Dependency for Network Analysis. To test the scalability of the approach, the Best-Worst method is applied to a larger problem to show the …

Supply Chain Infrastructure Restoration Calculator Software Tool -- Developer Guide And User Manual, Akhilesh Ojha, Bhanu Kanwar, Suzanna Long, Thomas G. Shoberg, Steven Corns

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This report describes a software tool that calculates costs associated with the reconstruction of supply chain interdependent critical infrastructure in the advent of a catastrophic failure by either outside forces (extreme events) or internal forces (fatigue). This tool fills a gap between search and recover strategies of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (or FEMA) and construction techniques under full recovery. In addition to overall construction costs, the tool calculates reconstruction needs in terms of personnel and their required support. From these estimates, total costs (or the cost of each element to be restored) can be calculated. Estimates are based upon …

The Tabu Ant Colony Optimizer And Its Application In An Energy Market, David Donald Haynes

Doctoral Dissertations

"A new ant colony optimizer, the 'tabu ant colony optimizer' (TabuACO) is introduced, tested, and applied to a contemporary problem. The TabuACO uses both attractive and repulsive pheromones to speed convergence to a solution. The dual pheromone TabuACO is benchmarked against several other solvers using the traveling salesman problem (TSP), the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), and the Steiner tree problem. In tree-shaped puzzles, the dual pheromone TabuACO was able to demonstrate a significant improvement in performance over a conventional ACO. As the amount of connectedness in the network increased, the dual pheromone TabuACO offered less improvement in performance over the …

Product Development Of Rice Milk Soap, Jiradej Ekthumrong

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The objective of this research is to develop rice into rice milk soap using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in order to add value to the product. The current rice production process can produce some broken rice, which is of low value. In order to increase value, the study is conducted to develop it into rice milk soap product. Quality Function Deployment is used to analyze and develop the product that best answer customer needs. There are data collection on customers through surveys to gain insights used for product development and rough product to market business plan. The result of this …

Quality Function Deployment (Qfd) For Designing Rock Sugar Chopping Machine, Janejira Pannavatkulthon

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The objective of this research is to study and apply the principles of quality function deployment to design rock sugar chopping machine for selected sugar factory in order to increase productivity of current chopping process. The design of machine is analyzed using House of Quality which is a part of quality function deployment methodology. The data collection was conducted by on-site investigation and face-to-face interview with the owner of sugar factory. It is found that the main problem of this factory is inadequate of in-house production capacity and the bottleneck of manufacturing processes is chopping process. The result of this …

Assessing Feasibility Of Water Accounting Toolkit For In A Poultry Processing Plant, Kantinant Silabhusith

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

In this project, we will be looking into the use of a toolkit called water accounting as applied to a food processing plant and determine its effectiveness as a toolkit for monitoring water usage in a factory. The main objective of this thesis report is to 1. Recommend reducing water consumption by applying the water accounting toolkit. 2. Provide a standardized tool for the case study company to measure their sustainability progress and communicate that information clearly. This report will also discuss the extent in which the company can reduce their water consumption and their various methods in which to …

Improvement Of Inventory Policy For Furniture Fittings Manufacturer, Natchaya Suntipiromkul

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The objective of this research is to improve the management of inventory in a furniture fittings manufacturer so that shortage and overstock could be reduced. Based on our initial investigations, such inventory problems were caused not only by inefficient production planning but also a lack of inventory control system that linked those plans with the stocks of raw material required. To better address the issues, two different models have been therefore proposed, namely more accurate demand forecasting models for products with different demand patterns and inventory control models for raw materials of those products. Regarding the development of more accurate …

Tracking System Design For A Production Warehouse Of Automobile Condensers, Kittisak Lertkajornkitti

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

In order to survive in a harshly competitive market, a company needs to enhance not only its core operational efficiency but also the performance of other business functions, including the supportive ones. As such, in this thesis, we will explore how we could improve the performance of one important supportive operation in a Thai automobile condenser manufacturer, namely the warehousing process, using RFID tracking technology. RFID tracking technology is brought into consideration by the company’s management team due to its current warehousing issues, including inventory mismatch, inventory misplacement, and faulty delivery. We found that the root cause of these problems …