Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Calibration Of Hdm-4 For Use In Pavement Management Systems (Pms), Nurdin Mushule

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

One of major problems of road management in developing countries is the lack of decision making tools for preparing road maintenance programmes. This results in poor resource allocation and poor utilisation of existing assets. Pavement management systems (PMS) have been developed around the world in order to assist with the pavement management process in a co-ordinated and systematic manner. Some developed countries have derived pavement performance models that are suited to local conditions by setting up long term pavement performance studies. Conversely, most developing countries do not have the resources required to set up similar large-scale field experiments. However, validation …

Case Studies: In-Situ Rebuilding Of Damaged Rope Drum Shafts Of Ssg Crane And The Repair Of Circumferential Crack Of Cement Kiln By Welding, Joseph Runyoro

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Material failures in engineering are characterized by unwanted downtime of equipment and require the application of sound engineering principles to rectify the problem so that it does not reoccur. The most widely method for repairing damaged steel structures such as rope drum shaft or cracked cement kiln is by Manual metal arc welding. The equipment mentioned have their main importance that, when they are broken down, they cost a lot of money in lost revenue and affects a lot of people in terms of business and livelihood. The nominal diameter (DN) 240 rope drum shaft was damaged when the roller …

A Systemic Framework For Implementation Of Tqm Programmes, Emanuel Mjema

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The purpose of this paper is to present a systemic framework for implementation of TQM program in a manufacturing organisation that produces motor vehicle components in Port Elizabeth - South Africa. The approach used included conceptualisation of the systemic framework and then involvement of the stakeholders in adding scenarios to be considered in the design and implementing the framework in the real field. The findings obtained during the implementation of the systemic framework established that reduction of scrap rate, reduction of production costs, reduction of cycle time and employee motivation could be achieved through the implementation of a Systemic Framework …

Simulation Model To Investigate Flexible Workload Management For Healthcare And Servicescape Environment, Michael Thorwarth, Paul Harper, Amr Arisha

Conference papers

High demand and poor staffing conditions cause avoidable pressure and stress among healthcare personnel which results in burnout symptoms and unplanned absenteeism which are hidden cost drivers. The work environment within an emergency department is commonly arranged in a flexible workload which is highly dynamic and complex for the outside observer. Using detailed simulation modeling within structured modeling methods, a comprehensive model to characterize the nurses' time utilization in such flexible dynamic workload environment was investigated. The results have been used to derive a generalized analytic expression that describes certain settings that lead to an instable queuing system with serious …

Extending The Strategy Based Risk Model Using The Delphi Method: An Application To The Validation Process For Research And Developmental (R&D) Satellites, Amanda J. Langenbrunner, Mary R. Trautwein

Theses and Dissertations

The validation between a research and developmental satellite and its ground system is critical to ensuring the success on-orbit. However, the exact process for completing validation is not documented, frequently underfunded, and accomplished ad hoc. This leads to debate regarding maintenance of budget and schedule, while ensuring on-orbit success. This thesis examines readiness and on-orbit activities within the U.S. Air Force Space Development and Test Wing's Research Development Test and Evaluation Support Complex. Combining historical data with the consultation of subject matter experts, a validation process was defined. Risks associated with this process were then analyzed using the Strategy Based …

Analyzing Systems Integration Best Practices And Assessment In Dod Space Systems Acquisition, Douglas R. Dillon, Enriqueta M. Styres

Theses and Dissertations

Senior leadership of the Air Force's Space and Missile Center suggested an investigation of systems integration within the space acquisition community in the fall of 2008. This thesis performs that investigation. A review concluded that while Systems Integration (SI) is extensively discussed as an area deserving considerable attention in the Systems Engineering literature, definitions are weak and methods and tools non-existent. Known SI activities are not being traced and assessed for adequacy throughout system development. Employing the Space System Acquisition Lifecycle Framework as the environment for this research, a method of characterizing and tracing SI throughout a program‘s lifecycle by …

Analysis And Selection Of New Rental Paintball Masks For Gladiator Paintball Park, Geoff Wakefield

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This project is designed to select new rental paintball masks for Gladiator Paintball Park. The currently used rental masks are worn down and need replacement. Criteria for new rental masks are examined and include customer preferences, owner's constraints, and time studies. Candidate masks were found by asking customers what they like in rental masks, interviewing other paintball field owners, and referring to the online paintball community. Three candidate masks were found, the V-Force Vantage, JT Alpha, and Kingman java paintball masks. These masks were compared to the currently used rental masks, the V-Force Armor. Customers were surveyed to find out …

Acs Custom Creation's New Business And Assembly Operations, Kent Christensen

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

ACS Custom Creations had assembly and business operations that wasted time and wasted money. The objective of the project is to improve and implement ACS Custom Creations business and manufacturing operations. The proposed assembly process involves the rearranging of the bottlenecked steps to eliminate constraints. The assembly workstations were also redesigned to reduce cycle time. With the improvement of the new assembly and business operations, ACS is poised to grow into a bigger company. Financial Statements were created to improve visibility of the company’s historical data. These financial statements include an income statement, balance sheet, and a cash flow statement. …

Solder Qwik Pentm, Katherine E. Robbins

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Electronics soldering is a technique used frequently in the manufacturing of Printed

Circuit Boards (PCB) to attach small electronic parts or wires together. Often times

the need to remove a solder joint arises; this is known as desoldering. Solder wick,

fine braided copper wire infused with rosin, is one of the most effective ways to

desolder because it results in the cleanest joints. Currently using solder wick

involves several time consuming and somewhat awkward steps. This report will

cover the process behind designing, manufacturing, and testing a new ergonomic,

dispenser for solder wick that can be used with one hand. …

Examining Strategic Information Technology In Relationship To The Need For Technology Modernization, Jill A. Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Strategic planning can be a critical business process for today’s organizations, especially for IT organizations that are facing continually changes in technology. This research was designed to investigate IT organizations’ use of strategic planning and determine if the organization uses their strategic plan to set project priorities. The second part of this research was to determine if the IT strategic plans are aligned with the overall organization’s strategic plan.

This research was conducted using a mail-type survey to IT Executives from organizations with sales/revenues under 100 million dollars, a maximum of 5000 employees, and SIC codes of 201 thru 399. …

An Environment That Fosters Shared Leadership And The Effects On Engineering Education: An Analysis And Proposed Structure, Brian J. Galli, Ray Luechtefeld

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Engineers must not only have design and technical skills, but they must also possess the ability to work in and lead teams, adopt and adapt to change, and act as leaders who can think in terms of the bigger picture. to develop these skills, engineering students must be actively involved in their education and trained to continually learn. Many engineering students have become accustomed to traditional forms of education, which can lead to passivity and dependence on faculty to tell them what to know and why they need to know it. Research in organizational behavior suggests a solution can lie …

Risk Matrix Input Data Biases, Eric D. Smith, William T. Siefert, David Drain

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Risk matrices used in industry characterize particular risks in terms of the likelihood of occurrence, and the consequence of the actualized risk. Human cognitive bias research led by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky exposed systematic translations of objective probability and value as judged by human subjects. Applying these translations to the risk matrix allows the formation of statistical hypotheses of risk point placement biases. Industry-generated risk matrix data reveals evidence of biases in the judgment of likelihood and consequence-principally, likelihood centering, a systematic increase in consequence, and a diagonal bias. Statistical analyses are conducted with linear regression, normal distribution fitting, …

Reinforcement Learning For Model Building And Variance-Penalized Control, Abhijit Gosavi

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a simulation-Based technique to solve Markov decision problems or processes (MDPs). It is especially useful if the transition probabilities in the MDP are hard to find or if the number of states in the problem is too large. in this paper, we present a new model-Based RL algorithm that builds the transition probability model without the generation of the transition probabilities; the literature on model-Based RL attempts to compute the transition probabilities. We also present a variance-penalized Bellman equation and an RL algorithm that uses it to solve a variance-penalized MDP. We conclude with some numerical …

Effectiveness Of Team-Building And Teamwork In Real And Virtual Worlds, Rachana Ranade

All Theses

Given the increasing importance of globalization and collaboration, this research investigates the possibility of performing team-building training for globally dispersed teams using the capabilities of the virtual world Second Life. Three meeting conditions, the 3D virtual world Second Life, a combination of face-to-face and Second Life and face-to-face were evaluated. Thirty randomly assigned 3 person teams performed an ice-breaker session and then a team-building activity in each meeting condition. Four dependent variables were measured: task completion time; quality of task performance; the subjective satisfaction with the process based on group cohesiveness, perception of the process and satisfaction with the outcome; …

Acuta Enews December 2009, Vol. 38, No. 12

ACUTA Newsletters

ln This lssue

Board Approves Slate of Nominees for 2010-2011 Board of Directors

From the President.......... Harvey "Buck" Buchanan, Florida State Univ., ACUTA President

Mutli-Event Discount: Attend More in 2010 and Save More!

Tech Talk: what's the Next Really Big Thing?.........................Kevin Tanzillo, Dux PR

Washington Update Newsletter

Nominate Now for ACUTA Ruth A. Michalecki Leadership Award

Board Report.................Jeri A,. Semer, Executive Director

Happy Holidays from the ACUTA Staff

DC Update Dave Ostrom, Washington State Univ, (retired)

BlCSI-Governmental Relations for 2009-2010 ................Richard Reed, RCDD, BlCSI

Audio Seminar: "lMS: The Future of Fixed Mobile Convergence"

Follow Corporate Members on Twitter 8 lnfo …

Design, Reconstruction And Evaluation Of A Dynamometer For Quarter Scale, Samuel Sanchez

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This project discusses the design, reconstruction, and evaluation of a dynamometer. A new test stand for the Quarter Scale team would improve the testing of the engines and the Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT). All the readings will be done electronically in order to provide the most accurate data collection. The dynamometer will be a closed hydraulic system for ease of use. This system will be able to test all of Quarter Scale engines. The data collected will be used to determine which engines are in the best condition, and which may need to be fixed. With the new design, the …

The Part Count Tool (Pact) For Concept Selection, Tarang Parashar, Katie Grantham Lough, Robert B. Stone

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a part count tool that automates the consideration of manufacturing cost during the conceptual design phase by predicting part count for a particular product concept. with an approximate number of parts per product in the conceptual design phase, the designer can estimate the cost associated with the product. on the basis of the cost, the designer can make changes according to budget requirements. the part count tool will also aid in ranking the design concepts by number of components for a product. This tool utilizes existing automated concept generation algorithms to generate the design concepts. It extracts …

A Logistic Regression Model To Predict Incident Severity Using The Human Factors Analysis And Classification System, Hrishikesh Kavade

All Theses

The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) is used to help identify causal factors that lead to human error. The framework has been used in a variety of industries to identify leading contributing factors of unsafe events, such as accidents, incidents and near misses. While traditional application of the HFACS framework to safety outcomes has allowed evaluators to identify leading causal issues based on frequency, little has been done to gain a more comprehensive view of the system's total risk. This work utilizes the concept of event severity along with the HFACS framework to help better identify target areas …

Thermoelastic Behavior Of A Small Bearing Cage, Eric Planting

All Theses

The full field non contact measurement of objects undergoing testing is one of interest for manufacturers of parts which are graded on their longevity. Unfortunately, for homogenous small parts with irregular geometries, such as bearing cages, the solution for testing is typically to use only a FEA model and compliment the testing of the model with simply cyclically loading the sample until failure. To better understand the stresses and behavior of a small object Thermoelasticity can be employed in order to see in a full field technique what stress patterns exist and their correlation to a FEA model.
The FEA …

Performance Of Storm Water Stage And Quality Measuring Instruemtnation Of A Small Watershed Using A Remote Monitoring Station, Rebecca Crane

All Theses

ABSTRACT


As economic development proceeds special care must be taken to preserve and sustain our water resources. Monitoring the storm water from a watershed during a rainfall event can help quantify any changes in water quantity and quality. An accurate means of measuring flow is necessary for all watershed monitoring projects. This study was conducted to analyze the performance of stage, turbidity, and temperature measuring devices in a laboratory setting as well as on Honeycutt Creek in Clemson, South Carolina.
The stage measuring devices under study include: a radar level sensor, ultrasonic transmitter, pressure transducer, and a bubbler module. A …

A Particle Swarm Optimization Using Random Keys For Flexible Flow Shop Scheduling Problem With Sequence Dependent Setup Times, Vinodh Sankaran

All Theses

In this research, a particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) using random keys is developed to schedule flexible flow lines with sequence dependent setup times to minimize makespan. The flexible flow line scheduling problem is a branch of production scheduling and is found in industries such as printed circuit board and automobile manufacturing. It is well known that this problem is NP-hard. For this reason, we approach the problem by implementing a particle swarm optimization (PSO), a metaheuristic which is inspired by the motion of a flock of birds or a school of fish searching for food. The proposed PSO has …

Sensor-Based Soil Water Monitoring To More Effectively Manage Agricultural Water Resources In Coastal Plain Soils, Christopher Bellamy

All Theses

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) is widely grown in the United States with 5.7 million ha grown nationally and 1.2 million ha grown in the humid southeastern states in 2005. From 1969 to 2003, agricultural irrigated farmland acreage and total water applied increased by over 40% and 11% respectively to include a total of 55.3 million acres in 2002. Combined with recent and more frequent drought periods and legal water conflicts between states, there has been an increased interest in more effective southeastern water management, thus making the need to develop improved irrigation scheduling methods and enhanced water use efficiency of …

Detecting The Process' 1.5 Sigma Shift: A Quantitative Study, James R. Stevenson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Process behavior can change with time. In this study an attempt was made to discover whether the Six Sigma™ claim of changes in the process mean stayed within +/- 1.5 sigma units. Several process groups were examined for a particular firm that made metal castings, machined parts, tested major components and assembled these into a vehicle that was a product sold to the customer. As the assembly progressed, deficiencies were identified and recorded. Analyses employed cumulative sum (CUSUM) sequence charts, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series analyses, minimum mean square error (MMSE) exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), Shewhart control …

The Root Causes Of Errant Ordered Radiology Exams, Benjamin Duman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to determine why there was a high number of errant radiology orders from requesting physicians at ATA Hospital. As the researcher, I wanted to clearly define errant orders, determine the root causes of errant orders, and further, make recommendations that would help diminish current as well as future order errors. This study answers three research questions: RQ1. Exactly what are the performance problems associated with errant orders within ATA Hospital’s radiology department that warrant further research? RQ2. What causes the increase in errant radiological orders at ATA Hospital? And, RQ3. What types of performance …

Using Electronic Faculty Course Portfolios To Showcase Classroom Practices And Student Learning, Paul Savory, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Faculty course portfolios are a valuable medium for documenting and making visible the serious intellectual work of teaching. Developing a faculty course portfolio follows the same process one uses to explore a research question. Faculty members inquire, analyze, and document their teaching practices and the resulting student learning and then make the results accessible for use, review, and assessment by one’s peers. In this article, we introduce four types of electronic course portfolios that sponsor different forms of inquiry into student learning. We highlight the major components of each type, offer advice in developing them, and share examples of each. …

E-Design Tool For Friction Stir Welding, Harish Bagaitkar, Venkat Allada

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper describes efforts to develop a web-Based E-Design tool for the Friction Stir Welding (FSW) technique. the input parameters to the E-Design tool are the joint specifications. the output parameters of the E-Design tool are process parameters such as tool geometry details, tool rpm, and plunge depth. the heart of the E-Design tool is the FSW database. the FSW database contains mappings of various input parameters and output parameters that are captured by referring to various experimental studies cited in the literature. the proposed E-Design tool deals with lap joints and butt joints between similar aluminum alloys. Copyright © …

On The Statistical Estimation Of Rényi Entropies, Elia Liitiäinen, Amaury Lendasse, Francesco Corona

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Estimating Entropies is Important in Many Fields Including Statistical Physics, Machine Learning and Statistics. While the Shannon Logarithmic Entropy is the Most Fundamental, Other Rényi Entropies Are Also of Importance. in This Paper, We Derive a Bias Corrected Estimator for a Subset of Rényi Entropies. the Advantage of the Estimator is Demonstrated Via Theoretical and Experimental Considerations. © 2009 IEEE.

Simpler Packaging, Tomiko Oden

Graphic Communication

This project explains how product packaging is become more "green", and thus more simple. Packaging needs to go beyond just simplifying materials and graphics - it needs to create a simpler process in order to reduce wasted time, energy, and resources.

Is The Test Of Senior Friendly ⁄Child Resistant Packaging Ethical?, Laura Bix, Javier De La Fuente, Kenneth D. Pimple, Eric Kou

Industrial Technology and Packaging

Research has documented the drastic reduction of unintentional poisonings of children since the introduction of child resistant (CR) packaging. However, studies also indicate that consumers report difficulty using CR packages, in part because tests which determine the ‘senior friendliness’ of CR designs that are used throughout the world disallow people with ‘overt or obvious’ disabilities from being test subjects. Our review of drug package usability suggests that the current tests of CR packaging can and should be revised to correct this problem. We use US legislation, regulation and data to exemplify these points, but the conclusions are applicable to all …

2-D And 3-D Assessment Of Cambered And Symmetric Airfoils: A Cfd Study, Tuncay Kamas

All Theses

A two dimensional and three dimensional computational study has been carried out respectively regarding aerodynamic forces affecting a symmetric airfoil, NACA0015 and a cambered airfoil, NACA2414. The negative lift (down force) and drag forces were predicted through the simulation of airflows over inverted rear-wings in different configurations namely; varying incidences i.e. angles of attack of the airfoils, two dimensional cross section of the inverted rear wings to be mounted on back of a car, and varying speeds of initial airflow.
The downforce increases as the angle of attack increases however, if an inverted rear wing is fixed on a car …