Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Phased Helical Antenna Array For Cubesat Application, Kameron Lacalli

Undergraduate Honors Theses

CubeSats communication links are typically slow due to their power and size restrictions. However, a low power, high speed down link connection can allow for greater data collection and relaying, pushing the capability of 1U CubeSats beyond what is traditionally thought possible. Investigated here is the feasibility of a 11 Mb/s down link connection on a 1U CubeSat, accomplished via 2x2 helical antenna phased array operating on the 802.11 standard. Using a phased array also allows for beam steering to secure connection with the ground station when the on board ADCS may not provide precise pointing capability of the CubeSat, …

Process Development For High Powered Amplifier Au/Sn Eutectic Die Attach Via Vacuum Furnace, Zachary F. Blanden

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This research was conducted to develop and qualify a vacuum GaAs semiconductor monolithic microwave integrated circuit die attach process. Research was done to understand the causes and effects of voiding levels on device performance and reliability. Simultaneous investigation was done to qualify vacuum-attach as a successful methodology by which minimal voiding levels were achieved. After an initial vacuum-attach trial was completed to verify the methodology, internal accept/reject criteria were developed to qualify die attach interfaces. A dual phase attachment methodology was created to minimize tolerance stacking resulting in more consistent component placement. MATLAB image processing code was developed to quantify …

Energy-Climate-Manufacturing Nexus: New Insights From The Regional And Global Supply Chains Of Manufacturing Industries, Murat Kucukvar, Bunyamin Canseva, Gokhan Egilmez, Nuri C. Onat, Hamidreza Samadi

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications

The main objectives of this research are to improve our understanding of energy-climate-manufacturing nexus within the context of regional and global manufacturing supply chains as well as show the significance of full coverage of entire supply chain tiers in order to prevent significant underestimations, which might lead to invalid policy conclusions. With this motivation, a multi region input–output (MRIO) sustainability assessment model is developed by using the World Input–Output Database, which is a dynamic MRIO framework on the world’s 40 largest economies covering 1440 economic sectors. The method presented in this study is the first environmentally-extended MRIO model that harmonizes …

Design And Implementation Of A Fixture For Robotic Welding, Isaac Nathaniel Williams

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The Cal Poly IME department recently purchased a robotic welder. The faculty would like to see this robot incorporated into the welding class. The robot was capable of moving, but was not able to perform a weld prior to this project. This problem is addressed by creating a demonstration part for the welding class. The objectives that need to be complete for this to be possible is designing a part, designing a fixture, analyzing the cost of robotic welding, and implement welding the part in the class. The part is designed with specific requirements in mind. The fixture is designed …

Application Of Gearbox Drivetrains For Commuting Bicycles, Loren Sunding

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

People all over the world are beginning to ride their bicycles more often to destinations which include work, school, and local markets. Most bicycles being used for these activities have an external drivetrain exposed to the elements of the road including water, mud, dirt, and debris. External drivetrains are very fragile and when damaged, pedaling efficiency is greatly reduced and the overall riding experience diminishes.

One solution to this issue is a gearbox specifically designed for a bicycle frame. A gearbox has several mechanical mechanisms operating inside a protective housing. Since the housing is fully sealed, outside elements are not …

Assembly Line Kitting: Foam Mold Material Substitute, Samer Samy Saleh

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Kitting is considered an incredibly innovative and effective solution intended to aid operators within a mixed model assembly line. However, it is a non-value added procedure and one that customers may not be willing to pay for. With this project, the goal is to examine opportunities to employ lean principles and provide a solution that further eliminates non-value added procedures, while also producing the potential for a flexible, mixed model assembly line.

To achieve the aforementioned purpose, the production of foam molds, located within industrial totes and sent to the assembly line, was found to be a major waste within …

Mri Upgrades At Radiology Associates, Patrick Cheung, Charlene Donlon

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Problem Statement: The MRI machines at Radiology Associates are limiting the company’s ability to expand and compete within the local market. After discussing with technicians and managers at Radiology Associates, we decided to focus on hardware and software upgrades for the MRI machines. With 2 of the 3 locations purchasing new machines in the near future, our focus was on upgrades at the Santa Maria facility. The two machines at this location needed hardware and/or software upgrades to remain on par competitively both within the company and with local scanning options. Flexible coils are beneficial in terms of size, weight, …

Development Of A Process Monitoring Tool For The Manufacturing Process Of An Electric Vehicle Battery Enclosure, Ian Lamond

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

High volume manufacturing requires process control that is responsive to manufacturing related issues. It is critical that tools and resources are implemented that gauge manufacturing performance and identify root cause issues.

This project focuses on the design and manufacturing process of an electric vehicle aluminum battery enclosure and the implementation of a production measurement system. The current problem is a lack of process control communication and out of control alarms when uncontrolled events occur for manufacturing associates at the battery enclosure manufacturing work station.

This report examines the core principles of Quality Engineering, the economic advantages of implementing a vision …

Design And Prototyping Of An Adjustable Putter, Daulton Morgan

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Being able to demo a golf putter is essential for a golfer since the feel of the putter is critical in determining what suits the golfer best. Due to the market being primarily dominated by right-handed players, it is difficult for left-handed players to demo high quality putters since the selection is sparse.

This report is about designing and integrating an interchangeable fastening system that allows a putter to be altered between a right and left-handed orientation, while still maintaining the traditional look of a putter. The report covers the necessary design steps, the prototyping of the putter, the projected …

Impact Of Rfid Information-Sharing Coordination Over A Supply Chain With Reverse Logistics, Juan Jose Nativi Nicolau

Open Access Dissertations

Companies have adopted environmental practices such as reverse logistics over the past few decades. However, studies show that aligning partners inside the green supply chain can be a substantial problem. This lack of coordination can increase overall supply chain cost. Information technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has the potential to enable decentralized supply chain coordinate their information. Even though there are research that address RFID on traditional supply chain, few researches address how to coordinate RFID information sharing in a green supply chain. We study, through simulation experiments, two types of RFID information-sharing coordination under different configurations related …

A Design And Analysis Of Computer Experiments Approach For Green Building, Marjan Sayadi

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Theses - Archive

The coming shortage of energy sources and critical environmental impacts are two major factors that have forced a change in product design processes. The shortage of energy sources is related to the limitation on non-renewable energy sources on earth and requires the development of new concepts with lower energy consumptions. Environmental impact, on the other hand, is concerned about the negative effects of products on the natural environment. In recent years, research on designing more environmentally-friendly products that consume lower of energy with lower environmental impact has been initiated to address these issues [1-3]. Designing new powertrains for vehicles [4] …

Evaluating Increasing Hospital Closure Rates In U.S: A Model Framework And A Lean Six Sigma Deployment Approach For Quality Improvement Initiatives To Prevent Further Closures In Rural And Disadvanaged Locations, Soma Sekar Balasubramanian

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Hospital Closures occur from time to time. Several rural hospitals were closed in the U.S recently in an unprecedented manner and hundreds of others are at the risk of closing. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which was amended in 2010, has brought sea of changes in the healthcare industry right from changing the way how hospitals receive reimbursements by introducing several new programs targeting hospitals’ quality of care to expanding health insurance for millions of poor and underprivileged populations in the country. The goal of this study is to understand the closure of rural hospitals in line …

Photovoltaic Cooking In The Developing World, Tyler Watkins, Christopher O'Day, Omar Arriaga

Mechanical Engineering

The challenge of clean cooking is faced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We present a cooking technology consisting of a solar panel directly connected to an electric heater in a well-insulated chamber. Assuming continued decrease in solar panel prices, we anticipate that in a few decades Solar Electric Cooking technologies will be the most common cooking technology for the poor. Appropriate use of insulation reduces the power demand making low-power Insulated Solar Electric Cooking systems already cost competitive.

Robostock: Autonomous Inventory Tracking, Drew Christian Balthazor

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Effective Supplier Quality Practices In The Construction Industry, Ashleigh Hegwood

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The dynamic and irregular nature of projects in the construction industry causes the complexity of supplier quality management (SQM). The Construction Industry Institute (CII) Research Team (RT) 308 is focused on achieving zero rework through effective supplier quality practices.

This honors thesis is an extension of RT 308’s project work. Its purpose is to look at current supplier evaluation practices within the construction industry, confirm arecommended supplier cutoff rating through data analysis, and determine if outliers in the data set could be normalized. A survey was developed in Qualtrics (an online survey software tool) and sent to CII members for …

Comparing Three Instructional Modes For An Engineering Economy Course, Farnaz Ghazi Nezami, M. B. Yildirim, G. Grossi Crema

Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Publications

This study compares three instructional modes in an “Engineering Economy” course: online, face-to-face (FtF), and flipped. Engineering Economy is a core course in this study and incorporates students with diverse backgrounds from different engineering majors. To discern the relation between student characteristics and teaching modality, an online questionnaire was designed for each mode and distributed over a two-year period. Data was collected and several statistical analyses were conducted to study the relationship between pedagogical delivery modes and various student-based factors such as gender, age, course load, living distance from campus, computer skills, work status, and first language. Students’ performance, persistence, …

A General Code To Represent The Mathematical Life Cycle Cost Model Of Bridge, Bajel Mohammed Alshadeedi

Masters Theses

There are many factors that play a role in the overall cost of any bridge. The life cycle cost needs deep knowledge of bridge components to calculate its subcategories costs. The bridge life cycle cost is divided into; agency, user cost, and society costs. The agency cost includes the expected value of the final bridge construction cost, the inspection cost, better value of repainting cost, and replacing asphaltic deck cost. The user cost includes traffic delay cost and vehicle operation cost under different traffic conditions, accident cost, and failure cost. The society cost includes aesthetical and environmental impact. All costs …

Taming Tail Latency For Erasure-Coded, Distributed Storage Systems, Jingxian Fan

Open Access Theses

Nowadays, in distributed storage systems, long tails of responsible time are of particular concern. Modern large companies like Bing, Facebook and Amazon Web Service show that 99.9th percentile response times being orders of magnitude worse than the mean. With the advantages of maintaining high data reliability and ensur- ing enough space eciency, erasure code has become a popular storage method in distributed storage systems. However, due to the lack of mathematical models for analyzing erasure-coded based distributed storage systems, taming tail latency is still an open problem.

In this research, we quantify tail latency in such systems by deriving a …

Metrics Of Critical Pair Identification, Zixu Zhang

Open Access Theses

Critical Pair Identification works as a potential assistive tool for human air traffic controllers by identifying potentially dangerous situations that are not detected by proposed automated separation assurance systems. This concept specifically considers conflicts that might arise if aircraft unexpectedly deviate from their planned flight path in the near future. Five metrics of the critical pair concept, Critical Pair Count, Time to Risk Exposure, Lead Time, Risk Exposure Duration and Blunder Sensitivity Index, have been developed and mathematically defined to characterize the safety level of an aircraft pair or a volume of air space. Algorithm that computes proposed metrics is …

Examination And Utilization Of Rare Features In Text Classification Of Injury Narratives, Hsin-Ying Huang

Open Access Dissertations

Thanks to the advances in computing and information technology, analyzing injury surveillance data with statistical machine learning methods has grown in popularity, complexity, and quality over recent years. During that same time, researchers have recognized the limitations of statistical text analysis with limited training data. In response to the two primary challenges for statistical text analysis, dimensionality reduction and sparse data, many studies have focused on improving machine learning algorithms. Less research has been done, though, to examine and improve statistical machine learning methods in text classification from a linguistic perspective.

This study addresses this research gap by examining the …

Adaptive Sampling Trust-Region Methods For Derivative-Based And Derivative-Free Simulation Optimization Problems, Sara Shashaani

Open Access Dissertations

We consider unconstrained optimization problems where only “stochastic” estimates of the objective function are observable as replicates from a Monte Carlo simulation oracle. In the first study we assume that the function gradients are directly observable through the Monte Carlo simulation. We propose ASTRO, which is an adaptive sampling based trust-region optimization method where a stochastic local model is constructed, optimized, and updated iteratively. ASTRO is a derivative-based algorithm and provides almost sure convergence to a first-order critical point with good practical performance. In the second study the Monte Carlo simulation is assumed to provide no direct observations of the …

Selecting Cloud Platform Services Based On Application Requirements, Bridger Ronald Larson

Theses and Dissertations

As virtualization platforms or cloud computing have become more of a commodity, many more organizations have been utilizing them. Many organizations and technologies have emerged to fulfill those cloud needs. Cloud vendors provide similar services, but the differences can have significant impact on specific applications. Selecting the right provider is difficult and confusing because of the number of options. It can be difficult to determine which application characteristics will impact the choice of implementation. There has not been a concise process to select which cloud vendor and characteristics are best suited for the application requirements and organization requirements. This thesis …

Dynamic Warehouse Optimization Using Predictive Analytics., Parvaneh Jahani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The forward area is a small area of a warehouse with a low picking cost. Two approaches that are investigated for selecting the SKUs of this area and the allocated space are the static and the dynamic approaches. In the case that decisions about the forward area are made periodically (e.g. yearly) and the products' demand patterns are completely ignored, the FRP is static. We developed two heuristics that solve the large discrete assignment, allocation, and sizing problem simultaneously. Replenishing the same product in the same place of the forward area brings about a ``Locked" layout of the fast picking …

Order Picking Strategies For Healthcare Warehouses., Ehsan Khodabandeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Order picking is the process of collecting goods and items in specified quantities from storage locations, in response to customer orders. Since many labor resources are involved in this process, finding ways to make it more efficient have been a primary goal for researchers and practitioners. Determining a better allocation of products to the storage areas, finding the best route and sequence to pick multiple products, and choosing the best picking policies to minimize congestion in the aisles are just a few of many objectives regarding order picking process. Due to regulatory compliances and the chance of product spoilage, additional …

Optimization Models And Algorithms For Demand Response In Smart Grid., Guangyang Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For demand response in smart grid, a utility company wants to minimize total electricity cost and end users want to maximize their own utility. The latter is considered to consist of two parts in this research: electricity cost and convenience/comfort. We first develop a system optimal (SO) model and a user equilibrium (UE) model for the utility company and end users, respectively and compare the difference of the two. We consider users' possible preference on convenience over cost-saving under the real-time pricing in smart grid, and each user is assumed to have a preferred time window for using a particular …

Simulation Modeling For Energy Consumption Of Residential Consumers In Response To Demand Side Management., Prajwal Khadgi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Energy efficiency in the electricity distribution system continues to gain importance as demand for electricity keeps rising and resources keep diminishing. Achieving higher energy efficiency by implementing control strategies and demand response (DR) programs has always been a topic of interest in the electric utility industry. The advent of smart grids with enhanced data communication capabilities propels DR to be an essential part of the next generation power distribution system. Fundamentally, DR has the ability to charge a customer the true price of electricity at the time of use, and the general perception is that consumers would shift their load …

A Comparison Of Gestures For Virtual Object Rotation, Brandon Michael Garner

Theses and Dissertations

The fields of virtual reality and gesture-based input devices are growing and becoming more popular. In order for the two technologies to be implemented together, an understanding of gestures in relation to virtual objects and users' expectations of those gestures needs to be understood. Specifically, this thesis focuses on arm gestures for the rotation of virtual objects. Participants in the study were first asked to freely perform an arm gesture they felt should execute a task. Next, participants were asked to perform specific rotation tasks with pre- configured arm gestures on four objects. There were two types of objects: those …

Recognition Of Infrastructure Events Using Principal Component Analysis, Lane David Broadbent

Theses and Dissertations

Information Technology systems generate system log messages to allow for the monitoring of the system. In increasingly large and complex systems the volume of log data can overwhelm the analysts tasked with monitoring these systems. A system was developed that utilizes Principal Component Analysis to assist the analyst in the characterization of system health and events. Once trained, the system was able to accurately identify a state of heavy load on a device with a low false positive rate. The system was also able to accurately identify an error condition when trained on a single event. The method employed is …

The Effect Of Process Parameters And Surface Condition On Bond Strength Between Additively Manufactured Components And Polymer Substrates, Bharat Bhushan Chivukula

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Additive patching is a process in which printers with multiple axes deposit molten material onto a pre-defined surface to form a bond. Studying the effect of surface roughness and process parameters selected for printing auxiliary part on the bond helps in improving the strength of the final component. Particularly, the influence of surface roughness, as established by adhesion theory, has not been evaluated in the framework of additive manufacturing (AM). A full factorial design of experiments with five replications was conducted on two levels and three factors, viz., layer thickness, surface roughness, and raster angle to examine the underlying effects …

Predicting The Performance Of Queues: A Data Analytic Approach, Kum Khiong Yang, Cayirli Tugba, Mei Wan Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Existing models of multi-server queues with system transience and non-standard assumptions are either too complex or restricted in their assumptions to be used broadly in practice. This paper proposes using data analytics, combining computer simulation to generate the data and an advanced non-linear regression technique called the Alternating Conditional Expectation (ACE) to construct a set of easy-to-use equations to predict the performance of queues with a scheduled start and end time. Our results show that the equations can accurately predict the queue performance as a function of the number of servers, mean arrival load, session length and service time variability. …