Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Case Study: The Optimization Of Information Flow & Organization In Software Development, Farshad Madani, Bing Wang, Xiaowen Wang, Corey White, Liying Wang

Engineering and Technology Management Student Projects

Trial and error are inevitable in the process of software development; the redesign is wasteful when unfocused communication occurs within the development process. To speed up this development process, we optimized the information flow and redesigned the development organization into chunks. First, we investigated the information flow between tasks and coupled tasks into phases utilizing the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) so that the information exchange among chunks of tasks is as few as possible. In this way, the redundant iterations of tasks are eliminated. Meanwhile, we also grouped the engineers into groups according to the tasks, in this; we eliminated …

Economic Impact On Annual Profit Of A Retail Inventory Management System When Using Rfid And Considering Discrepancy Ratio, Inaccuracy Ratio, Backorders, And Federal Income Tax, Liyuan Zhang

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) emerged as an important technology with the ability to improve the efficiency and accuracy of object tracking. It has brought cost savings and added value to a wide variety of fields. Retail inventory management system is one of the beneficial fields. In order to better satisfy customers and to improve profit, retailers demand high accuracy in inventory management to service customers without redundant on-hand inventories. The RFID technology, which provides more accurate tracking, can improve retailers’ profit.

Two accuracy factors were proposed to determine the difference in the profit of a retailer inventory management system caused …

Acuta Enews July 2012 Vol. 41, No. 7

ACUTA Newsletters

In this issue....

1 What Matters to You

2 Overheard via eMail: Legacy Systems

3 UC Cloud Security: Avoiding an Identity Crisis

4 Board Report

4 Annual Dues Reminders Mailed July 3

5 Sense- Making: Why People Won't Be Replaced by Computers Anytime Soon

6 Young Professionals-- What's in It for You?

6 Webinar FREE to members

7 Info Links

8 PCI Compliance of Increasing Importance to Higher Ed

8 ACUTA Member Benefit: Post and Access RFPs

9 Welcome New Members

9 Check It Out

Using Modeling And Simulation To Examine The Benefits Of A Network Tasking Order, Matthew D. Compton, Kenneth M. Hopkinson, Gilbert L. Peterson, James T. Moore

Faculty Publications

The Global Information Grid (GIG) is the military’s computer and communications network which supports the myriad of military missions. Military missions are highly planned, passing through many hands in the strategy-to-task methodology to ensure completeness, accuracy, coordination, cohesion, and appropriateness. A benefit of this planning is the possibility to collect knowledge of future conditions that could be of use to network designers whose goals include optimizing and protecting the GIG. This advanced knowledge includes which networked military equipment will be involved, what their capabilities are, where they will be, when they will be there, and particulars on the required data …

Design And Analysis Of A Dynamically Configured Log-Based Distributed Security Event Detection Methodology, Michael R. Grimaila, Justin M. Myers, Robert F. Mills, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Military and defense organizations rely upon the security of data stored in, and communicated through, their cyber infrastructure to fulfill their mission objectives. It is essential to identify threats to the cyber infrastructure in a timely manner, so that mission risks can be recognized and mitigated. Centralized event logging and correlation is a proven method for identifying threats to cyber resources. However, centralized event logging is inflexible and does not scale well, because it consumes excessive network bandwidth and imposes significant storage and processing requirements on the central event log server. In this paper, we present a flexible, distributed event …

Half-Life Learning Curves In The Defense Acquisition Life Cycle, Adedeji B. Badiru

Faculty Publications

Learning curves are useful for assessing performance improvement due to the positive impact of learning. In recent years, the deleterious effects of forgetting have also been recognized. Workers experience forgetting or decline in performance over time. Consequently, contemporary learning curves have attempted to incorporate forgetting components into learning curves. An area of increasing interest is the study of how fast and how far the forgetting impact can influence overall performance. This article introduces the concept of half-life analysis of learning curves using the concept of growth and decay, with particular emphasis on applications in the defense acquisition process. The computational …

Meta-Heuristics Analysis For Technologically Complex Programs: Understanding The Impact Of Total Constraints For Schedule, Quality And Cost, Henry Darrel Webb

EMSE Doctoral Projects

Program management data associated with a technically complex radio frequency electronics base communication system has been collected and analyzed to identify heuristics which may be utilized in addition to existing processes and procedures to provide indicators that a program is trending to failure. Analysis of the collected data includes detailed schedule analysis, detailed earned value management analysis and defect analysis within the framework of a Firm Fixed Price (FFP) incentive fee contract.

This project develops heuristics and provides recommendations for analysis of complex project management efforts such as those discussed herein. The analysis of the effects of the constraints on …

Establishing Relationships Between Risk Management And Knowledge Transfer, Garrett S. Haltiwanger

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Risk management (RM) and Knowledge management (KM) have mostly been treated as separate management philosophies. Risk management is a widely taught topic in academia and is practiced in industry. Knowledge management is being taught at increasingly more colleges and many companies are discovering a need for managing knowledge. This dissertation shows that some research has been conducted to apply the principles of knowledge management in establishing risk management plans. To a lesser extent there has been research conducted to apply the philosophies of risk management to identifying knowledge gaps and maintaining corporate knowledge. Both risk management and knowledge management are …

Incorporating Memory And Learning Mechanisms Into Meta-Raps, Arif Arin

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Due to the rapid increase of dimensions and complexity of real life problems, it has become more difficult to find optimal solutions using only exact mathematical methods. The need to find near-optimal solutions in an acceptable amount of time is a challenge when developing more sophisticated approaches. A proper answer to this challenge can be through the implementation of metaheuristic approaches. However, a more powerful answer might be reached by incorporating intelligence into metaheuristics.

Meta-RaPS (Metaheuristic for Randomized Priority Search) is a metaheuristic that creates high quality solutions for discrete optimization problems. It is proposed that incorporating memory and learning …

The Multi-Product Price-Setting Newsvendor With Resource Capacity Constraints, Chase C. Murray, Abhijit Gosavi, Debabrata Talukdar

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we consider a newsvendor problem commonly encountered in retail stores that cater to budget-sensitive shoppers. the newsvendor sells multiple products, and in addition to determining order quantities must also determine the selling price of each product sold. the demand for each product is of a stochastic nature and depends on the demands of other products, i.e., is cross-elastic. We transform the objective function into a form that is amenable to developing integer-programming solutions and then develop a numeric optimization procedure rooted in the Nelder-Mead search technique. We obtain encouraging numerical results on some small-scale and large-scale problems. …

Decision Support For Agent Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Geoff Gordon, Asrar Ahmed

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by large scale problems in urban transportation and labor mobility where there is congestion for resources and uncertainty in movement. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly interact with other agents, they effect other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed deterministic movements of agents. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents that are identical and have involuntary movements in dynamic environments. For instance, in a taxi fleet serving a city, …

Logistics Orchestration Modeling And Evaluation For Humanitarian Relief, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhengping Li, Xin Du, Heng Jiang, Robert De Souza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes an orchestration model for post-disaster response that is aimed at automating the coordination of scarce resources that minimizes the loss of human lives. In our setting, different teams are treated as agents and their activities are "orchestrated" to optimize rescue performance. Results from simulation are analysed to evaluate the performance of the optimization model.

Probabilistic Resilience Quantification And Visualization Building Performance To Hurricane Wind Speeds, Berna Eren Tokgoz

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Natural and man made disasters are unpredictable and unavoidable in today's world. Their frequency of occurrence and damages keep increasing. Due to the efforts to reduce negative consequences from such disasters, the concept of resilience has gained so much popularity in disaster management area especially after disasters like the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Complex systems of today are under operational risks because of increasing threats and their high level of vulnerability. Hence, such systems need to adapt the concept of resilience for continuous operations. Resilience is a proactive concept which should incorporate both pre-event (preparedness and mitigation) and …

Identifying Operations Research Systems Analysts' Technical Competencies: A Delphi Approach, William T. Winklbauer

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

After the attacks of September 11, 2011, the demands for more agile, adaptive, critical-thinking, and multi-talented U.S. Army Operations Research Systems Analysts (FA49s) have only increased. Tomorrow's joint operating environment demands U.S. Army FA49s to be ingenious, proactive, and multi-talented; proficient in their core competencies as military leaders as well as being proficient in their technical competencies as problem solvers in the operations research field.

The purpose of this study was to identify the technical competencies and knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required for future U.S. Army FA49s to perform their duties within the joint operating environment of the next …

A Systems Engineering Approach To The Design And Integration Of Microstrip Antennas With Wearable Wireless Devices, Daniel Gilbert Rucker

Theses and Dissertations

Modern wireless systems for implantable and wearable Body Area Network (BAN) applications have reached an advanced stage of design and development not possible in previous generations. Systems engineering techniques allow for modern wireless devices to be developed in a top-down approach to meet the necessary design requirements while utilizing modular architectures. A modular systems architecture is developed to form a platform for BAN systems design. The BAN systems architecture defines the requirements, physical architecture, and operational architecture. The antenna component of the system is researched in detail and prototypes are developed to meet the requirements of implantable and wearable BAN …

A Quantitative Methodology For Vetting "Dark Network" Intelligence Sources For Social Network Analysis, James F. Morris

Theses and Dissertations

Social network analysis (SNA) is used by the DoD to describe and analyze social networks, leading to recommendations for operational decisions. However, social network models are constructed from various information sources of indeterminate reliability. Inclusion of unreliable information can lead to incorrect models resulting in flawed analysis and decisions. This research develops a methodology to assist the analyst by quantitatively identifying and categorizing information sources so that determinations on including or excluding provided data can be made. This research pursued three main thrusts. It consolidated binary similarity measures to determine social network information sources' concordance and developed a methodology to …

Simulation Modeling And Analysis Of The Impact Of Individual Mobility Augmentee Loss At The Tanker Airlift Control Center, Megan A. Leiter

Theses and Dissertations

The Tanker Airlift Control Center (TACC) operates as the execution arm for Air Mobility Command's Global Reach mission. The Command and Control Directorate (XOC) monitors the execution of missions tasked to the 18th Air Force. Approximately 70% of the personnel on the operations floor are considered Individual Mobility Augmentees (IMA). Adjustments in manpower, specifically the loss of IMAs, at the TACC/XOCG may impact their responsiveness to mission deviations. This research develops a discrete event simulation using a combination of SME and historical data to capture the activities of a section of the personnel on the operations floor and the potential …

Design Thinking In Enterprise Supply Chains, Edward Sweeney

Other Resources

No abstract provided.

Developing And Assessing Leadership In Engineering Students, W. Vincent Wilding, Thomas A. Knotts, William G. Pitt, Morris D. Argyle

Faculty Publications

Developing and Assessing Leadership in Engineering Students W. Vincent Wilding, Thomas A. Knotts IV, William G. Pitt, and Morris D. Argyle Department of Chemical Engineering, Brigham Young University The Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology at Brigham Young University is focusing on five initiatives: Leadership, Innovation, Global Awareness, Character, Technical Excellence. Efforts in the realm of leadership include freshmen leadership seminars and a required sophomore course entitled Global Leadership in a Technological World. Departments within the college are expected to build on this foundation in the junior and senior years. The Chemical Engineering Department has developed an effective …

Lagrangian Relaxation For Large-Scale Multi-Agent Planning, Geoff Gordon, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, William Yeoh, Ajay Srinivasan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent planning is a well-studied problem with applications in various areas. Due to computational constraints, existing research typically focuses either on unstructured domains with many agents, where we are content with heuristic solutions, or domains with small numbers of agents or special structure, where we can find provably near-optimal solutions. In contrast, here we focus on provably near-optimal solutions in domains with many agents, by exploiting influence limits. To that end, we make two key contributions: (a) an algorithm, based on Lagrangian relaxation and randomized rounding, for solving multi-agent planning problems represented as large mixed-integer programs; (b) a proof of …

Blunt Impact Performance Evaluation Of Helmet Lining Systems For Military And Recreational Use, Jaclyn Siniora, Ryan Taylor, Darren Suey

Industrial Technology and Packaging

With the increasing problem in collegiate athletes experiencing injuries to the brain, different helmet liners where put to the test to see which liner provided athletes the greatest protection under specific conditions.

This senior project evaluates five different liners in football helmets. Each of the helmet liners were tested at three different temperatures: hot, cold, and ambient. Each helmet had seven different impact locations which were put to the test. The project was designed to be used to test ACH military combat liners as well. Due to shipping bottle necks the ACH combat liners have been left to future Cal …

Acuta Enews June 2012 Vol. 41, No. 6

ACUTA Newsletters

In this issue...

1 Meeting Member Needs with Excellence

2 What's on Your Desk?

3 IPv6 Transition: The Time ls (Finally) Here

4 Board Report

5 Social Intelligence: Bringing the Human Touch to the Online Work place

5 Annual Dues Reminders Mail July 2

6 lnfo Links

7 Welcome New Members

7 Check lt Out

8-12 Annual Conference Photo Gallery

Two-Semester Agile Systems Engineering Design Course: Investigation And Exploration Of "Immersive" Training Technologies, Andrew S. Bodenhamer, Ivan G. Guardiola, Steven Corns, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The teaching of systems engineering is a daunting task that involves the development of curriculum capable of teaching students the systems engineering process, the design aspects of engineering, and the interdisciplinary knowledge of a variety of fields. Design is widely considered to be the central or the major distinguishing activity of engineering1. Design can be considered as the center of system engineering, in which engineers employ an interdisciplinary approach to design effective solutions to meet social needs. However, systems engineering requires that traditional academic boundaries be crossed and intertwined with other fields of engineering as well as business, socio-political, and …

Comparative Analysis Of Erp Emerging Technologies, Ryan Engebrethson

Master's Theses

This Master's Thesis compares technologies used in the architecture of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems to evaluate the benefits and advantages of emerging technologies. The emerging technologies, Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Multi-Tenancy, could significantly alter the current ERP space and become a primary part of ERP Systems of the future. A survey was sent to industry professionals to obtain feedback on their company's ERP Systems and to collect their comments on these new technologies. The survey results and related analysis show that Emerging Cloud ERP Systems outperform Traditional Legacy ERP Systems in all important characteristics - …

Rfid For Inventory Of Medical Records, Johny Wu

Biomedical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to explore the feasibility and economic viability of the implementation of a radio frequency identification (RFID) system in a large-scale, medical office setting. Practitioners in fields such as; medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers do not have a sufficient method for tracking filing forms. RFID has the potential to reduce wait time, improve checking-in time, and decrease the possibility of interchanging documents between patients.

The purpose of this RFID system is to improve upon the filing system already in place in any office setting. The major consideration behind this …

Development And Validation Of A Model For Granular Material Volume Measurements, Pourya Fasounaki

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Keeping inventory record of packed grains in silos poses challenges since the bulk material’s different segments do not discharge uniformly, leading to formation of random peaks and valleys on the surface. To facilitate obtaining accurate volume measurement of the grains by taking into account this non-linear behavior on the surface, laser or plumb-bob level-sensing devices are employed at different part of the surface to probe the level of material under those regions.

The main goals of this research is to study the behavior of granular material in silo while discharging downward and by doing so, differentiate certain flow patterns formed …

Prioritized Shaping Of Models For Solving Dec-Pomdps, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, William Yeoh, Prasanna Velagapudi, Paul Scerri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An interesting class of multi-agent POMDP planning problems can be solved by having agents iteratively solve individual POMDPs, find interactions with other individual plans, shape their transition and reward functions to encourage good interactions and discourage bad ones and then recompute a new plan. D-TREMOR showed that this approach can allow distributed planning for hundreds of agents. However, the quality and speed of the planning process depends on the prioritization scheme used. Lower priority agents shape their models with respect to the models of higher priority agents. In this paper, we introduce a new prioritization scheme that is guaranteed to …

Delayed Observation Planning In Partially Observable Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Janusz Marecki

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional models for planning under uncertainty such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) or Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) assume that the observations about the results of agent actions are instantly available to the agent. In so doing, they are no longer applicable to domains where observations are received with delays caused by temporary unavailability of information (e.g. delayed response of the market to a new product). To that end, we make the following key contributions towards solving Delayed observation POMDPs (D-POMDPs): (i) We first provide an parameterized approximate algorithm for solving D-POMDPs efficiently, with desired accuracy; and (ii) We then propose …

Stochastic Dominance In Stochastic Dcops For Risk-Sensitive Applications, Nguyen Duc Thien, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems where the primary interactions are between local subsets of agents. However, one limitation of DCOPs is the assumption that the constraint rewards are without uncertainty. Researchers have thus extended DCOPs to Stochastic DCOPs (SDCOPs), where rewards are sampled from known probability distribution reward functions, and introduced algorithms to find solutions with the largest expected reward. Unfortunately, such a solution might be very risky, that is, very likely to result in a poor reward. Thus, in this paper, we make three contributions: (1) we propose a stricter objective for …

Assessing Lean Systems Using Variability Mapping, Ahmed Deif

Industrial Technology and Packaging

A new approach to assess lean manufacturing based on system's variability is proposed. The assessment utilizes a new tool called variability source mapping (VSMII) which focuses on capturing and reducing variability across the production system. The new tool offers a new metric called variability index to measure the overall variability level of the system. Based on the mapping and the new metric, VSMII suggests a variability reduction plan guided by a recommendation list of both lean techniques as well as production control policies. An industrial application is used to demonstrate the new tool. Results show that VSMII managed to reduce …