Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

The Design Of A Digital Scheduling Solution For Healing Alternatives, Hailey A. Malin, Krista L. Mcallester, Anne E. Shields

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The focus of this senior project is to assist Healing Alternatives, an acupuncture clinic located in San Luis Obispo, in developing a business management software to fit their needs and boost their overall organization. The approach to finding the right fit for this business included assessing their current system while simultaneously investigating other providers. Once alternatives were found that met all of Healing Alternatives’ initial requirements, trial demos were generated in order to perform user experience testing. The presented final solution, a scheduling software called Acuity Scheduling, was implemented in a three-phase move plan that occurred over the period of …

Development Of An Additive Manufacturing Compression Molding Process For Low Cost In-House Prototyping, Grant Forrester Warden

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Composite parts can be manufactured using various processes. Generally, a mix of resin and fiber is formed into the desired geometry using a mold and pressure. One process used by Dr. Joseph Mello in his research is known as compression molding. Compression molds are generally made from large billets of aluminum or stainless steel, are machined by a CNC mill, and are then hand-finished with polishes and mold preparation products. This process is expensive, requires large machinery and experienced operators, and introduces long lead times relative to the design cycle of the part being manufactured. The nature of Dr. Mello's …

Julian's Forecasting, Krista R. Bowdle

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This report focuses on developing a solution to a current problem faced at Julian’s Cafe and Bistro. The problem is that inaccurate order quantities are leading to inventory shortage and surplus which is causing unnecessary profit loss. After accessing and analyzing historical sales data, several forecasts were created using various approaches. After assessing each method and applying a mean absolute percentage error to see how accurate the forecasts were, the seasonal forecast with removing outliers initially was the selected method. After, this method was used to forecast the top three selling items at Julian’s and make demand predictions for busy …

Healing Alternatives Workspace Remodel, Lissandra Ilcyn, Jenifer Astrid Colmenares, Grace E. Kuffner

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Healing Alternatives is an acupuncture office space located in a repurposed house in San Luis Obispo. Healing Alternatives’ current facility layout does not allow for an additional treatment room or the space to provide additional services because of the wasted space within the facility. Furthermore, patients can be disrupted by noise outside the treatment room causing a negative customer experience. The project team’s objectives are to:

o Design two layout alternatives

o Provide a time estimate for each alternative

o Provide a cost analysis of each alternative

o Implement 5s methodology on the storage room

o Provide a 2D-3D model …

Designing A Manufacturing System To Reduce Production Learning Curve, Nicholas Devin Kuhnsman

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The goal of this project was to design a new manufacturing system for Patio Pacific that would reduce the learning curve and the skilled labor required in the production process. Multiple ideas to decrease the scrap rate in the vert manufacturing process were tested. It was determined that outsourcing the manufacturing of the vertical frame piece was the most optimal because it would reduce overall cost and increase product quality. A new facility and production layout were designed in order to accommodate the new pre-manufactured parts. The approved facility design included a new production flow that transitioned manufacturing from single …

Farmbot Trackless Redesign, Cole Thomas, Cailey Kamm, Clayton Alderson, Otto Akerstrom

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

For this project the team PLANT3D worked along with Rory Aronson and FarmBot to generate a cheaper more user-friendly design for the FarmBot Genesis 1.3. Working with Rory and FarmBot, we as a team generated a list of design requirements and engineering specifications for the project. These requirements centered around creating a more accessible FarmBot model for the average person to be able to purchase and set up with ease. Much of this required taking the existing system and eliminating the most common problem areas. These were the track system, built using 1.5 meter aluminum extrusions and the complex interchangeable …

Solar Electric Immersion Heating Element Fabrication, Logan V. Kregness

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Believing that cooking with flame is cheaper and more efficient than cooking with electricity, Ugandan citizens have exposed themselves to several health and safety risks, including major respiratory issues through harmful emissions, pollution, and the burning down of many homes. Even though solar electric cooking is cheaper and healthier than cooking with flames in the long run, many Ugandans lack the resources to invest in cooking with electricity.

The Solar Stove student research team, led by Dr. Pete Schwartz, partnered with Aid Africa to bring solar panels and prototype solar electric cooking units to villages in Uganda. Observing how their …

Improving Efficiencies For The Loading And Packaging Departments At San Luis Sourdough, Alexis Bergstrom, Isabella Pereira, Claudia Robinson

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

San Luis Sourdough, currently has issues with efficiency and standardization in their packaging department, ergonomics problems in the packaging department, shipment accuracy in their loading department, and lacks an organized layout design. As a result, four objectives were designed within a six month period. The first was to create standard operating procedures for the packaging department. To inform this decision time studies were performed before and after creating these SOPs. It was discovered that there was a clear need for the SOPs due to variation in packaging efficiency among new and experienced associates. The second set of time studies showed …

Slm Materials Development, Justin G. Reiner, Michael T. Schembri

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The purpose of this project was to create a procedure to efficiently determine a “recipe” of parameter values that create a desired set of mechanical properties. Research was conducted into the laser powder bed fusion process with focus on underdeveloped materials. A design of experiment was used with a set of density correlated parameters to establish a method of producing nearly dense parts. Our methods include SLM printing, metrology, and statistical analysis. An experimental procedure for materials development was designed, but unable to be validated during the scope of this project, due to unforeseen safety issues (exposure to Chromium 6, …

Risk Assessment Of Dropped Cylindrical Objects In Offshore Operations, Adelina Steven

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Dropped object are defined as any object that fall under its own weight from a previously static position or fell due to an applied force from equipment or a moving object. It is among the top ten causes of injuries and fatality in oil and gas industry. To solve this problem, several in-house tools and guidelines is developed over time to assess the risk of dropped objects on the sub-sea structures. This thesis focuses on compiling and comparing those methods in hope to improve the recommended practices available in the market. A simple modification is done on the in-house tools …

Design Of A Distributed Real-Time E-Health Cyber Ecosystem With Collective Actions: Diagnosis, Dynamic Queueing, And Decision Making, Yanlin Zhou

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, we develop a framework for E-health Cyber Ecosystems, and look into different involved actors. The three interested parties in the ecosystem including patients, doctors, and healthcare providers are discussed in 3 different phases. In Phase 1, machine-learning based modeling and simulation analysis is performed to remotely predict a patient's risk level of having heart diseases in real time. In Phase 2, an online dynamic queueing model is devised to pair doctors with patients having high risk levels (diagnosed in Phase 1) to confirm the risk, and provide help. In Phase 3, a decision making paradigm is proposed …

Bi-Directional Testing For Change Point Detection In Poisson Processes, Moinak Bhaduri

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Point processes often serve as a natural language to chronicle an event's temporal evolution, and significant changes in the flow, synonymous with non-stationarity, are usually triggered by assignable and frequently preventable causes, often heralding devastating ramifications. Examples include amplified restlessness of a volcano, increased frequencies of airplane crashes, hurricanes, mining mishaps, among others. Guessing these time points of changes, therefore, merits utmost care. Switching the way time traditionally propagates, we posit a new genre of bidirectional tests which, despite a frugal construct, prove to be exceedingly efficient in culling out non-stationarity under a wide spectrum of environments. A journey surveying …

Physical And Social Systems Resilience Assessment And Optimization, Daniel Romero Rodriguez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Resilience has been measured using qualitative and quantitative metrics in engineering,economics, psychology, business, ecology, among others. This dissertation proposes a resilience metric that explicitly incorporates the intensity of the disruptive event to provide a more accurate estimation of system resilience. A comparative analysis between the proposed metric and average performance resilience metrics for linear and nonlinear loss and recovery functions suggests that the new metric enables a more objective assessment of resilience for disruptions with different intensities. Moreover, the proposed metric is independent of a control time parameter. This provides a more consistent resilience estimation for a given system and …

Dispensing Medical Countermeasures In Public Health Emergencies Via Home Health Agencies And Points Of Distribution, Anna Hudgeons

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

A major concern regarding emergency preparedness on the state government level involves the handling and dispensing of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) of medicinal supplies. Each state is required to update and maintain a plan of action for dispensing SNS materials that would effectively provide care to the state’s population in times of distress. This research evaluates a state’s ability to dispense an adequate amount of medicine to her population in a timely manner, specifically after it has been received by the state government. Although simulation modeling has previously been utilized to replicate the dispensing process at pre-designated points of …

Understanding The Decision-Making Process Of Local Level Emergency Managers And Future Impacts Of Social Data, Justin Taylor

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

During the course of a natural disaster, affected populations turn to different avenues to attempt to communicate their needs and locations while emergency managers are faced with the task of making quick decisions to aid in the response effort. The decisions that emergency managers face are affected by factors such as available resources, responder safety, and source of information. In this research, we interview emergency managers about the 2009 North American Ice Storm and a flooding event in late April of 2017 to understand the decisions made and the factors that affected these decisions. Using these interviews, a list of …

Modeling Commodity Flow As A Statistical Function Of Lock Unavailability And Usage, Grace Mcgee

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The inland waterway system in the United States allows for the transportation of commodities, and interruptions to the system can have remarkable economic consequences. This research estimates statistical models of commodity flow as a function of lock usage and lock unavailability to discover relationships between system disruption and economic penalties. Findings specifically complement a portfolio of research conducted by the Maritime Transportation Research & Education Center (MarTREC) for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to aid in decision making and resource planning for lock maintenance.

Quantitative Methods For Select Problems In Facility Location And Facility Logistics, Bin Li

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presented three logistics problems. The first problem is a parallel machine scheduling problems that considers multiple unique characteristics including release dates, due dates, limited machine availability and job splitting. The objective of is to minimize the total amount of time required to complete work. A mixed integer programming model is presented and a heuristic is developed for solving the problem. The second problem extends the first parallel scheduling problem to include two additional practical considerations. The first is a setup time that occurs when warehouse staff change from one type of task to another. The second is a …

Effective Resource Utilization In Arkansas Public Schools, Ryan Sanders

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Teacher pay in Arkansas public schools varies widely from district to district across the state. This pay discrepancy is driven by both the funds available to a district and by how these funds are allocated. There is a standard per student budget given to districts across the state, but this budget can be supplemented by additional property taxes collected on property within a district. This leaves districts with more highly valued property at an advantage. Districts are free to allocate their budget for teacher pay as they see fit, with constraints on number of students per teacher and minimum teacher …

Developing An Ergonomic Model And Automation Justification For Industrial Spraying Operations: A Case Study, Anthony Woods

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Industrial spraying tasks prove to be some of the most dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs in the modern day. Although it is a ripe area for automation, justification methods do not typically account for the potential improvements in the ergonomics of a task from automating it. In addition, there is a gap in the ergonomics literature in formal methodologies to comprehensively evaluate an industrial spraying task ergonomically, including all relevant musculoskeletal elements. This research focuses on first developing a formal, comprehensive methodology for ergonomically evaluating industrial spraying tasks and attaining a final classification of the ergonomic ranking of the task. …

Transportation And Distribution Of Strategic National Stockpile Supplies In A Public Health Emergency, Olivia A. Goss

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the event of a public health emergency in the United States, it is important that public

authorities are equipped to distribute medical supplies to every person in need as quickly as

possible. Federal guidelines state that all persons in an area affected by a public health

emergency should receive their medical countermeasures within 48 hours of the emergency’s

declaration. While the CDC has determined a general dispensing plan for each state and county

to follow, it is ultimately up to the state and county to formalize and implement detailed plans.

A body of academic literature focuses on optimizing the …

An Agent Based Model To Assess Crew Temporal Variability During U.S. Navy Shipboard Operations, Kevin Muhs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the factors that affect human performance variability as well as their temporal impacts is an essential element in fully integrating and designing complex, adaptive environments. This understanding is particularly necessary for high stakes, time-critical routines such as those performed during nuclear reactor, air traffic control, and military operations. Over the last three decades significant efforts have emerged to demonstrate and apply a host of techniques to include Discrete Event Simulation, Bayesian Belief Networks, Neural Networks, and a multitude of existing software applications to provide relevant assessments of human task performance and temporal variability. The objective of this research was …

Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation Of Metal Additive Manufacturing., Venkata Karthik Nadimpalli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) is increasingly being used to make functional components. One of the barriers for AM components to become mainstream is the difficulty to certify them. AM components can have widely different properties based on process parameters. Improving an AM processes requires an understanding of process-structure-property correlations, which can be gathered in-situ and post-process through nondestructive and destructive methods. In this study, two metal AM processes were studied, the first is Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing (UAM) and the second is Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF). The typical problems with UAM components are inter-layer and inter-track defects. To improve the …

Predicting The Impact Of Resource Delays On A Construction Project’S Critical Path Using Monte Carlo Simulation, Colby Weishaar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The construction industry is a complex and evolving industry, making the project manager’s job of planning, organizing, and making decisions a difficult one. One of the most difficult decisions throughout a project is determining what resources are needed to complete a task by the deadline. Uncertainties cause risks within the schedule often creating delays for which the project manager must develop a mitigation plan once risks are identified. After conducting a review of the literature, no research was found examining the use of an analytical model to estimate the delays caused within the resource allocation process. If an analytical model …

Simulation-Based Analysis And Optimization Of The United States Army Performance Appraisal System., Lee A. Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a discrete event simulation framework is considered to replicate the dynamics, structure, and regulatory constraints placed on the officers in the U.S. Army. Using performance appraisal data provided by the United States Army Human Resources Command, we create a multi-objective response function that quantifies the human behavior associated with evaluating subordinates. Utilizing simulation-optimization techniques for model validation enables estimating unknown input parameters, such as human behavior, based on historical data. Furthermore, the model allows users to analyze the effects of current constraints on the evaluation system and the effects of proposed personnel policy changes.The effectiveness of the …

Multi Self-Adapting Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (Msapso)., Gerhard Koch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The performance and stability of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm depends on parameters that are typically tuned manually or adapted based on knowledge from empirical parameter studies. Such parameter selection is ineffectual when faced with a broad range of problem types, which often hinders the adoption of PSO to real world problems. This dissertation develops a dynamic self-optimization approach for the respective parameters (inertia weight, social and cognition). The effects of self-adaption for the optimal balance between superior performance (convergence) and the robustness (divergence) of the algorithm with regard to both simple and complex benchmark functions is investigated. This work …

Optimal Allocation Of Resources In Reliability Growth, Mohammadhossein Heydari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reliability growth testing seeks to identify and remove failure modes in order to improve system reliability. This dissertation centers around the resource allocation across the components of a multi-component system to maximize system reliability. We summarize this dissertation’s contributions to optimal resource allocation in reliability growth.

Chapter 2 seeks to deploy limited testing resources across the components of a series-parallel system in effort to maximize system reliability under the assumption that each component’s reliability exhibits growth according to an AMSAA model with known parameters. An optimization model for this problem is developed and then extended to consider the allocation of …

A Multi-Objective Affinity-Based Savings Algorithm For Improving Processes In Centralized Warehousing Operations, Mckenlee M. Coco

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traditional approaches to improving material management processes in warehousing operations tend to focus on one of three major areas: facility design, order picking and sorting, and order batching. In an effort to improve total system savings, a new affinity function is developed and applied to batching logic to create a multi-objective problem. The proposed multi-objective function incorporates user input to increase adaptability to changing demand and flexibility to changing requirements. Computational experience shows the new function leads to solutions that deviate no more than 25% from the most efficient distance based picking route by the same batching logic, while creating …

Essays On Applications Of Transportation Network Design And Optimization, Amirali Ghaharikermani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address different transportation problems. The three main outcomes are: designing a battery swap station network, studying gaps in Empty Container Management literature, designing a model with similar characteristics to the vehicle routing problem as well as implementation scenario for it to be applied for a real-world case.

For the designed battery swap station, a model is developed for customer demand satisfaction that permits construction of different types of BSS in the planning network. Our solution methodology is a Tabu Search algorithm combined with a dynamic programming initialization. Numerous tests showed that the proposed TS approach provides …

Demonstrating Set-Based Design Techniques- A Uav Case Study, Colin Small

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Defense (DoD) and Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) community seek to improve decision making in the Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) process by incorporating resilience and leveraging the capabilities of model-based engineering (MBE) early in the design process. Traditional tradespace exploration utilizing Point-Based Design (PBD) often converges quickly on a solution with subsequent engineering changes to modify the design. However, this process can lead to a suboptimal solution if an incorrect initial solution is chosen. Enabled by MBE, Set-Based Design (SBD) considers sets of all possible solutions and enables down-selecting possibilities to converge on a final solution. Using a …

Convergent Set-Based Design In Integrated Analysis Of Alternatives: Designing Engineered Resilient Systems, Zephan Wright Wade

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a comprehensive package for understanding and expanding set-based design quantification through the definition and demonstration of Convergent set-based design (SBD). Convergent SBD is a technique developed for the Engineered Resilient Systems program sponsored by the Department of Defense. Convergent SBD contributes a repeatable methodology with the goal of mathematically eliminating inefficient sets. The study of Convergent SBD led to the development of dominance identification criteria equations using comparison of statistical means. The demonstration of Convergent SBD also illustrates the effect of mission resilience in the tradespace and the impact mission resilience has on preference. Finally, Convergent SBD …