Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Control And Resilience Within The Maritime Traffic Management Domain, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

This article presents research conducted within the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) domain. VTS is a service that is provided close to ports and geographically challenging areas to support merchant vessels in their navigation. Although VTS is legally an advice and assistance service, applying concepts from Cognitive Systems Engineering and Resilience Engineering can highlight how the joint human-machine system works to promote safe and efficient traffic movements. The VTS is a Joint Cognitive System that maintains control through a mixture of opportunistic and tactical control. Strategic control is only partially supported by the higher levels of system aggregation that provide the …

Electronic Supplement: Value Focused Thinking For Community-Based Organizations: Objectives And Acceptance In Local Development, Jeffrey Keisler, David A. Turcotte, Rachel B. Drew, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

This is an electronic supplement to the manuscript "Value Focused Thinking for Community-Based Organizations: Objectives and Acceptance in Local Development", published by the EURO Journal on Decision Processes.

Desert Rhex Technical Report: Jornada And White Sands Trip, Sonia Roberts, Jeff Duperret, Aaron M. Johnson, Scott Van Pelt, Ted Zobeck, Nick Lancaster, Daniel E. Koditschek

Sonia F. Roberts

Researchers in a variety of fields, including aeolian science, biology, and environmental science, have already made use of stationary and mobile remote sensing equipment to increase their variety of data collection opportunities. However, due to mobility challenges, remote sensing opportunities relevant to desert environments and in particular dune fields have been limited to stationary equipment. We describe here an investigative trip to two well-studied experimental deserts in New Mexico with D-RHex, a mobile remote sensing platform oriented towards desert research. D-RHex is the latest iteration of the RHex family of robots, which are six-legged, biologically inspired, small (10kg) platforms with …

Comparing Data Envelopment Analysis (Dea) And An Integrated Approach Of Dea And Malmquist Index (Dea-Mi) In Evaluation Of Hospitals Performances, Amin Yazdani Kachoei, Mohammad Mahdi Mozaffari, Amin Vafadarnikjoo, Mahdi Saeedpoor

Amin Vafadarnikjoo

Productivity in hospitals where are major centres for health and medical services has always been emphasised, on the other hand considering development of countries, various methods are presented to measure this factor. It should be noted that not using the scientific measurement methods and indexes correctly will end up misleading and generalising productivity and will lead to poor compliance with scientific principles, wasting resources and failing to achieve productivity in both enterprise and the whole economic system. The purpose of this paper is to compare two approaches; data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the hybrid of DEA and Malmquist index in …

Community Impacts Of Decision Modeling For Foreclosed Redevelopment, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Alvine Sangang, Buki Usidame

Michael P. Johnson

Community development corporations purchase distressed housing to rehabilitate for renter or owner-occupancy. These mission-driven organizations, skilled in the business of housing development, often lack analytic expertise to determine which acquisitions to pursue that would maximize social impact. This paper presents results, using actual purchase data from a Boston-area CDC, to assess the potential social benefits associated with using a decision model as compared to conventional practices.

Data And Analytics For Neighborhood Development: Smart Shrinkage Decision Modeling In Baltimore, Maryland, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander, Eliza D. Whiteman

Michael P. Johnson

Many older cities in the United States confront the problem of long-term declines in population and economic activity in certain neighborhoods have resulted in blighted conditions that make conventional revitalization initiatives based on increased residential and commercial development unlikely to succeed. Planning scholars have developed a theory of smart shrinkage in which emphasis is placed on non-residential land uses that can maintain and improve quality of life while positioning some land for future growth-oriented activities (Hollander and Németh 2011). Smart shrinkage research and practice involves application of methods from information technology and decision science to identify vacant and abandoned parcels …

Strategy Design For Community Response To Distress And Decline Using Data Analytics, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

The foreclosure crisis in the U.S. has resulted in immense economic and social losses for individuals and neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods face long-term declines in population and economic activity that have been compounded by the foreclosure crisis. How can government and non-profit organizations design responses to neighborhood distress that reflect distinctive community characteristics and are consistent with long-term policy and planning goals? In this talk, I discuss alternative decision modeling strategies that support neighborhood health. Where foreclosure responses are likely to ensure that neighborhoods remain vital places for residential housing, productive strategies may include property acquisition and redevelopment. Other neighborhoods, however, …

Modified Stage-Gate: A Product Development Process, Nader Ale Ebrahim

Nader Ale Ebrahim

In today’s dynamic marketplace, manufacturing companies are under strong pressure to introduce new products for long-term survival with their competitors. Increased competition and reduced product life cycles put force upon companies to develop new products faster. In response to these pressing needs, there should be some new approach compatible in flexible circumstances. This presentation presents a solution based on the popular Stage-Gate system, which is closely linked with virtual team approach. Virtual teams can provide a platform to advance the knowledge-base in a company and thus to reduce time-to-market. The presentation describes all the major aspects of new product development …

Exploiting Knowledge About Future Demands For Real-Time Vehicle Dispatching, Soumia Ichoua, Michel Gendreau, Jean Yves Potvin

Soumia Ichoua

An important, but seldom investigated issue in the field of dynamic vehicle routing and dispatching is how to exploit information about future events to improve decision making. In this paper, we address this issue in a real-time setting with a strategy based on probabilistic knowledge about future request arrivals to better manage the fleet of vehicles. More precisely, the new strategy introduces dummy customers (representing forecasted requests) in vehicle routes to provide a good coverage of the territory. This strategy is assessed through computational experiments performed in a simulated environment.

Vessel Traffic Service (Vts): A Maritime Information Service Or Traffic Control System? Understanding Everyday Performance And Resilience In A Socio-Technical System Under Change, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) is a shore-side maritime assistance service that supports bridge teams in their safe navigation of port approaches and other areas that present navigational difficulties. The VTS is implemented in national waters and provides vessels with information through transmissions and broadcasts on Very High Frequency (VHF) radio. With a continued growth in the number, size and cargo volumes of merchant vessels, the role of the VTS has recently become a matter of discussion, and it has been argued that changes, such as implementing an aviation-like control system, would be of an enormous benefit for stakeholders and guarantee …

Tactical Allocation And Acceptance Of Multiple Patient Classes In The Presence Of No-Shows, Lauren Davis, Husniyah Abdus-Salaam

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Clinics that provide pediatric care are frequently confronted with family group appointment requests, where parents desire their children to be scheduled simultaneously or consecutively. This is potentially beneficial to the family by minimizing the number of trips to the provider’s office. However, offering prescheduled group appointments have the risk of reducing provider utilization, particularly if the entire group fails to meet their scheduled appointment. Similarly, reserving appointment slots for same day group appointment requests may also decrease utilization and impact profitability. This paper explores the impact of family group appointments on clinic performance in terms of provider utilization and profit. …

Psum: Training In Google Glass And Android, Keith R. Macarthur, Sarah Greenstein, Ben Sawyer

Keith Reid MacArthur

Orientation To Umass And The Eh&S Program, Donald Robinson

Donald A. Robinson

No abstract provided.

Direct Neighbor Search, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

In this paper we study a novel query type, called direct neighbor query. Two objects in a dataset are direct neighbors (DNs) if a window selection may exclusively retrieve these two objects. Given a source object, a DN search computes all of its direct neighbors in the dataset. The DNs define a new type of affinity that differs from existing formulations (e.g., nearest neighbors, nearest surrounders, reverse nearest neighbors, etc.) and finds application in domains where user interests are expressed in the form of windows, i.e., multi-attribute range selections. Drawing on key properties of the DN relationship, we develop an …

Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches For Smoothing Congestion In Resource Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu, William Yeoh, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Shih-Fen CHENG

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by sel sh agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed in- centives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the re- source sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilib- rium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the uncon- strained version (no budget) of the …

Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Shih-Fen CHENG

The Orienteering Problem (OP), as originally defined by Tsiligirides, is the problem of cross-countr sport in which participants get rewards from visiting a predefined set of checkpoints. As Orienteering Problem can be used to describe a wide variety of real-world problems like route planning for facility inspection, patrolling of strategic location, and reward-weighted traveling salesman problem, it has attracted continuous interests from researchers and a large number of variants and corresponding algorithms for solving them have been introduced.

A Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm For Vehicle Resource Allocation In Sustainable Transportation Planning, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Pang Jin Tan

Shih-Fen CHENG

Sustainable supply chain management has been an increasingly important topic of research in recent years. At the strategic level, there are computational models which study supply and distribution networks with environmental considerations. At the operational level, there are, for example, routing and scheduling models which are constrained by carbon emissions. Our paper explores work in tactical planning with regards to vehicle resource allocation from distribution centers to customer locations in a multi-echelon logistics network. We formulate the bi-objective optimization problem exactly and design a memetic algorithm to efficiently derive an approximate Pareto front. We illustrate the applicability of our approach …

An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Shih-Fen CHENG

In this paper, we illustrate how massive agent-based simulation can be used to investigate an exciting new application domain of experience management in theme parks, which covers topics like congestion control, incentive design, and revenue management. Since all visitors are heterogeneous and self-interested, we argue that a high-quality agent-based simulation is necessary for studying various problems related to experience management. As in most agent-base simulations, a sound understanding of micro-level behaviors is essential to construct high-quality models. To achieve this, we designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind real-world experiment that helps us understand how typical visitors behave in a theme-park environment. …

Interacting Knapsack Problem In Designing Resource Bundles, Truong Huy D. Nguyen, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Shih-Fen CHENG

In many real-life businesses, the service provider/seller keeps a log of the visitors’ behavior as a way to assess the efficiency of the current business/operation model and find room for improvement. For example, by tracking when visitors entering attractions in a theme park, theme park owners can detect when and where congestion may occur, thus having contingency plans to reroute the visitors accordingly. Similarly, a Cable TV service provider can track channel switching events at each household to identify uninteresting channels. Subsequently, the repertoire of channels up for subscription can evolve over time to better serve the entertainment demand of …

Connecting The Dots: Career Reflections, Donald Robinson

Donald A. Robinson

This presentation reflects on the life experiences (dots)career of Donald Robinson, Ph.D. spanning the years from 1960 t0 2014. Connectiing the Dots can only be done looking backwards and the idea for this presentation was drawn from a presentation of the same title given by Stephen Jobs at a Stanford University graduation.

Scheduling Food Bank Collections And Deliveries To Ensure Food Safety And Improve Access, Lauren Davis, Irem Sengul, Julie Ivy, Luther Brock, Lastella Miles

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Food banks are privately-owned non-profit organizations responsible for the receipt, processing, storage, and distribution of food items to charitable agencies. These charitable agencies in turn distribute food to individuals at risk of hunger. Food banks receive donated food from national and local sources, such as The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and supermarkets. Local sources with frequent high-volume donations justify the use of food bank vehicles for collection. Food bank vehicles are also used to deliver food to rural charitable agencies that are located beyond a distance safe for perishable food to travel without spoilage. Due to limited funds, food …

Renewable Energy And Smart Grid Integration Through Advanced Power Electronics, Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

As electricity demands are increasing day by day causing unbalance in the present grid system which results in various causes like load shedding, unbalance voltage and power quality etc which ultimately affects the consumers. Now to avoid all such situations the only option is to meet the demand by increasing generation but, we are also lagging with the conventional sources so generating more power is also not convenient by conventional ways. Therefore, recent researches are interested in renewable energy system integrated with smart grid through advanced power electronic converters. Smart gird with renewable energy sources have been regarded as the …

Optimal Design Of A Pv/Fuel Cell Hybrid Power System For The City Of Brest In France, Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

This paper deals with the optimal design of a stand-alone hybrid photovoltaic and fuel cell power system without battery storage to supply the electric load demand of the city of Brest, Western Brittany in France. The proposed optimal design study is focused on economical performance and is mainly based on the loss of the power supply probability concept. The hybrid power system optimal design is based a simulation model developed using HOMER. In this context, a practical load demand profile of Brest city is used with real weather data.

Supplier Assessment And Selection Using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process In A Steel Manufacturing Company, Farzad Tahriri, Nader Ale Ebrahim, Mohammad Dabbagh

Nader Ale Ebrahim

Every organization needs suppliers and no organization can exist without suppliers. Therefore, the organizations approach to suppliers and the selection of the appropriate supplier, its acquisition processes and policies, and its relationships with suppliers, is of vital importance, both to organizations and suppliers alike. No organization can be successful without the support of its supplier base, operationally and strategically, short or long-term.To select the best supplier, it is essential to make an analytical decision based upon tangible and intangible criteria. Chose and management of a supplier has to be congruent with organizational strategy. Therefore, the vision and strategy of the …

A Review Of Parallel Operation Of Active Power Filters In The Distributed Generation System, Shafiuzzaman Khadem, Malabika Basu, Michael Conlon

Dr. Shafiuzzaman Khan Khadem

In this paper a technical review of parallel operation of Active Power Filter (APF) for harmonic power compensation in distributed generation (DG) network has been presented. Controlling methods and connection topologies with their pros and cons are described. Recent improvements in controlling and future trends for the application of APFs in distributed mode are also identified.

Maritime Traffic Management: A Need For Central Coordination?, Fulko Van Westrenen, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

Traffic management is not formally organised in the maritime domain. Ships are autonomous and find their own way. Traffic is organised through rules, regulations, and “good seamanship”; it is a distributed system. In areas of high traffic-density support is proved by vessel traffic service (VTS) to promote traffic safety and fluency. VTS does not take control. This organisational structure has proven itself in situations with sufficient resources. When resources become insufficient (e.g. not enough sailing space), the traffic needs an organising mechanism. In this article, the authors argue that the most promising way to do this is by organising centralised …

Transport Replacement And Sustainability Aspects Associated With Additive Manufacturing, Marcus R. Wigan

Marcus R Wigan

Additive manufacturing has a range of characteristics that suggest enhancements to sustainability should be possible. The nature of the process influences not only how products can be made, but also how they can be delivered. Logistics and the global supply chain are central aspects to manufacturing, and considerable attention is being paid to making the supply chain more sustainable. This often makes sound economic sense without any consideration of the environmental benefits, as this usually delivers energy reductions and reduced reworking or redelivery. Additive manufacturing has also secured increasing attention from a sustainability standpoint, but this has in the main …

Industrial Technology Roadmap As A Decision Making Tool To Support Public R&D Planning, Yonghee Cho

Joseph Cho

تمرین شماره چهار دوره کاربردی کنترل پروژه با نرم افزار, Mahdi Amirzadeh

Dr.Mahdi Amirzadeh

No abstract provided.