Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Human Capital Management Within The Federal Government Utilizing Generational Stratification With A Focus On Generation Y, Ian Nathaniel Barford

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

With many individuals in the Baby Boomer generation eligible to retire, many open positions will need to be filled by other Baby Boomers, or those from Generation X or Generation Y. Private industry has taken note of this and has been exploring workplace differences between Generation Y, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. Unfortunately for the federal government, data shows Generation Y is also separating; specifically quitting for unknown reasons. Understanding this apparent dichotomy between Generation Y and Generation X and Baby Boomer federal government employees is a current knowledge gap within the federal government's strategic human capital management focus.

From …

Naval Aviation Squadron Risk Analysis Predictive Bayesian Network Modeling Using Maintenance Climate Assessment Survey Results, Harry Michael Robinson

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Associated risks in flying have resulted in injury or death to aircrew and passengers, and damage or destruction of the aircraft and its surroundings. Although the Naval Aviation's flight mishap rate declined over the past 60 years, the proportion of human error causal factors has stayed relatively constant at about 80%. Efforts to reduce human errors have focused attention on understanding the aircrew and maintenance actions occurring in complex systems.

One such tool has been the Naval Aviation squadrons' regular participation in survey questionnaires deigned to measure respondent ratings related to personal judgments or perceptions of organizational climate for meeting …

Investigation Of Mirror Image Bias: Evidence For The Use Of Psychophysiological Measures As Indicators Of Cognitive Heuristics, Caroline R. Salchak

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The Mirror Imaging Bias (MIB) is gaining attention as a prominent quality factor in analysts' performance. MIB is an irrationality in which analysts perceive and process information through the filter of personal experience. As evidenced by notable historical events, the consequences of this bias can be dramatic. A way to understand MIB in humans is sought. How analysts analyze data, are trained, and interact with biases is explored. An experiment testing for the appearance of MIB was designed and completed. Measures from an eye tracker as well as physiological measures were collected. Results show a significant correlation between pupil diameter …

Painted Rumble Stripes: Alternatives To Raised Pavement Markers (Rpms), Thomas M. Brennan Jr, Stuart R. Mikey, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Posters

This poster highlights research completed by the Joint Transportation Research Program (JTRP) led by Darcy Bullock, Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, for JTRP Project SPR-3528, "Alternatives to Raised Pavement Markers (RPMs)." The poster includes photos taken at a construction site on State Road 25 located near Shadeland, Indiana. The top photo demonstrates how the center line corrected a driver when snow covered to avoid oncoming traffic. Photo was taken on US 231 near Country Road 800 in Tippecanoe County.

2013-14 Indiana Interstate Mobility Summary, Steve M. Remias, Howell Li, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Posters

These posters highlight the speed and mobility metrics on four of Indiana’s interstates (I-94, I-65, I-465, and I-70). The posters are part of the effort by the Indiana Department of Transportation to characterize mobility concerns on the statewide interstate system.

Striping Truck Utilization Project, Jon R. Padfield, James Handy

JTRP Posters

This poster highlights research completed by the Joint Transportation Research Program (JTRP) led by Jon Padfield and James Handy, Purdue University for JTRP project SPR-3722, “Striping Truck Utilization for Crawfordsville and Greenfield District.” This poster highlights the transformation of striping trucks at both districts using Value Stream Mapping (VSM) through the Technical Assistance Program.

Prioritizing Offshore Vendor Selection Criteria For The North American Geospatial Industry, Simon Wolfgang Musaeus

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The U.S. market for geospatial services totaled US $2.2 billion in 2010, representing 50% of the global market. Data-processing firms subcontract labor-intensive portions of data services to offshore providers in South and East Asia and Eastern Europe. In general, half of all offshore contracts fail within the first 5 years because one or more parties consider the relationship unsuccessful. Despite the high failure rates, no study has examined the offshore vendor selection process in the geospatial industry. The purpose of this study was to determine the list of key offshore vendor selection criteria and the efficacy of the analytic hierarchy …

Development And Application Of An Analyst Process Model For A Search Task Scenario, Hendrickson K. Karl

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A key intelligence analyst role in open source search is the transformation of data into understanding. Better comprehension is needed of how new tools impact the analyst search process. The use of function analysis, heuristic analysis, and a usability study combine to provide the basis for developing an analyst process model, which affords the researcher with a structure to measure the impact of tools and expertise in performing a search task. The experiment utilized representative analyst scenario tasks in comparing baseline tools with the Geospatial Open Search Toolkit (GOST). The results show error rates increase when using a new toolset …

Investigation Of Capabilities Of Observers In A Watch Window Study, Ositadimma Nnanna Eziolisa

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Due to an abundance of data and dynamic nature of tasks, challenges with information retrieval in surveillance and target identification tasks have risen in today's Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) community. In this study, two variables, Area of Coverage and Amount of Activity (AOC/ACT), are manipulated to study their effects on the number of Watch Windows an observer can monitor. This research describes the analyst's task model, and explains how the level of AOC/ACT and number of Watch Windows affects the analyst's cognitive load. Results showed a significant difference in performance and physiological indicators of workload between high AOC/ACT conditions …

Use Of Vibrotactile Feedback And Stochastic Resonance For Improving Laparoscopic Surgery Performance, Robert Douglas Hoskins

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Vibrotactile feedback, used as sensory substitution for loss of haptic feedback, has been utilized to improve performance in manual control, teleoperation and during minimally invasive surgical tasks. Stochastic resonance (SR), introduced into the human control system as white noise at a sub-threshold level, has shown promise to improve the sensitivity of tactile receptors resulting in enhancement of performance for a variety of manual tracking and sensorimotor tasks. The purpose of this study was to determine if SR could improve performance (accuracy, speed) in a simulated laparoscopic palpation task and to compare it to vibrotactile feedback (VIB). It was hypothesized that …

Improving Motion Imagery Analysis: Investigating Detection Failures, Remembering To Perform Deferred Intentions, Michael R. Nickels

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Advances in automation have led to an increased prevalence of human multitasking in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. Despite advancements in computer-vision research, almost all video data collected must be processed by human analysts. Traditionally, analysts are plagued with the presence and possible overabundance of interruptions that fundamentally leads to multitasking while processing video data. It is currently unknown what factors influence decision making in completing primary tasks or handling interruptions. In this study, we investigated the performance effects and the resulting design implications of varying the number of concurrent prospective memory tasks and encoding of one large group of …

A Theoretical Adaptive Autonomy Model: Real-Time Physiological Assessment Of Cognitive Workload, Dakota C. Evans

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Increases in modern-day system complexity, has led for a need to improve human performance and the interaction between the two. Three objectives: (1) to investigate physiological measures as indicators of cognitive workload, (2) to assess cognitive workload during human interaction with different autonomy levels, and (3) to develop a theoretical model for an adaptive autonomous system that changes with real-time cognitive workload measures were addressed. This effort seeks to improve human computer interaction by providing the human with the acceptable level of computer automation based on real-time cognitive state. Two experiments involved collection of measures of subject physiology, subjective survey …

Autonomous Capabilities For Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Conducting Radiological Response: Findings From A High-Fidelity Discovery Experiment, Brittany Duncan, Robin Murphy

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

This article presents a preliminary work domain theory and identifies autonomous vehicle, navigational, and mission capabilities and challenges for small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs) responding to a radiological disaster. Radiological events are representative of applications that involve flying at low altitudes and close proximities to structures. To more formally understand the guidance and control demands, the environment in which the SUAS has to function, and the expected missions, tasks, and strategies to respond to an incident, a discovery experiment was performed in 2013. The experiment placed a radiological source emitting at 10 times background radiation in the simulated collapse of …

Generic Instance-Specific Automated Parameter Tuning Framework, Linda Lindawati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Meta-heuristic algorithms play an important role in solving combinatorial optimization problems (COP) in many practical applications. The caveat is that the performance of these meta-heuristic algorithms is highly dependent on their parameter configuration which controls the algorithm behaviour. Selecting the best parameter configuration is often a difficult, tedious and unsatisfying task. This thesis studies the problem of automating the selection of good parameter configurations. Existing approaches to address the challenges of parameter configuration can be classified into one-size-fits-all and instance-specific approaches. One-size-fits-all approaches focus on finding a single best parameter configuration for a set of problem instances, while instance-specific approaches …

Outsourcing Management Of Engineering Work In Petroleum Exploration And Production, Panunee Thongprasom

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Since there is no official outsourcing management system in the studied Petroleum Exploration and Production company, many outsourcing projects under the studied company have been facing with a lot of schedule delays. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to find an appropriate and efficient outsourcing management system which consists of workflow and procedure including supporting tools and techniques for using with outsourcing engineering work in the studied company to minimize the delays. The approach is to review outsourcing management practices and recommended tools from literatures and gather information from the studied company’s outsourcing experiences including best practices to develop …

Simulating Real-World Work Experience In Engineering Capstone Courses, Thomas H. Deagostino, Vukica M. Jovanovic, M. Brian Thomas

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Experiential learning and cooperative education provide students with the necessary tools to succeed in the workplace by simulating their future working environment. Various studies have shown that many graduates have gaps related to their so called "soft skills", which are related to teamwork, time management, working under pressure and tight deadlines. The main purpose of the inclusion of the industry expert in senior design discussions is to provide meaningful feedback through a competitive led by industry practitioners. In this simulation, the senior engineering students take on the role of actual engineering job functions, on a demanding, continuous basis for the …

Structure Health Monitoring (Shm) System Trade Space Analysis, Salman A. Albinali, David R. Jacques

Faculty Publications

An analytic approach to exploring the tradespace associated with Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems is presented. Modeling and simulation of the life cycle of a legacy aircraft and the expected operational and maintenance events that could occur is shown. A focus on the SHM system detection of a significant crack length and the possibility of False Alarm (FA), miss detection and mishap events is investigated. The modeling approach allows researchers to explore the tradespace associated with safe and critical crack lengths, sensor thresholds, scheduled maintenance intervals, falsely triggered maintenance actions, and mishaps due to missed detections. As one might expect, …

Timekeeping Issues In Ultra-Quality Metering Systems, David D. Haynes, Steven M. Corns

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The improvements made to smart metering systems in terms of performance and accuracy have in many cases created a gap in the requirements for timekeeping performance. When clock errors accumulate in different metrology systems, data collected from one system cannot be compared to data collected from another system. This paper recommends the use of a common time base for all data gathering systems, and that systems clocks are corrected with numerous minor corrections when possible, rather than major corrections. © 2013 IEEE.

Joint Kinematics, Muscle Activity And Postural Strain For Finger- Intensive Operation Of Small Hand- Held Devices, Farhana Afreen Proma

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Background: Extensive movement of fingers while playing video games, and while browsing or texting in a smartphone often result in medically recognized repetitive strain injuries such as "PlayStation thumb" or "Blackberry thumb". In order to understand the strenuous effects of these tasks, it is important to study the geometry of the movement of fingers (kinematics), corresponding muscle activities (physiology), and the overall posture of the tasks (ergonomics). There is almost no information available in the present literature regarding the finger kinematics of video gaming. Although texting and browsing tasks have been studied, a multifaceted approach including kinematic, physiological and postural …

Stationary And Non-Stationary Time Series Prediction Using State Space Model And Pattern-Based Approach, Kin Ming Kam

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The motion-adaptive radiotherapy techniques are promising to deliver ablative radiation doses to tumor with minimal normal tissue exposure by accounting for real-time tumor movement. However, a major challenge of successful applications of these techniques is the real-time prediction of target motion to accommodate system delivery latencies. Predicting respiratory motion in real-time is challenging. The current respiratory mo-tion prediction approaches are still not satisfactory in terms of accuracy and interpretability due to the com-plexity of breathing patterns and the many sources of variability across patients. In this paper, we propose a novel respiratory motion prediction approach based on future values of …