Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Comparative Usability Study Of Web-Based Personal Health Records., Alexandra Doggett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research on Personal Health Records (PHRs) has focused on applications that are “tethered” to a specific Electronic Health Record (EHR). However, this is a gap in research on the usability of unaffiliated, independent PHRs, as well as a gap in research on college-aged PHR users. Based on this gap in the literature, a single factor, within-subject experiment was conducted using 18 participants from the University of Louisville to determine if one PHR had superior usability and design. The testing included the completion of six tasks in three different PHRs. Dependent variables included task time, mouse movement, mouse clicks, keystrokes, …

The Electropolishing Of Electron Beam Melting, Additively Manufactured Ti6al4v Titanium : Relevance, Process Parameters And Surface Finish., Austin Lassell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the next frontier in manufacturing technology, but with this new frontier comes new challenges in post processing techniques. In an attempt to gain further knowledge of the post processing of metal AM components, the Electropolishing (EP) of Electron Beam Melting (EBM), Additively Manufactured Ti- 6Al-4V alloy parts is investigated in the following work. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is predominant in a number of industries, with electronics and consumer goods, aerospace, automotive and medical constituting the majority of AM sales. For most of these, Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) AM technology is of great interest given the ability of …

Mental Workload Measurement For Competitive Video Games., Jamal Mcfarland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore different ways to measure mental workload for competitive video games using two different techniques: heart rate variability (HRV) and the NASA Task Load Index (TLX). eSports is a rising form of a competitive sport as well as a source of entertainment for people all over the world. I write this in hopes to find efficient and verified ways to estimate mental workload. I also hope this work can pioneer the expansion of literature for the competitive gaming scene.

The study design is a single factor, within-subject design. The single factor was Game …

Operational Decision Making For Medical Clinics Through The Use Of Simulation And Multi-Attribute Utility Theory., Bo Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Currently, health care is a large industry that concerns everyone. Outpatient health care is an important part of the American health care system and is one of the strongest growth areas in the health care system. Many people pay attention to how to keep basic health care available to as many people as possible. A large health care system is usually evaluated by many performance measures. For example, the managers of a medical clinic are concerned about increasing staff utilization; both managers and patients are concerned about patient waiting time. In this dissertation, we study decision making for clinics in …

A Simulation-Based Evaluation Of Efficiency Strategies For A Primary Care Clinic With Unscheduled Visits, Afrifah Bobbie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the health care industry, there are strategies to remove inefficiencies from the health delivery process called efficiency strategies. This dissertation proposed a simulation model to evaluate the impact of the efficiency strategies on a primary care clinic with unscheduled "walk-in" patient visits. The simulation model captures the complex characteristics of the Orlando Veteran's Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) primary care clinic. This clinic system includes different types of patients, patient paths, and multiple resources that serve them. Added to the problem complexity is the presence of patient no-shows characteristics and unscheduled patient arrivals, a problem which has been until recently, …

A Systems Approach To Assessing, Interpreting And Applying Human Error Mishap Data To Mitigate Risk Of Future Incidents In A Space Exploration Ground Processing Operations Environment, Tiffaney Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research results have shown that more than half of aviation, aerospace and aeronautics mishaps/incidents are attributed to human error. Although many existing incident report systems have been beneficial for identifying engineering failures, most of them are not designed around a theoretical framework of human error, thus failing to address core issues and causes of the mishaps. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a human error assessment framework to identify these causes. This research focused on identifying causes of human error and leading contributors to historical Launch Vehicle Ground Processing Operations mishaps based on past mishaps, near mishaps, and close calls. …

An Integrated Design For Six Sigma-Based Framework To Align Strategy, New Process Development, And Customer Requirements In The Airlines Industry, Mohammed Alghamdi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When organizations create new strategy maps, key new processes are often identified. This is important for organizations to stay competitive in the global marketplace. This document describes the development, implementation, and validation of a framework that properly aligns and links an organization's strategy and new process development. The proposed framework integrates the Balanced Scorecard management system (BSC) and the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) methodology, leveraging their strengths, overcoming weaknesses, and identifying lessons learned to help bridge the gap between strategy development and execution. The critical-to-quality conceptual model is used as an integrative component for the framework. Literature search has …

An Experimental Investigation Of The State Of Creativity, Critical Thinking And Creativity Training In Undergraduate Engineering Students, Eric Sola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research explores creativity and critical thinking skills in undergraduate engineering students. The study undertook two experiments in order to gather a better understanding of several factors regarding the interactions between students' creative abilities and the effects of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Experiment 1 focused on the differences in creative and critical thinking skills in freshman versus senior undergraduate engineering students. Experiment 2 centered on the variation in the effects of long-term versus short-term creativity training on senior engineering students. Creative skill was measured using the Test for Creative Thinking – Drawing Production (TCT-DP) developed by Urban and Jellen (2010). …

A Framework For Quantifying And Managing Overcrowding In Healthcare Facilities, Abdulrahman Albar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emergency Departments (EDs) represent a crucial component of any healthcare infrastructure. In today's world, healthcare systems face growing challenges in delivering efficient and time-sensitive emergency care services to communities. Overcrowding within EDs represents one of the most significant challenges for healthcare quality that adversely impacts clinical outcomes, patient safety, and overall satisfaction. Research in this area has resulted in creating several ED crowding indices, such as National Emergency Department Overcrowding Scale (NEDOCS) and Emergency Department Work Index (EDWIN) that have been developed to provide measures aimed at mitigating overcrowding. Recently, efforts made by researchers to examine the validity and reproducibility …

A Neuroergonomics Study Of Brain Eeg's Activity During Manual Lifting Tasks, Awad Aljuaid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electroencephalography (EEG) has been shown to be a reliable tool in neuroergonomics studies due to the relatively low cost of brain data collection and limited body invasion. The application of EEG frequency bands (including theta, alpha and beta), enjoyed a wide range of interest in physical and cognitive ergonomics. The psychophysical approach has been used for decades to improve safe work practices by understanding human limitations in manual materials handling. The main objective of this research project was to study the brain's EEG activity expressed by the power spectral density during manual lifting tasks related to: 1) the maximum acceptable …

A Holistic Framework For Effective Engineering Leadership Development Using 3d Virtual World Simulation, Hamed Almalki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Problems associated with the limited success of traditional engineering leadership development are the absence of embedded real-life industry case studies in leadership development and incorrect applications of leadership strategies in the various contexts. Though recommended programs for enhancing leadership development exist, they lack an examined framework, especially when it comes to leadership development of undergraduate engineering students. In this research effort, the impact of a framework using 3D virtual world simulation and the 4-D Leadership System to enhance the leadership abilities of undergraduate engineering students at the individual and team levels based on industrial leadership case studies was investigated. The …

A Predictive Model To Identify Caregivers At Risk Of Musculoskeletal Disorders, Abdulelah Ali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare systems face several challenges due to the aging workforce, recruitment shortages, increasing patient acuteness, and increasing patient size and weight. The most costly, leading, and prevalent problem in the healthcare industry and nursing professions is work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). MSDs are common among caregivers because of the nature of their work, which requires repetitive heavy physical activity. The development of MSDs among caregivers negatively impacts the quality of care, and incurs high costs such as worker compensation, days away from work, turnover, rehabilitation, and lower productivity. Therefore, it is essential to determine the factors that contribute to musculoskeletal disorder …

The Effect Of Baldrige Performance Excellence Program On Organization's Innovation/Dynamic Capabilities, Mohammed Alomairy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigated the effect of Baldrige performance excellence program on organization's innovation/dynamic capabilities improvement. According to the literature, there is little or no practical method for building dynamic/innovation capabilities within organizations. The study hypothesizes that Baldrige performance excellence program helps organizations to systematically develop the required dynamic/innovation capabilities for innovation. Twenty-four organizations that had implemented Baldrige program over the past five years participated in this research study. Two types of data were measured/collected from these organizations; Performance excellence data and Innovation capabilities data. To avoid bias in the data collection, the two data were measured and collected at different …

A New Six Sigma Implementation Approach For Power Generation Gas Turbines Repair Process Development, Somesh Ghunakikar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Power Generation gas turbines used for heavy duty application mainly constitutes three modules; compressor, combustion and turbine. Typically, all these parts are designed by OEM companies for specific number of hours and cycles (also known as starts) before they become dysfunctional. In addition, Gas Turbine (GT) also have intended repair interval depending upon the type of part application and anticipated damages during service operation. Thus, GT parts need inspections and repair (overhaul) after certain operating hours in order to recondition them so that they can be fit for reoperation to produce power. In this dissertation, a unique six sigma DFSS …

Modeling And Solving Large-Scale Stochastic Mixed-Integer Problems In Transportation And Power Systems, Zhouchun Huang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, various optimization problems from the area of transportation and power systems will be respectively investigated and the uncertainty will be considered in each problem. Specifically, a long-term problem of electricity infrastructure investment is studied to address the planning for capacity expansion in electrical power systems with the integration of short-term operations. The future investment costs and real-time customer demands cannot be perfectly forecasted and thus are considered to be random. Another maintenance scheduling problem is studied for power systems, particularly for natural gas fueled power plants, taking into account gas contracting and the opportunity of purchasing and …

Assessing The Effect Of Social Networks On Employee Creativity In A Fast-Food Restaurant Environment, Mitchell Rabinowitz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Creativity has been widely recognized as critical to the economic success of organizations for over 60 years. Today, it is considered to be the most highly prized "commodity" of businesses. As such, there have been numerous efforts to better understand creativity with the goal of increasing individual creativity and therefore improving the economic success of organizations. An emerging area of research on creativity recognizes creativity as a complex, social process that is dependent upon many factors, including those of an environmental nature. In support of this perspective, a growing amount of research has investigated the effect of social networks on …

Data Mining Models For Tackling High Dimensional Datasets And Outliers, Orestis Panos Panagopoulos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High dimensional data and the presence of outliers in data each pose a serious challenge in supervised learning. Datasets with significantly larger number of features compared to samples arise in various areas, including business analytics and biomedical applications. Such datasets pose a serious challenge to standard statistical methods and render many existing classification techniques impractical. The generalization ability of many classification algorithms is compromised due to the so-called curse of dimensionality. A new binary classification method called constrained subspace classifier (CSC) is proposed for such high dimensional datasets. CSC improves on an earlier proposed classification method called local subspace classifier …

Using Case-Based Reasoning For Simulation Modeling In Healthcare, Khaled Alshareef

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The healthcare system is always defined as a complex system. At its core, it is a system composed of people and processes and requires performance of different tasks and duties. This complexity means that the healthcare system has many stakeholders with different interests, resulting in the emergence of many problems such as increasing healthcare costs, limited resources and low utilization, limited facilities and workforce, and poor quality of services. The use of simulation techniques to aid in solving healthcare problems is not new, but it has increased in recent years. This application faces many challenges, including a lack of real …

Assessing Safety Culture Among Personnel In Governmental Construction Sites At Saudi Arabia: A Quantitative Study Approach, Omar Alrehaili

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Safety is an essential issue for organizations to survive, especially for hazardous industries such as the construction industry. The construction industry is considered to be one of the major industries that help in the growth of the economy and the infrastructure of all countries. Recently, scholars have paid increasing attention to the concept of safety culture due to its role in decreasing the occurrences of accidents and injuries. Safety culture has become the focus of all industries and has received much attention in recent years, especially within the construction industry. Absence of this culture is a major cause of injuries …

A Framework To Generate A Smart Manufacturing System Configurations Using Agents And Optimization, Khalid Nagadi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Manufacturing is a crucial element in the global economy. During the last decade, the national manufacturing sector loses nearly 30% of its workforce and investments. Consequently, the quality of the domestic goods, global share, and manufacturing capabilities has been declined. Therefore, innovative ways to optimize the usage of the Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) are required to form a new manufacturing era. This research is presenting a framework to optimize the design of SMS. This includes the determination of the suitable machines that can perform the job efficiently, the quantity of those machines, and the potential messaging system required for sharing …

A Hybrid Simulation Framework Of Consumer-To-Consumer Ecommerce Space, Oloruntomi Joledo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the past decade, ecommerce transformed the business models of many organizations. Information Technology leveled the playing field for new participants, who were capable of causing disruptive changes in every industry. "Web 2.0" or "Social Web" further redefined ways users enlist for services. It is now easy to be influenced to make choices of services based on recommendations of friends and popularity amongst peers. This research proposes a simulation framework to investigate how actions of stakeholders at this level of complexity affect system performance as well as the dynamics that exist between different models using concepts from the fields of …

Spare Parts On Demand Using Additive Manufacturing : A Simulation Model For Cost Evaluation., Stefan Jedeck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the impact of additive manufacturing in the spare part supply chain. A few studies are available, but they focus on specific parts and their applications only. A general model, which can be adapted to different applications, is nonexistent. This dissertation proposes a decision making framework that enables an interested practitioner/manager to decide whether using additive manufacturing to make spare parts on demand is economical when compared to conventional warehousing strategy. The framework consists of two major components: a general discrete event simulation model and a process of designing a wide range of simulation scenarios. The goal …

Optimization Of Support Structures For Selective Laser Melting., Kai Zeng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Additive Manufacturing (AM) users rely on experiments and experience to predict the performance of AM processes. This trial and error approach for qualifying AM parts takes significant time and money. Simulation tools are an urgent need for today’s AM industry. One area of need is the automatic generation of optimized support structures based upon the scan patterns used to produce those structures. This research seeks to develop support structure generation tools based on real scan pattern and thermo-mechanical simulation tools for Selective Laser Melting (SLM) developed at the University of Louisville and being commercialized by 3DSIM, LLC. In order to …

Simulation-Based Optimization Of Mitigation Strategies For Pandemic Influenza., Arsalan Paleshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Millions of people have been infected and died as results of influenza pandemics in human history. In order to prepare for these disasters, it is important to know how the disease spreads. Further, intervention strategies should be implemented during the pandemics to mitigate their ill effects. Knowledge of how these interventions will affect the pandemic course is paramount for decision makers. This study develops a simulation-based optimization model which aims at finding a combination of strategies that result in the best value for an objective function of defined metrics under a set of constraints. Also, a procedure is presented to …

A Framework For Interoperability On The United States Electric Grid Infrastructure, Stuart Laval

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the United States (US) electric grid has been a stable one-way power delivery infrastructure that supplies centrally-generated electricity to its predictably consuming demand. However, the US electric grid is now undergoing a huge transformation from a simple and static system to a complex and dynamic network, which is starting to interconnect intermittent distributed energy resources (DERs), portable electric vehicles (EVs), and load-altering home automation devices, that create bidirectional power flow or stochastic load behavior. In order for this grid of the future to effectively embrace the high penetration of these disruptive and fast-responding digital technologies without compromising its safety, …

Body Mass Bias Mitigation For Females In Military Physical Readiness Testing Through Load Carriage Implementation, Aaron Yeaton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The US Military requires specific fitness testing, known as the Physical Readiness Test (PRT), for its members to determine their overall fitness levels. The test currently being used has been shown to have bias towards heavier mass individuals of up to 20%. Prior research has been completed and several recommendations have been made to eliminate mass bias, but this has been conducted almost exclusively on males. There is very little data and research on military physical fitness testing for women besides combat specific evolution exercises. A possibility exists to eliminate the bias for females through implementing load carriage during PRT …

The Effects Of Chronic Sleep Deprivation On Sustained Attention: A Study Of Brain Dynamic Functional Connectivity, Yiling He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is estimated that about 35-40% of adults in the U.S. suffer from insufficient sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has become a prevalent phenomenon because of contemporary lifestyle and work-related factors. Sleep deprivation can reduce the capabilities and efficiency of attentional performance by impairing perception, increasing effort to maintain concentration, as well as introducing vision disturbance. Thus, it is important to understand the neural mechanisms behind how chronic sleep deprivation impairs sustained attention. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the study of the integration between anatomically distributed and functionally connected brain regions. Functional connectivity has been widely used …

Modeling Dense Storage Systems With Location Uncertainty, Mohamed Awwad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing models to study the problem of searching and retrieving items in a dense storage environment. We consider a special storage configuration called an inverted T configuration, which has one horizontal and one vertical aisle. Inverted T configurations have fewer aisles than a traditional aisle-based storage environment. This increases the storage density; however, requires that some items to be moved out of the way to gain access to other more deeply stored items. Such movement can result in item location uncertainty. When items are requested for retrieval in a dense storage environment with item location uncertainty, …

A New Paradigm Integrating Business Process Modeling And Use Case Modeling, Barclay Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research is to develop a new paradigm integrating the practices of business process modeling and use case modeling. These two modeling approaches describe the behavior of organizations and systems, and their interactions, but rest on different paradigms and serve different needs. The base of knowledge and information required for each approach is largely common, however, so an integrated approach has advantages in efficiency, consistency and completeness of the overall behavioral model. Both modeling methods are familiar and widely used. Business process modeling is often employed as a precursor to the development of a system to be …

A Macro-Level Sustainability Assessment Framework For Optimal Distribution Of Alternative Passenger Vehicles, Nuri Onat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although there are many studies focusing on the environmental impacts of alternative vehicle options, social and economic dimensions and trade-off relationships among all of these impacts were not investigated sufficiently. Moreover, most economic analyses are limited to life cycle cost analyses and do not consider macro-level economic impacts. Therefore, this thesis aims to advance the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment literature and electric vehicle sustainability research by presenting a novel combined application of Multi Criteria Decision Making techniques with Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for decision analysis. With this motivation in mind, this research will construct a compromise-programming model (multi-objective optimization method) …