Other Engineering Science and Materials Commons^™

Data-Driven Dynamic Decision-Making Using Discrete Optimization And Supervised Machine Learning, Navid Rashedi

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

In recent years, the operations research community has developed data-driven optimization techniques to solve complex combinatorial problems with the aid of machine learning. This thesis contributes to these efforts by combining machine learning with optimization to expedite online decision-making, with applications in transportation and healthcare.

In the domain of airline operations recovery, the focus is on the aircraft recovery process—repairing disrupted schedules by minimizing overall disruption costs. Traditional exact methods are too time-consuming, while heuristic approaches often yield poor solution quality and lack generalizability across varying formulations. To address these challenges, this research employs supervised machine learning to identify near-optimal …

Soil Respiration Measurements Reveal High Retention Of Organic Carbon From Corn Residue Derived High-Lignin Fermentation Byproduct Enabling Sustainable Lignocellulosic Biofuel Production, Michelle Sun Wang

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

While 2G biofuel production can utilize non-edible, lignocellulosic feedstocks such as agricultural residues to produce liquid fuel, harvesting crop residues is unsustainable without careful management of the soil underneath. By harvesting a fraction of the crop residues left in the field after harvest, soil health can diminish and critically, the soil organic carbon (SOC) stored in agricultural fields can decrease. Currently, in the most popular 2G process models published, the issue of soil degradation remains unresolved with residue harvest strategies receiving considerable attention in the literature and other SOC management strategies receiving far less. Specifically, the strategy of returning the …