Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Warrior Information Network- Tactical Human View Models & Analysis, Holly A. H. Handley, Cansu Kandemir, Elnaz Dario

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The Human View collects and categorizes data to provide information and analyses on the human component of a system. This organization of human system data helps to understand what the impact of the technology on human performance may be. The first phase of this project completed exploratory work on different Human View techniques in the context of the Warrior Information Network - Tactical (WIN-T) system. This included creating a high-level diagram to provide a conceptual realization of a General Purpose User (GPU) interacting with the WIN-T system, creating engineering diagrams using the System Modeling Language (SysML) to render the Human …

Calculus For Decision Systems, Jorge Antonio Samayoa Ranero

Open Access Dissertations

The conceptualization of the term "system" has become highly dependent on the application domain. What a physicist means by the term system might be different than what a sociologist means by the same term. In 1956, Bertalanffy [1] defined a system as " a set of units with relationships among them". This and many other definitions of system share the idea of a system as a black box that has parts or elements interacting between each other. This means that at some level of abstraction all systems are similar, what eventually differentiates one system from another is the set of …

Inventory Optimization In Manufacturing Organizations, Scott William Lemke

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Inventories totaling 1.7 trillion U.S. dollars represent an opportunity for U.S. manufacturers. This exploratory case study researched supply chain strategies used to manage inventory in manufacturing operations of a U.S. manufacturing company. A mature value chain contained within a single organization using the value chain framework was the basis for this study. Individual interviews conducted with 16 managers responsible for defining and implementing inventory control strategies, and 4 internal users provided primary information for the study. Other sources of information included a value chain map created through the observation of operations, various inventory measurements, and policies and guidelines related to …

Two-Stage Stochastic Programming In Adaptive Interdisciplinary Pain Management, Na Wang

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Chronic pain is a global health problem. About 100 million adult Americans suffering from chronic pain, which costs $560 - $635 billion per year. The Eugene McDermott Center for Pain Management at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas conducted a two-stage pain management program for patients who suffer from chronic pain. Data information such as patient’s parameter, past treatment, pain outcome at different evaluation point and so on has been collected by the McDermott Center. The University of Texas at Arlington is collaborating with the McDermott Center to find optimal treatment strategies for individual patients.A treatment strategy …

High-Dimensional Adaptive Dynamic Programming With Mixed Integer Linear Programming, Zirun Zhang

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Dynamic programming (DP, Bellman 1957) is a classic mathematical programming approach to solve multistage decision problems. The “Bellman equation” uses a recursive concept that includes both the current contribution and future contribution in the objective function of an optimization. The method has potential to represent dynamic decision-making systems, but an exact DP solution algorithm is limited to small problems with restrictions, such as problems with linear transitions and problems without uncertainty. Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) is a modern branch of DP that seeks to achieve numerical solutions via approximation. It is can be applied to real-world DP problems, but there …

Reliability Analysis And Optimal Maintenance Planning For Repairable Multi-Component Systems Subject To Dependent Competing Risks, Nailong Zhang

Wayne State University Dissertations

Modern engineering systems generally consist of multiple components that interact in a complex manner. Reliability analysis of multi-component repairable systems plays a critical role for system safety and cost reduction. Establishing reliability models and scheduling optimal maintenance plans for multi-component repairable systems, however, is still a big challenge when considering the dependency of component failures. Existing models commonly make prior assumptions, without statistical verification, as to whether different component failures are independent or not. In this dissertation, data-driven systematic methodologies to characterize component failure dependency of complex systems are proposed. In CHAPTER 2, a parametric reliability model is proposed to …

Alternate Models For Natural Gas Transportation System Performance Optimization, Gnana Shekaran Arumugam

Theses and Dissertations--Manufacturing Systems Engineering

The Natural Gas market in the U.S is growing rapidly with evidence that the nation has enough shale reserves to power the country for the next century. To ensure continued economic benefits through the use of this environmentally desired energy source, it becomes important to optimize the transportation network system design. Transportation through pipelines is one of the most common methods used to distribute Natural Gas from source to destination. This transportation system, consisting of pipelines, compressors and other supporting equipment, must be optimized, considering all relevant parameters to minimize cost and increase profit. The research presented here improves on …

Assessing Values-Based Sourcing Strategies In Regional Food Supply Networks: An Agent-Based Approach, Caroline C. Krejci, Michael C. Dorneich, Richard T. Stone

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Faculty Publications - Archive

The recent increase in demand for regionally produced food has resulted in a need for more efficient distribution methods. To connect regional food producers and consumers, intermediated regional food supply networks have developed. The intermediary, known as a regional food hub, serves as an aggregation point for products and information. It may also act as a filter to ensure that the requirements of both producers and consumers are consistently met. This paper describes an empirically based agent-based model of a regional food network in central Iowa that is intermediated by a food hub. The model was used to test a …

Embedding Integrated Rfid Sensors Into Fiber Reinforced Plastics During The Manufacturing Process, Billy Joe Gray

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This research evaluates the impact of embedding a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag into the structure of a fiber reinforced polymer (FRP). The first portion of the research evaluates the mechanical impacts of embedding the tag through simulation of the stresses that the polymer will be exposed to and then comparing with compression and shear testing of the polymer parts. The second portion of the research evaluates the impact of the reinforcement materials on the transmission of radio frequency to and from the tag. The last portion of the research looks at how the costs of RFID compare to the …

Semantic Shift To Pragmatic Meaning In Shared Decision Making: Situation Theory Perspective, M. Canan, A. Sousa-Poza, S. F. Kovacic

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The way humans establish communication depends on the generation and conveyance of meaning. Linguistically, meaning in information is dependent on the meaning that is ascribed to signifiers in the context of the communication. These signifiers can include items such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols. Conveyance of meaning may, however, imprecise and prone to error. The meaning of information in communication may arise from a change in the context in which a signifier is placed (intrinsic), or a change in the paradigm with which the signifier and context are perceived (extrinsic). In simple situations, where paradigms are reconcilable, semantic shift …

Analyzing Stakeholders Using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, Patrick T. Hester

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Stakeholder analysis was first explored as a methodology to assist business leaders with their strategic management functions. Stakeholder analysis has since expanded beyond the corporate arena. Stakeholders are a vital element in all complex systems problems; they are the customers, users, clients, suppliers, employees, regulators, and team members of a system. They fund a system, design it, build it, operate it, maintain it, and dispose of it. Each stakeholder contributes their own value-added perspective, as described by the systems principle known as complementarity. While many approaches exist for classifying and determining their attitudes, these approaches stop short of evaluating stakeholders …

Key Factors Driving Personnel Downsizing In Multinational Military Organizations, Ilksen Gorkem, Resit Unal, Pilar Pazos

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Although downsizing has long been a topic of research in traditional organizations, there are very few studies of this phenomenon in military contexts. As a result, we have little understanding of the key factors that drive personnel downsizing in military setting. This study contributes to our understanding of key factors that drive personnel downsizing in military organizations and whether those factors may differ across NATO nations’ cultural clusters. The theoretical framework for this study was built from studies in non-military contexts and adapted to fit the military environment.

This research relies on historical data from one of the largest multinational …

Understanding The Dynamic Behaviour Of Three Echelon Retail Supply Chain Disruptions, John Crowe, Mohammed Mesabbah, Amr Arisha

Conference papers

It is often taken for granted that the right products will be available to buy in retail outlets 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Challenges in achieving this continued on-shelf availability range from recession hit demand patterns to cost reduction driven strategies. Irish government initiatives to brand the country as a sustainable, reliable provider of food retail supply chains has resulted in increased importance on decision maker accuracy. The vulnerability of retail supply chain’s (RSC) to disruption is another catalyst in the complexity of the decision making process and a more robust understanding of disruption behavior is needed. …

A Probabilistic Fracture Assessment Of Vertebral Cortical Bone, Tarun Goswami, Isaac Mabe

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

Cortical bone is a material with a porous structure. The presence of pores creates local stress concentrations and the likelihood of premature failure. Assuming that pores are present in all bone, vertebral endplates, for example, can subside. Subsidence has taken place at rates as high as 77 percent. A computational probabilistic assessment of the pore size distribution and their contribution to the fracture toughness has been presented in this paper. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to develop and assign random pores. Also the model compared crack sizes to the thickness of the cortical bone present as a limiting case. …

A Framework For Interoperability On The United States Electric Grid Infrastructure, Stuart Laval

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the United States (US) electric grid has been a stable one-way power delivery infrastructure that supplies centrally-generated electricity to its predictably consuming demand. However, the US electric grid is now undergoing a huge transformation from a simple and static system to a complex and dynamic network, which is starting to interconnect intermittent distributed energy resources (DERs), portable electric vehicles (EVs), and load-altering home automation devices, that create bidirectional power flow or stochastic load behavior. In order for this grid of the future to effectively embrace the high penetration of these disruptive and fast-responding digital technologies without compromising its safety, …

Body Mass Bias Mitigation For Females In Military Physical Readiness Testing Through Load Carriage Implementation, Aaron Yeaton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The US Military requires specific fitness testing, known as the Physical Readiness Test (PRT), for its members to determine their overall fitness levels. The test currently being used has been shown to have bias towards heavier mass individuals of up to 20%. Prior research has been completed and several recommendations have been made to eliminate mass bias, but this has been conducted almost exclusively on males. There is very little data and research on military physical fitness testing for women besides combat specific evolution exercises. A possibility exists to eliminate the bias for females through implementing load carriage during PRT …

The Effects Of Chronic Sleep Deprivation On Sustained Attention: A Study Of Brain Dynamic Functional Connectivity, Yiling He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is estimated that about 35-40% of adults in the U.S. suffer from insufficient sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has become a prevalent phenomenon because of contemporary lifestyle and work-related factors. Sleep deprivation can reduce the capabilities and efficiency of attentional performance by impairing perception, increasing effort to maintain concentration, as well as introducing vision disturbance. Thus, it is important to understand the neural mechanisms behind how chronic sleep deprivation impairs sustained attention. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the study of the integration between anatomically distributed and functionally connected brain regions. Functional connectivity has been widely used …

Risk Based Optimization For Improving Emergency Medical Systems, Sandhya Saisubramanian, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In emergency medical systems, arriving at the incident location a few seconds early can save a human life. Thus, this paper is motivated by the need to reduce the response time – time taken to arrive at the incident location after receiving the emergency call – of Emergency Response Vehicles, ERVs (ex: ambulances, fire rescue vehicles) for as many requests as possible. We expect to achieve this primarily by positioning the "right" number of ERVs at the "right" places and at the "right" times. Given the exponentially large action space (with respect to number of ERVs and their placement) and …

Designing A Portfolio Of Parameter Configurations For Online Algorithm Selection, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mustafa Misir

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Algorithm portfolios seek to determine an effective set of algorithms that can be used within an algorithm selection framework to solve problems. A limited number of these portfolio studies focus on generating different versions of a target algorithm using different parameter configurations. In this paper, we employ a Design of Experiments (DOE) approach to determine a promising range of values for each parameter of an algorithm. These ranges are further processed to determine a portfolio of parameter configurations, which would be used within two online Algorithm Selection approaches for solving different instances of a given combinatorial optimization problem effectively. We …

High-Performance Extreme Learning Machines: A Complete Toolbox For Big Data Applications, Anton Akusok, Kaj Mikael Bjork, Yoan Miche, Amaury Lendasse

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This Paper Presents a Complete Approach to a Successful Utilization of a High-Performance Extreme Learning Machines (Elms) Toolbox for Big Data. It Summarizes Recent Advantages in Algorithmic Performance; Gives a Fresh View on the Elm Solution in Relation to the Traditional Linear Algebraic Performance; and Reaps the Latest Software and Hardware Performance Achievements. the Results Are Applicable to a Wide Range of Machine Learning Problems and Thus Provide a Solid Ground for Tackling Numerous Big Data Challenges. the Included Toolbox is Targeted at Enabling the Full Potential of Elms to the Widest Range of Users.