Engineering Commons^™

ℓ-Ctp: Utilizing Multiple Agents To Find Efficient Routes In Disrupted Networks, Andrew Alseth

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent hurricane seasons have demonstrated the need for more effective methods of coping with flooding of roadways. A key complaint of logistics managers is the lack of knowledge when developing routes for vehicles attempting to navigate through areas which may be flooded. In particular, it can be difficult to re-route large vehicles upon encountering a flooded roadway. We utilize the Canadian Traveller’s Problem (CTP) to construct an online framework for utilizing multiple vehicles to discover low-cost paths through networks with failed edges unknown to one or more agents a priori. This thesis demonstrates the following results: first, we develop the …

Sports Analytics: Putting The Fun Back Into Analytics, Walt Degrange

Operations Management Presentations

With the recent success of sports teams heavily using analytics (Dodgers, Patriots, Capitals, Warriors, Leicester City F.C.), does this mean that analytics has gained a foothold in the sports world? I use a k-means clustering model to determine if performance since 2015 in the four major US sports can support this question. And is there a career path that a high school student can use to become a sports analytics professional? This presentation attempts to answer that question by exploring all the areas of the application of analytics in sports. The final point the brief makes is that by using …

Change Management: Increasing The Odds Of Adoption, Travis Mcneal

Operations Management Presentations

With rapid changes happening all around, organizations are finding themselves in positions where they need their workforce to adapt to new ways of working (technology, structural, process). Organizations develop strategies, programs and projects intended to address these changes. Unfortunately, history is littered with strategies and programs that fail to live deliver on expected results. This has led to the recent rise and proliferation of Change Management as a practice and skill set. Often times, however, Change Management theory is given preeminence over practicality. This webinar will explore practical and actionable ways you can take to immediately increase the odds …

Resilient Design And Crisis Management, Rich Ham

Operations Management Presentations

Explores the techniques to design resilience into systems, business functions, compliance, quality assurance and response to uncertainty. Includes an overview of Federal Emergency Management Agency principles in resilient design and crisis management, including implementation of National Incident Management System processes and industry standards to frame resilient design, procedures and planning documents. Learn to focus on the use of testing, exercises, and implementation of Plan, Do, Check, Act model to continually improve government, business and personal continuity through periods of cascading uncertainty.

Analyzing The Fractal Dimension Of Various Musical Pieces, Nathan Clark

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

One of the most common tools for evaluating data is regression. This technique, widely used by industrial engineers, explores linear relationships between predictors and the response. Each observation of the response is a fixed linear combination of the predictors with an added error element. The method is built on the assumption that this error is normally distributed across all observations and has a mean of zero. In some cases, it has been found that the inherent variation is not the result of a random variable, but is instead the result of self-symmetric properties of the observations. For data with these …

Study On New Sampling Plans And Optimal Integration With Proactive Maintenance In Production Systems, Sinan Obaidat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sampling plans are statistical process control (SPC) tools used mainly in production processes. They are employed to control processes by monitoring the quality of produced products and alerting for necessary adjustments or maintenance. Sampling is used when an undesirable change (shift) in a process is unobservable and needs time to discover. Basically, the shift occurs when an assignable cause affects the process. Wrong setups, defective raw materials, degraded components are examples of assignable causes. The assignable cause causes a variable (or attribute) quality characteristic to shift from the desired state to an undesired state.

The main concern of sampling is …

Models For Data Analysis In Accelerated Reliability Growth, Cesar Alexander Ruiz Torres

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work develops new methodologies for analyzing accelerated testing data in the context of a reliability growth program for a complex multi-component system. Each component has multiple failure modes and the growth program consists of multiple test-fix stages with corrective actions applied at the end of each stage. The first group of methods considers time-to-failure data and test covariates for predicting the final reliability of the system. The time-to-failure of each failure mode is assumed to follow a Weibull distribution with rate parameter proportional to an acceleration factor. Acceleration factors are specific to each failure mode and test covariates. We …

Towards A Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud Through Operable Digital Twins And Virtual Production Lines, Md Rakib Shahriar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In last decade, the paradigm of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has integrated industrial manufacturing systems with Cloud Computing technologies for Cloud Manufacturing. Up to 2015, there were many CPS-based manufacturing systems that collected real-time machining data to perform remote monitoring, prognostics and health management, and predictive maintenance. However, these CPS-integrated and network ready machines were not directly connected to the elements of Cloud Manufacturing and required human-in-the-loop. Addressing this gap, we introduced a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) that bridges a gap between physical machines and virtual space in 2017. CPMC virtualizes machine tools in cloud through web services …

Maintenance Isn’T Just About Grease, Jim Burgin

Operations Management Presentations

Document maintenance is becoming a bit of a challenge. Slowly, but surely, business leaders are realizing that maintenance isn’t just a “necessary evil” but a competitive advantage that can help differentiate their company from others in the same industry. Maintenance is a broad concept, and this webinar is just to get you thinking about maintenance in a different way. Because of the “necessary evil” concept, professional maintenance resources are rare.

Maintenance costs real money. Depending on the size of the operation, labor, contractors, and material costs can be significant. While that seems like a lot of money, consider the costs …

Simulation Modeling Of Cross-Dock And Distribution Center Based Supply Chains, Ghewa Al Chall

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Companies are implementing new strategies to meet the customer requirements in terms of quality, timing, and cost. One of these strategies is cross-docking, which can be defined as the process of consolidating the products coming from different suppliers, but having the same destination, with minimal handling and almost no storage between loading and unloading of the goods. The purpose of this research is to investigate the benefits of having a cross-docking facility in a supply chain. In this research, we focus on developing discrete event simulation models using the opensource Java Simulation Library (JSL). Also, we work on augmenting an …

Characterizing Statin Use Among Prediabetic Patients With Predictive Analytics, Alexandra Gentile

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and can cause severe impairments to those diagnosed. Prediabetes is a state when a patient has higher fasting plasma glucose levels than a non-diabetic person but is not quite high enough to be considered diabetes. Both diabetic and prediabetic patients are at higher risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which is the leading cause of death in the United States. The primary form for prevention and treatment of CVD is through statin therapy. Statins are a class of medications used to treat and prevent CVD by limiting cholesterol …

Optimal Emergency Response Shelter Placement Based On Population Vulnerabilities, Alexander Johnson

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Hurricane Florence was a category 4 storm which caused an estimated $24 billion in damages and the loss of 53 lives. During and immediately following Florence, there were 235 shelters operating in and around the North Carolina (NC) area. These were used as temporary housing for storm victims and by emergency responders to distribute relief supplies and provide medical services. Emergency officials consider several factors when deciding where to open shelters, including, for example, proximity of victims and their levels of medical needs. Access disparities, or factors creating barriers that limit entry to shelters, put certain populations and regions at …

Intruder Preference And Route Selection: A Gis Data Approach, Griffin Mathews

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requested an Engineering Research and Development Center study incorporating modeling and simulation to determine the selection, amount, and optimal location of sensor suites along the U.S. Border. The study objective is to maximize the probability of detection and apprehension of illegal elements attempting to enter. A study on intruders and their preferences were conducted to create an intruder preference value map to determine the preferred intruder routes taken after crossing the border. The results of this research were integrated into another study on the selection and simulation of sensor suites.

Intruder context and preferences …

Improvement Of Geometric Quality Inspection And Process Efficiency In Additive Manufacturing, Yu Jin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been known for its ability of producing complex geometries in flexible production environments. In recent decades, it has attracted increasing attention and interest of different industrial sectors. However, there are still some technical challenges hindering the wide application of AM. One major barrier is the limited dimensional accuracy of AM produced parts, especially for industrial sectors such as aerospace and biomedical engineering, where high geometric accuracy is required. Nevertheless, traditional quality inspection techniques might not perform well due to the complexity and flexibility of AM fabricated parts. Another issue, which is brought up from the growing …

Locating Relay Nodes To Maximize Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime: A Numerical Study, Maria Rene Arandia Jimenez

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a group of sensors deployed over an area, which monitor changes in the environment, collects them as data and forwards it between sensors through wireless links. Data is routed, either in a single-hop or multi-hop manner, with the goal of getting this collected data to the sink nodes, which have higher computational capabilities and connects the network with a user interface. Studies have determined that multi-hop WSNs that integrate relay nodes, which function is to only receive and forward data, can maximize lifetime network. A linear programming model, created by Chang and Tassiulas in …

Improving Offensive Player Performance Measures For Assessing Free Agent Major League Baseball Players, Henley Wells

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Professional sports teams are important to their local economies, so successful franchises are significant contributors to their prosperity. This need for successful teams drives the owners and general managers to perform in-depth analyses on potential players to gain insight, so the best players can be chosen. Major League Baseball is one of the largest sports leagues in the world, so their analysis of players must be excellent to ensure they sign the best players and can compete at a high level.

Baseball is a complex sport with many different statistics evaluating nearly every part of a player’s game. Because of …

Re-Evaluating Coverage Metrics For Wireless Sensor Network Border Security Applications, Kevin Haney

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology used to monitor an environment over time. One specific application of the wireless sensor network is the border security application. Researchers have adapted coverage metrics from general wireless sensor network literature to fit the border security application. While some of the adapted metrics count the number of sensors detecting a potential target, others measure the distance between a potential target and its nearest sensor. No existing metric accounts for both of these factors. To take advantage of this gap and to attempt to increase the accuracy to which coverage is measured in this …

Low Latency Anomaly Detection With Imperfect Models, Samrat Nath

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The problem of anomaly detection deals with detecting abrupt changes/anomalies in the distribution of sequentially observed data in a stochastic system. This problem applies to many applications, such as signal processing, intrusion detection, quality control, medical diagnosis, etc. A low latency anomaly detection algorithm, which is based on the framework of quickest change detection (QCD), aims at minimizing the detection delay of anomalies in the sequentially observed data while ensuring satisfactory detection accuracy. Moreover, in many practical applications, complete knowledge of the post-change distribution model might not be available due to the unexpected nature of the change. Hence, the objective …

Curriculum Optimization Via Activity-On-Node Network Modeling, Caroline Rhomberg

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

University degree plans must be carefully planned so that they allow students the best chance of succeeding. Although for the better, with the advancement of technology and its incorporation into the classroom, it can be argued that the complexity and difficulty of some long-established engineering core classes has changed. With this trend certain combinations of engineering courses have become unfavorable in terms of course withdrawal and fail rates stemming from the interaction of course challenges. A wealth of data has been collected on this topic and will be utilized in this project. As one can imagine, the probability of success …

A Simulation Approach To Evaluate The Impact Of Breast Cancer Overdiagnosis On Patient Outcomes, Sierra Wagner

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Breast cancer overdiagnosis risk is difficult to estimate and varies significantly across current research. This research establishes a simulation approach to examine the relationship between breast cancer overdiagnosis and patient outcome and understand the impact that the range of breast cancer overdiagnosis rate estimates in the current literature has on patient outcomes. Overdiagnosis is represented in this study by a set of disease regression probabilities. Using microsimulation, we evaluate patient outcome, measured by number of mammograms and lifetime breast cancer mortality risk, as a function of treatment policy and regression probability. We use numerical experiments to evaluate treatment policies and …

Locating Emergency Shelters While Incorporating Spatial Factors, Justin Taylor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the immediate response phase of a natural disaster, local governments and nonprofit agencies often establish shelters for affected populations. Decisions regarding at which locations to open shelters are made ad hoc based on available building inventory, and may result in high travel impedance to reach shelters and congestion. This thesis presents a shelter location optimization model based on the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method. The 2SFCA method creates a shelter accessibility score for each areal unit (e.g., census block group) which represents the ability for persons in the unit to access shelter capacity with low travel impedance, relative …

When Optimal Isn’T Optimal, Robin Burk

Operations Management Presentations

Whether you’re an operations manager, a financial executive, an engineer, or an analyst, chances are you’ve been taught to optimize the outcomes of your decisions. And taken in a vacuum, that makes a good deal of sense. But as the new discipline of complex adaptive networks shows, in our heavily interconnected, interdependent world optimizing can introduce hidden vulnerabilities to surprisingly expensive failures. In this webinar we’ll discuss examples of such failures and identify conditions for which a satisfactory but not optimal solution is the best approach overall.

Bootstrap Statistics, Greg Hutto

Operations Management Presentations

Bootstrap Statistics is an intuitive approach to learning statistics because of its simplicity, freedom from assumptions and wide applicability. This webinar will refresh your knowledge of statistics and give you intuitive tools to apply concepts. We will deduce robust methods to build point estimates, interval estimates and assert differences or similarities. If time permits, we’ll even evaluate statistical power! And we’ll do it all with only one major assumption and no curtain of math or normal theory clouding our procedures. The webinar will be accompanied by three papers, tool references, slides and a sample data set with solutions.