Engineering Commons^™

Great South Metals: Slitter Head Building Process, Nabhan Karim, Evan Swierski, Raven Morin, Patrick Kelsey, Michael Williams

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Great South Metals (GSM) operates two steel slitter machines, which take large coils of flat rolled steel and cut them into smaller strips for use in customers’ applications. Setting up the working components of each machine, called the slitter head, is a precise and arduous task. This system relies on several manually performed calculations and acute attention to detail; and thus, is prone to human error. The management at GSM commissioned our team to simplify the slitter head assembly process by creating an automated computer program and make additional recommendations to improve their operations.

The program we created is a …

A Transdisicplinary, Survivor-Centered Approach For Creating A System Dynamics Model Of Closed-Buyer Sex Trafficking Networks, Kemonte Yow

All Theses

One of the largest drivers of sex trafficking operations is the demand for commercial sex. To date, research from a quantitative side typically focuses on understanding how to best identify and remove victims from their trafficking situation and then support their healing and recovery. This may be because this is where data exists (in limited forms) to support quantitative modeling. This thesis broadens that scope to understand how demand for commercial sex impacts trafficking operations. In particular, this research implemented a transdisciplinary, survivor-centered approach to build a system dynamics model of a closed-buyer sex trafficking network, which is a network …

Optimization Of Human Interactions In The College Campus Model Via Simio Integration, Benjamin E. Chaback

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

College campuses are a significant part of life in some cities. Many students each year attend university, pursuing additional knowledge from faculty members. Both staff and faculty members rely on these students to have successful jobs and to ensure the university functions. Yet recently, more and more students are attending, leading to overcrowding, lower admission rates, and difficulty getting into good programs. Previous work exists on qualitative student affairs and quantitative retention data, yet little on using simulations to model this problem. This work aimed to (a) Determine the ability to successfully model human interactions/people flow on a college campus, …

Drivers’ Hazard Avoidance During Vehicle Automation: Impact Of Mental Models And Implications For Training, Ganesh Pai Mangalore

Doctoral Dissertations

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are vehicle automation systems that have become more accessible and prevalent in vehicles in recent years. But the introduction of such technologies introduces new human factors challenges. Past literature suggests that users of vehicle automation lack the necessary and appropriate knowledge about their automation system. This may play a negative role in their hazard avoidance abilities when driving with automation features. Improving mental models and knowledge could generally lead to safer interactions with vehicle automation systems, but any effort to develop hazard avoidance skills when driving with vehicle automation is impeded by the lack of …

Milk Collection Problem: Integrating The Traveling Salesman And Set Covering Problem - A Case Study In West Virginia, Usa, Md Rabiul Hasan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Route determination for perishable products is complex due to its unique characteristics, such as limited shelf-life regulatory requirements, or possibility of getting damaged. This research investigates a novel problem of collecting raw milk from a rural network of dairy farms. The research problem is grounded in a real scenario of milk collection in West Virginia, USA. The milk in this scenario is produced by small farms incapable of realizing transportation economies of density out in mostly rural areas throughout the state. Maximum coverage area and milk processing overhead costs are used to identify suitable locations for intermediate milk collection centers …

Efficient Connectivity Management And Path Planning For Iot And Uav Networks, Amirahmad Chapnevis

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how to better manage resources in mobile networks, especially for enhancing the performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-supported IoT networks. We explored ways to set up a flexible communication architecture that can handle large IoT deployments by making good use of mobile core network resources like bearers and data paths. We developed strategies that meet the needs of IoT networks and enhance network performance. We also developed and tested a system that combines traffic from several mobile devices that use the same user identity and network resources within the core mobile network. We used everyday smartphones, SIM …

An Investigation Into Applications Of Canonical Polyadic Decomposition & Ensemble Learning In Forecasting Thermal Data Streams In Direct Laser Deposition Processes, Jonathan Storey

Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a process of creating objects from 3D model data by adding layers of material. AM technologies present several advantages compared to traditional manufacturing technologies, such as producing less material waste and being capable of producing parts with greater geometric complexity. However, deficiencies in the printing process due to high process uncertainty can affect the microstructural properties of a fabricated part leading to defects. In metal AM, previous studies have linked defects in parts with melt pool temperature fluctuations, with the size of the melt pool and the scan pattern being key factors associated with part defects. …

Imerys: Tube Mill Optimization Project, Ryan Waltman, Dalton Beasley, Dyson Beasley, Tristan Mcmichael

Senior Design Project For Engineers

The Tube Mill Optimization Project is in partnership with Imerys for Tube Mill 81 at their Marble Hill site in Georgia. Tube Mill 81 is a dry ball mill that operates 24/7 and makes an intermediary product for Plant 3. Tube Mill 81 needs quality improvement and a production rate increase to meet demand. Imerys’s quality specification is between a particle size of 12-18 microns and an acceptable production rate of 5 tons per hour. This project focuses on the development and implementation of three solutions: increase the amps on the separator to increase production, replace missing classifier blades in …

Assessing And Predicting The Students’ Systems Thinking Preference: Multi-Criteria Decision Making And Machine Learning, Siham Tazzit

Theses and Dissertations

The 21st century is marked by a technological revolution that features digital implementation and high interconnectivity between systems across different domains, such as transportation, agriculture, education, and health. Although these technological changes resulted in modern systems capable of easing individuals’ lives, these systems are increasingly complex, and that increased complexity is only expected to continue. The increased system complexity is due to the rapid exchange of information between subsystems, which creates high interconnectivity and interdependence between the subsystems and their elements. Workforce skill sets, as a result, must be modified appropriately to ensure the systems’ success. Systems Thinking is an …

Resources Based Planning Framework For Infrastructure Maintenance And Rehabilitation Projects, Heba Gad

Theses and Dissertations

Infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation projects involve activities scattered over a large geographical area (e.g., scattered road segments maintenance, telecom towers maintenance program, etc.). Planning such projects require a resource-based approach that accounts for the implications of resource mobility between activities’ locations in terms of time & cost. Existing scheduling techniques fall short of addressing the unique challenges of the scattered nature of these projects in combination with organization's limited resources availability. To address this need, this research presents a resources-based planning framework for infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation scattered projects with the objective of enhancing resources utilization achieving time and cost …

Understanding And Simulating Wildfire Changes Using Advanced Statical And Process-Oriented Models, Rongyun Tang

Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamic of global wildfires, their underlying climate-driving mechanisms, and their predictability by utilizing multiple data sources (both process-based model simulations and satellite-based observations) and multiple analytical methods including machine learning techniques (MLTs).

We first explored the global wildfire interannual variability (IAV) and its climate sensitivity across nine biomes from 1997 to 2018, leveraging the state-of-art U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) land component (ELM-v1) simulations with six sets of climate forcings. Results indicate that 1) ELM simulations could reproduce the IAV of wildfire in terms of magnitudes, distribution, bio-regional …

A Machine Learning Approach For Predicting Clinical Trial Patient Enrollment In Drug Development Portfolio Demand Planning, Ahmed Shoieb

Masters Theses

One of the biggest challenges the clinical research industry currently faces is the accurate forecasting of patient enrollment (namely if and when a clinical trial will achieve full enrollment), as the stochastic behavior of enrollment can significantly contribute to delays in the development of new drugs, increases in duration and costs of clinical trials, and the over- or under- estimation of clinical supply. This study proposes a Machine Learning model using a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) that is trained on a dataset of 100,000 patient enrollment data points including patient age, patient gender, patient disease, investigational product, study phase, blinded …

Smart Warehousing Implementaion And Education Of Supply Chain Management Leaders, David Quintanilla

Doctoral Dissertations

Paper #1 Overview

Businesses have to adapt to new challenges and technologies in the marketplace which influence warehousing. In order to support this growth, Industry 4.0 technologies have been implemented along the value chain to optimize their organizations and production processes; however, there are still gaps for warehousing research for Industry 4.0. We present four pillars¾location strategy, infrastructure/design, data management, and advanced planning and control¾ as a framework for businesses to use for their adaptation into smart warehousing. In particular, this framework will guide companies in their logistics journey into Industry 4.0. Industry experts and senior logistics professionals were interviewed …

Development Of A Smart Waste Management System For City Application, Lawrence D. Fraction

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Elmer R. Smith College of Business and Technology Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Science by Lawrence D. Fraction on April 14, 2023.

Team And Skill Matching For Disaster Recovery Operations, Emily B. Frahm

Theses and Dissertations

United States Air Force (USAF) bases are key power projection platforms that ensure mission readiness and help bring humanitarian aid to locations in need. Recovering airfields after attack or natural disaster is a key mission of USAF civil engineers, and accomplishing this repair as swiftly as possible is key to maintaining our position in the global order. Accomplishing a disaster recovery project is a set of teams, each assigned to a specific task, and made up of a series of personnel. The question answered within this paper is: how do we match the right person with the appropriate skills to …

A Transformer Based Architecture For Indonesian Sentiment Analysis - Exploring Indobert Variations, Training Size, And Self-Supervised Model Training, Connor F. Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

There is strong motivation in both civilian and military circles to understand the attitudes, motivations, feelings, and emotions of a population of interest. Social media is a rich source of self-disclosed information by individuals from all walks of life about virtually every domain of the human experience, but the vast quantity of data is impossible to effectively analyze without advanced natural language processing algorithms. This research creates a transfer learning based emotion classification model for Indonesian language Twitter data. Transfer learning consists of two steps: pre-training and fine tuning. Three variations of Indonesian Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (IndoBERT) are …

Investigation Of Rhine Pointing As A Solution To The Aircraft Human Machine Interface Problem, Alexandra C. Dobranski, Samuel J. Medvec

Theses and Dissertations

The human machine interface in 5th generation aircraft has not evolved proportionally with advances in display size and data density. The traditional cursor slew method fails to rapidly relocate the cursor, especially on large displays. Previous studies at the Air Force Test Pilot School and Air Force Institute of Technology identified methods that have the potential to improve the human machine interface. This research expanded upon those studies by providing an assessment of head tracking technology as a secondary method of cursor manipulation. Specifically, this study examined the effects that visual feedback (visible and invisible head tracking cursors) and cursor …

Long-Term Asset Prioritization To Support District Planning, Melissa R. Sallberg

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force (USAF) relies on its installations to project military power across the globe. However, due to the deferred infrastructure maintenance and recapitalization backlog of $33 billion as of 2019 (Wilson & Goldfein, 2019), it is more critical than ever for base-level community planners to focus their attention to the projects that will achieve each installation’s long-term goals. The recent incorporation of asset management principles into the USAF District Planning Process allows a unique opportunity to improve the existing scoring model for a holistic look at what matters to enterprise leaders and community planners making the plans …

Pattern Of Life Modeling On Maritime Vessels With Bayesian Inferencing, Miles A. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Despite decades of research, maritime traffic models’ limited predictive power continues to constrain their operational utility. We build on previous pattern of life modeling algorithms and contribute a Bayesian inferencing model for anomaly detection. Our probabilistic approach provides decision makers the capability to tailor the belief threshold for identifying anomalies and to enact a measured response based on the degree of abnormality. We perform a case study to evaluate the results, verifying that our Bayesian inferencing method accurately refines its probability when given the location and time of a ship of interest, and serving as a proof of concept for …

Uncertainty Quantification In Federated Learning For Persistent Post-Traumatic Headache, Byungmoo Brian Kim

Theses and Dissertations

A post-traumatic headache (PTH), resulting from a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), potentially develops into persistent post-traumatic headache (PPTH). Although no known cure for PPTH exists, research has shown that receiving treatment at earlier stages of PTH lowers the risk of patients developing PPTH. Previous studies have shown machine learning (ML) models capable of predicting a patient’s PTH progression, but none have considered the issue of protecting patient privacy. Due to patient privacy, ML models only have access to data within the institution. Federated learning (FL) harnesses data from separate institutions without sacrificing patient privacy as institutions can run ML …

Accelerating Manufacturing Decisions Using Bayesian Optimization: An Optimization And Prediction Perspective, Taofeeq Olajire

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Manufacturing is a promising technique for producing complex and custom-made parts with a high degree of precision. It can also provide us with desired materials and products with specified properties. To achieve that, it is crucial to find out the optimum point of process parameters that have a significant impact on the properties and quality of the final product. Unfortunately, optimizing these parameters can be challenging due to the complex and nonlinear nature of the underlying process, which becomes more complicated when there are conflicting objectives, sometimes with multiple goals. Furthermore, experiments are usually costly, time-consuming, and require expensive materials, …

Improving The Health And Safety Of Manufacturing Workers By Detecting And Addressing Personal Protective Equipment (Ppe) Violations In Real-Time With The Use Of Automated Ppe Detection Technology, Joseph Olufemi Fasinu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emphasized that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) can significantly reduce the risk of occupational injuries and illnesses. However, improper use, failure to use, and other PPE-related violations can still result in injuries and fatalities. Eye and face protection violation has been one of the top 10 most frequently violated OSHA standards in fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 consecutively. A common practice among safety professionals to ensure PPE compliance has been to physically inspect or monitor PPE usage among workers, which has been found to be unsustainable on a continuous real-time …

Practical Requirements Elicitation In Modern Product Development: A Multi-Case Study In Discontinuous Innovation, Michael King

Theses and Dissertations

Practical modern product development, specifically rapid, lean efforts to create new disrupting or specialized products, face constraints that require modified requirements elicitation (RE) techniques. Requirements elicitation conventions have not been updated to address the challenges of these approaches, and industry practitioners lack the tools to select the most efficient techniques. This study examines the RE approaches performed by three resource-limited teams conducting discontinuous new product development through a multi-case study to identify gaps between the literature and practice, with suggestions to fill them. Our findings suggest modern RE practices and challenges closely reflect those found by studies on RE in …

Towards Structured Planning And Learning At The State Fisheries Agency Scale, Caleb A. Aldridge

Theses and Dissertations

Inland recreational fisheries has grown philosophically and scientifically to consider economic and sociopolitical aspects (non-biological) in addition to the biological. However, integrating biological and non-biological aspects of inland fisheries has been challenging. Thus, an opportunity exists to develop approaches and tools which operationalize planning and decision-making processes which include biological and non-biological aspects of a fishery. This dissertation expands the idea that a core set of goals and objectives is shared among and within inland fisheries agencies; that many routine operations of inland fisheries managers can be regimented or standardized; and the novel concept that current information and operations can …

A Novel Approach To Orbital Debris Mitigation, Timothy S. Turk

Doctoral Dissertations

Since mankind launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957, we have been inadvertently, yet deliberately, creating an environment in space that may ultimately lead to the end of our space exploration. Space debris, more specifically, orbital debris is a growing problem that must be dealt with sooner, rather than later. Several ideas have been developed to address the complex problem of orbital debris mitigation.

This research will investigate the possibility of removing orbital debris from the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) regime by using a metaheuristic algorithm to maximize collection of debris resulting from the February 2009 on-orbit collision of …

Novel Mixed Integer Programming Approaches To Unit Commitment And Tool Switching Problems, Najmaddin Akhundov

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first two chapters, we discuss mixed integer programming formulations in Unit Commitment Problem. First, we present a new reformulation to capture the uncertainty associated with renewable energy. Then, the symmetrical property of UC is exploited to develop new methods to improve the computational time by reducing redundancy in the search space. In the third chapter, we focus on the Tool Switching and Sequencing Problem. Similar to UC, we analyze its symmetrical nature and present a new reformulation and symmetry-breaking cuts which lead to a significant improvement in the solution time. In chapter one, we use convex hull pricing …

Novel Hitch Cargo Cart, Cesilio Sanchez Ramirez, Lance Haidet, Richard Lontoc, Tyler Selinka

Mechanical Engineering

This document presents the engineering design process used to develop, manufacture, and test a new and improved iteration of a hitch cart prototype. This process was performed by a team of four mechanical engineering seniors as part of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s senior design pathway. The goal of this project was to develop a sturdy and reliable iteration of our sponsor’s hitch cart prototype, that integrated the functionality of a vehicle hitch cargo platform and that of a height adjustable cargo cart into a single streamlined and easy to use product. This design could be used by …

Essays On Perioperative Services Problems In Healthcare, Amogh S. Bhosekar

All Dissertations

One of the critical challenges in healthcare operations management is to efficiently utilize the expensive resources needed while maintaining the quality of care provided. Simulation and optimization methods can be effectively used to provide better healthcare services. This can be achieved by developing models to minimize patient waiting times, minimize healthcare supply chain and logistics costs, and maximize access. In this proposal, we study some of the important problems in healthcare operations management. More specifically, we focus on perioperative services and study scheduling of operating rooms (ORs) and management of necessary resources such as staff, equipment, and surgical instruments. We …

Operational And Cost Analysis Of A Leo Radar-Based Satellite Constellation, Kyle O. Norbert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a methodology to assess the ability of a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to successfully accomplish the GMTI mission in a cost-effective fashion. A simulation model was developed to test the coverage performance of 512 unique constellation designs. Significant factors were revealed by developing regression models that revealed the most critical constellation trade-offs on measures of performance. A Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach was applied to assign weights to a broad range of measures of performance from which the Pareto distribution on a cost-capability plot revealed cost-effectiveness. A novel measure of performance was developed and analyzed that accounted …

Cooperative Wide Area Search Algorithm Analysis Using Sub-Region Techniques, Shawn Whitney

Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in small Unmmaned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology reinvigorates the need for additional research into Wide Area Search (WAS) algorithms for civilian and military applications. But due to the extremely large variability in UAV environments and design, Digital Engineering (DE) is utilized to reduce the time, cost, and energy required to advance this technology. DE also allows rapid design and evaluation of autonomous systems which utilize and support WAS algorithms. Modern WAS algorithms can be broadly classified into decision-based algorithms, statistical algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. This research continues on the work by Hatzinger and Gertsman …