Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Deployed Communications In An Austere Environment: A Delphi Study, Andrew Soine, James Harker, Alan R. Heminger

Faculty Publications

The information and communications technology (ICT) field is undergoing a period of tremendous change. The exponential growth rate of ICT capability in recent decades, which has had an undeniable effect on every aspect of our society, will likely have ramifications for military operations in austere environments. 1 The Air Force’s 689th Combat Communications Wing commissioned a study to forecast the future of mobile ICT in such environments. Researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology chose to employ the Delphi technique as the methodology for executing this task. The following scenario, based on the results of that study, demonstrates how …

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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 …

Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are typically used to model routing and trip planning problems. OP is a variant of the well known traveling salesman problem where the goal is to compute the highest reward path that includes a subset of nodes and has an overall travel time less than the specified deadline. Stochastic orienteering problems (SOPs) extend OPs to account for uncertain travel times and are significantly harder to solve than deterministic OPs. In this paper, we contribute a scalable mixed integer LP formulation for solving risk aware SOPs, which is a principled approximation of the underlying stochastic optimization problem. Empirically, …

Interaction Model Of Functions In The National Airspace System, Nathan F. Koerschner, Steven J. Landry

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The National Airspace System (NAS) is comprehensively described by five functions derived from big-picture goals: (1) conflict detection and resolution, (2) controlling aircraft states, (3) traffic flow management, (4) controlling passenger states, and (5) controlling company resources. It can be reasonably assumed that these functions interact in some way; this interaction is currently unknown. A model of the entire NAS would be helpful in discovering these interactions, yet no such comprehensive model exists. To address this problem an agent-based state-based model was created in MATLAB. To date, only functions (1) and (2) were implemented. Running the model shows that there …

Quantitative Measurement Of Intuitiveness Of Visualization Techniques, Jeongjoon Boo, Ji Soo Yi

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

More and more visualizations and infographics are being adopted as a part of data communication (e.g., news articles and personal blogs) because they can not only present more details succinctly but also allow viewers explore data by themselves. However, when an information provider needs to decide which type of graphs, there is not much reliable information out there. For example, we do not know what portion of general public understands how to comprehend a type of graph, such as a scatter plot, without any explanation. Thus, the aim of this project is to quantify the level of intuitiveness of different …

Pulsed Laser Coating Of Bioceramic (Hap) And Niti Nanoparticles On Metallic Implants, Aayush Goswami, Gary J. Cheng

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

This research deals with increasing the biocompatibility of the bio implants which have a global market valued more than $94.1 billion . The surface of the metal alloys used for the bone implants need to be coated with bio compatible materials like HAp(Hydroxyapatite), graphene, etc. in order to promote the growth of cells(osteoblasts) on the surface of the implants. Various techniques like plasma spray coating, ion beam sputter coating, etc. have been used before to coat such materials on a substrate, however these have faced problems of coating quality. In order to perfect this coating, that is make it more …

Analysis Of Closed-Loop Acoustic Feedback Cancellation Systems, Meng Guo, Soren Holdt Jensen, Jesper Jensen, Steven L. Grant

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In a previous study, the performance of an acoustic feedback/echo cancellation system was analyzed using a power transfer function method. Whereas the analysis result provides very accurate performance predictions in open-loop acoustic echo cancellation systems, it is less accurate in closed-loop acoustic feedback cancellation systems if there is a strong correlation between the loudspeaker signal and the signals entering the microphones. This work extends the performance analysis to include the effects of the nonzero correlation on the adaptive filters. Simulation results verify that this extension provides much more accurate performance predictions in closed-loop acoustic feedback cancellation systems. © 2013 IEEE.

Acuta Enews October 2013 Vol. 42, No. 10

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Nominate for Board of Directors

1 PD and More from ACUTA

2 Nominations Open for institutional Excellence Award

3 What's on Your Desk?

4 Using Social Media During Times of Crisis

5 Why You Should Customize Lync' qualified Phones

6 Board Report

7 Info Links

8 Welcome New Members

8 Check It Out

Modeling The Impact Of Simulated Educational Interventions On The Use And Abuse Of Pharmaceutical Opioids In The United States: A Report On Initial Efforts, Wayne Wakeland, Alexandra E. Nielsen, Teresa D. Schmidt, Dennis Mccarty, Lynn Webster, John Fitzgerald, J. David Haddox

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Three educational interventions were simulated in a system dynamics model of the medical use, trafficking, and nonmedical use of pharmaceutical opioids. The study relied on secondary data obtained in the literature for the period of 1995 to 2008 as well as expert panel recommendations regarding model parameters and structure. The behavior of the resulting systems-level model was tested for fit against reference behavior data. After the base model was tested, logic to represent three educational interventions was added and the impact of each intervention on simulated overdose deaths was evaluated over a 7-year evaluation period, 2008 to 2015. Principal findings …

Design, Development, And Testing Of A Conformal Power Control Interface For Thrust Vectoring Aircraft, David Rozovski

Open Access Dissertations

Over the last five years, a new power control inceptor for tiltrotor aircraft, known as the Rotational Throttle Interface (RTI) was designed and built. Prior to the RTI, no tiltrotor inceptor had been able to simultaneously indicate both the direction and magnitude of thrust conformally. The purpose of the RTI is to provide an interface that maps to the intended vehicle response throughout ALL ranges of operation. Doing so is expected to reduce confusion that may have contributed to several tiltrotor accidents

Two tests were conducted with the RTI, one at the NASA Vertical Motion Simulator, and one at Canada's …

Algorithmic And Mathematical Programming Approaches To Scheduling Problems With Energy-Based Objectives, Kan Fang

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation studies scheduling as a means to address the increasing concerns related to energy consumption and electricity cost in manufacturing enterprises. Two classes of problems are considered in this dissertation: (i) minimizing the makespan in a permutation flow shop with peak power consumption constraints (the PFSPP problem for short) and (ii) minimizing the total electricity cost on a single machine under time-of-use tariffs (the SMSEC problem for short). We incorporate the technology of dynamic speed scaling and the variable pricing of electricity into these scheduling problems to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing.The challenge in the PFSPP problem is to …

Human Cognitive Performance In Healthcare Information System Environment And Its Application On Nursing Tasks, Byung Cheol Lee

Open Access Dissertations

The US healthcare system has serious issues in care quality and patient safety. Patients often do not receive the care they need or the given care service cause harm. In addition, the significant amounts of medical and medication errors occur, and recurring adverse drug events due to damaging side effects from medications threaten patient safety. To solve these issues, healthcare information systems (HIS) have been recommended in various care processes. Though several studies have confirmed the benefits and usefulness of the systems (Cordero, Kuehn, Kumar, & Mekhjian, 2004; Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000; Sittig, Krall, Kaalaas-Sittig, & Ash, 2005; Weiner …

The Effect Of Distribution On Product Temperature Profile In Thermally Insulated Containers For Express Shipments, Jay Singh, Sanjiv Jaggia, Koushik Saha

Industrial Technology and Packaging

An uninterrupted cold chain is a continual series of storage and distribution activities that maintain a specific temperature or temperature range. Cold chain solutions typically involve excessive packaging to ensure that the desired product temperature is maintained through the distribution process, thereby increasing the logistics-related costs. There is a myriad of solutions available for shipping temperature-sensitive products, including those constructed with a variety of packaging materials as well as refrigerants. Although static characteristics for thermally insulated packaging solutions such as the R-values of package systems as well as the melting points and heat absorption rates of various refrigerants have been …

An Ergonomic Evaluation Of Aircraft Pilot Seats, Yolanda Nicole Andrade

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Seat comfort has become increasingly important in today's society as we spend more time at consoles, instrument panels, or just online. However, seat comfort is hard to define and difficult to measure. Several measures both objective and subjective were used to evaluate seat comfort in commercially available average pilot seats. Three pilot seats, which had the same material and similar adjustments but different physical attributes, and a universal classroom seat, with different material and no adjustments, were compared by 20 volunteers using subjective and objective measures in a Latin square controlled repeated measures design. A Friedman's test was used to …

Theory Of Constraints Project Management In A Manufacturing Environment, Shihching Kraft

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The following thesis covers the concepts of Theory of Constraints (TOC) Project Management. Introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in I 984, TOC is a management philosophy that focuses on the use of critical chain project management to prioritize everyday tasks in a company. In TOC Project Management, there is always at least one resource constraint that limits the speed at which projects are completed. TOC management philosophy also recognizes that most projects in the manufacturing industry face unknown schedule delays that could cause projects to be completed late or over the planned budget. During project plan creation, plans are developed …

Acuta Enews September 2013 Vol. 42, No. 9

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 Big Data Means Big Advances

2 Nominations Open for 2014 institutional Excellence Award

2 Seeking Presenters for Winter Seminar

3 Webinar: The Evolution of Control Systems Security Brief

3 Register to Attend Fall Seminar

4 What Exactly Is a Microsoft Lync Phone?

6 Info Links

7 Overheard on the Listserv

8 Board Report

9 Welcome New Members

9 Check It Out

Study Of A Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell Combined Heat, Hydrogen And Power System: End-Use Application, Tarek A. Hamad, Abdulhakim Amer A. Agll, Yousif M. Hamad, Sushrut Bapat, Mathew Thomas, Kevin B. Martin, John W. Sheffield

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

To address the problem of fossil fuel usage and high greenhouse gas emissions at the Missouri University of Science and Technology campus, using of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources can lower energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Biogas, produced by anaerobic digestion of wastewater, organic waste, agricultural waste, industrial waste, and animal by-products is a potential source of renewable energy. In this work, we have discussed the design of CHHP system for the campus using local resources. An energy flow and resource availability study is performed to identify the type and source of feedstock required to continuously run the …

Construction, Analysis, And Data-Driven Augmentation Of Supersaturated Designs, Alex J. Gutman

Theses and Dissertations

Screening designs are used in the early stages of industrial and computer experiments to find the most important input factors affecting a system's output. They provide an economical way to remove unimportant factors from further, potentially costly, experimentation. However, when an experiment has a large number of control factors and limited number of available runs, it is infeasible to run a traditional screening design. In these situations, experimenters can use supersaturated designs. A supersaturated design is a fractional factorial design that can screen a set of k factors in n runs, where k is greater than n -1. Unfortunately, they …

Development Of Availability And Sustainability Spares Optimization Models For Aircraft Reparables, Edmund K. W. Pek

Theses and Dissertations

The Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) conducts Logistics Support Analysis (LSA) studies in various engineering and logistics efforts on the myriad of weapon systems. In these studies, inventory spares provisioning, availability and sustainability analyses are key focus areas to ensure asset sustenance. In particular, OPUS10, a commercial-off-the-shelf software, is extensively used to conduct reparable spares optimization in acquisition programs. However, it is limited in its ability to conduct availability and sustainability analyses of time-varying operational demands, crucial in Operations & Support (O&S) and contingency planning. As the RSAF seeks force structure expansion to include more sophisticated weapon systems, the …

On The Allocation Of Exclusive-Use Counters For Airport Check-In Queues: Static Vs. Dynamic Policies, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we propose a static policy for the optimal allocation of a fixed number of exclusive-use check-in counters dedicated to a single flight. We first provide the motivation for considering the static policy by showing that the dynamic policy already available in the literature suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The objective is to minimize the (expected) total cost of waiting, counter operation, and passenger delay costs which we show to be convex in the number of counters allocated. In those cases where the passenger delay cost is difficult to estimate, we propose an alternative formulation and minimize …

Low Volume Dispensing With High Speed Dispensers, Sunny Agarwal

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

With the high pace of innovation in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, there has been an increasing demand for more energy efficient and environmental friendly products. This research relates to a complex process of fluid dispensing at low volumes on a printed circuit board. Currently, a more refined non-contact dispensing terminology named “Streaming” is widely used to stream out material at low volumes for various applications. The key solution is to frame a dispensing method that lends itself most closely to the requirements of a specific production process.

This study represents a detailed approach of dispensing low volumes of materials in …

Acuta Enews August 2013 Vo. 42, No. 8

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue.,,

1 Sewanee Campus Celebrates IEA Award

2 Regulatory Webinar on Section 255

2 ACUTA Webinar: What's on the Radar?

2 Sneak Peek at 2014 ACUTA journal Topics i

Vendor System lntegrations Accelerate in the Safety 6 Security Industry j

Seeking Presenters for Winter Seminar

4 Deja vu All Over Again: Can We Please Put SDNs in Context?

5 Some Thoughts about Fiber Optics

6 lnfo Links

6 Mark Your Calendar for Fall Seminar

7 Looking for a Few Good Coordinators

7 Board Report

8 Welcome New Members

8 Check It Out

The Role Of Third Party Logistics Providers (3pls) In The Adoption Of Green Supply Chain Initiatives, Edward Sweeney, Pietro Evangelista, Maria Huge-Brodin, Karin Isaksson

Practitioner Journals

The increasing importance of environmental sustainability has sharpened the focus on the need for innovative approaches to the purchasing of transport and logistics services. This article points out some of the challenges that purchasers of transport and logistics services, as well as their suppliers in the third party logistics (3PL) industry, are facing. These include the need for closer collaboration between 3PLs and their customers, as well as developing systems for the robust assessment of the environmental sustainability of services. The article is based on several years’ research experience inIreland,ItalyandSweden.

Evaluation Of Team Quality, Shiva Rama Krishna Murthy Bhagavatula

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

The ever-increasing competitive pressure and sizes of the global markets have forced organizations from both manufacturing and healthcare sectors to rely more on teams. Therefore the success or the failure of an organization depends largely on the overall quality of the teams within that organization. This increased attention towards teams has forced many organizations to focus on improving the overall quality of their teams. This study has three main objectives. The first objective is to structure a comprehensive list of attributes affecting the overall quality of a team in manufacturing and healthcare sectors. The second objective is to use a …

Improved Photolithography Scheduling In Semiconductor Manufacturing, Sreenath Chalil Madathil

All Theses

Photolithography is typically the bottleneck process in semiconductor manufacturing. In this thesis, we present a model for optimizing photolithography job scheduling in the presence of both individual and cluster tools. The combination of individual and cluster tools that process various layers or stages of the semiconductor manufacturing process flow is a special type of flexible flowshop. We seek separately to minimize total weighted completion time and maximize on-time delivery performance. Experimental results suggest that our mathematical- and heuristic-based solution approaches show promise for real world implementation as they can help to improve resource utilization, reduce job completion times, and decrease …

Utilizing Atcs Data To Inform A Dynamic Reassignment System For Muni Metro Light Rail Vehicles Departing Embarcadero Station, April M. Hickey

Master's Theses

This is a report of a professional project intended to act as an informational tool for the evaluation of a dynamic dispatch system at Embarcadero Station for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Systems that operate dispatch algorithms do so in response to on-time performance and reliability. The optimization problem is documented in many transportation contexts including airline networks, bus dispatch, and freight routing. According to the research, optimizing available options and re-routing based on available options can create a more efficient system that would minimize operating costs and improving service reliability for customers.

The methodology presented here uses …

Predicting Hospital Patients' Admission To Reduce Emergency Department Boarding, Mohammadmahdi Moqri

Graduate Masters Theses

Emergency Department (ED) boarding - the inability to transfer emergency patients to inpatient beds- is a key factor contributing to ED overcrowding. This paper presents a novel approach to improving hospital operational efficiency and, therefore, to decreasing ED boarding. Using the historic data of 15,000 patients, admission results and patient information are correlated in order to identify important admission predictor factors. For example, the type of radiology exams prescribed by the ED physician is identified as among the most important predictors of admission. Based on these factors, a real-time prediction model is developed which is able to correctly predict the …

An Optimization Model For Class Scheduling At A Dance Studio, Chirag Ojha

All Theses

Scheduling has been a large area of research for decades. A substantial amount of work has been done to express, classify, and solve scheduling problems. Most of these problems are computationally difficult to solve and require complex algorithms. In this thesis, we develop a mixed-integer linear program for a real world optimization problem at a dance studio. Similar to a university, the students in this studio request a particular class and instructors teach the classes under constrained resources such as a limited number of classrooms. The priorities of instructors as well as dancers are included to further mimic reality. Experimental …

The Assignment Problem With Dependent Costs., Ghazal Tariri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assigning workers, each with their own skill set, to tasks which demand different skills in an efficient manner is a challenging problem that often requires workers to receive additional training. The training of workers is very costly with Training Magazine’s Annual Industry Report stating 58.5 billion dollars were spent in 2007 on employee training in the United States. Therefore assigning workers to tasks in such a way as to minimize the overall training costs is an important problem in many organizations. In this research, the assignment problem with dependent cost is considered, i.e. the training cost associated with assigning a …

Parameterizing Analytical Models To Support An Empirically Based Warehouse Design Methodology, Lisa Thomas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research in the area of warehouse design is characterized by a myriad of analytical models that address one, typically small and isolated, area of the warehouse. These models, although important in gaining insight into one question of warehouse design, are of limited value when one considers the larger question of overall warehouse design. Thus, research in the area of overall warehouse design typically consists of procedure-driven processes based on qualitative factors and not the quantifiable results of analytical models.

In contrast, practitioners have significant empirical data related to how a design alternative performs in an industry, a company, or a …