Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Predictive Power And Validity Of Connectome Predictive Modeling: A Replication And Extension, Michael Wang, Joaquin Goni, Enrico Amico

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Neuroimaging, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is a rapidly growing research area and has applications ranging from disease classification to understanding neural development. With new advancements in imaging technology, researchers must employ new techniques to accommodate the influx of high resolution data sets. Here, we replicate a new technique: connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM), which constructs a linear predictive model of brain connectivity and behavior. CPM’s advantages over classic machine learning techniques include its relative ease of implementation and transparency compared to “black box” opaqueness and complexity. Is this method efficient, powerful, and reliable in the prediction of behavioral measures …

Pilot Performance With Advance Sensor Technlogies Considerations, Erin R. Groll, Nsikak Udo-Imeh, Steven Landry Dr.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Research on human performance indicates people may discretely shift modes as the difficulty in tasks changes. These modes are referred to as “cognitive control modes.” Cognitive control modes are ways people operate and handle their process of thinking during a series of tasks. However, past work has been confined to subjective reports of these mode changes - objective markers in data of cognitive control modes, which should appear if these mode changes are truly discrete, have not be identified. This work will attempt to identify markers of cognitive control modes in data collected on pilots flying instrument approaches. Specifically, a …

Multi-Objective Two-Stage Stochastic Programming For Adaptive Interdisciplinary Pain Management With Piece-Wise Linear Network Transition Models, Gazi Md Daud Iqbal

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Pain is the most common symptom when a patient visits a physician. People experience pain throughout their lifetime at different degrees. If short term pain is not treated properly, then it can become long term pain, which is also known as chronic pain. The Eugene McDermott Center for pain management at UT Southwestern Medical Center conducts a two-stage pain management program for chronic pain. This research uses a two-stage stochastic programming approach to optimize personal adaptive treatment strategies for pain management. The goal is to generate adaptive treatment strategies using statistics based optimization approaches that can be used by physicians …

Essays In Measuring, Controlling, And Coordinating Supply Chain Inventory And Transportation Operations, Payam Parsa

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Supply chain collaboration programs, such as continuous replenishment program (CRP), is among the most popular supply chain management practices. CRP is an arrangement between two partners in a supply chain to share information on a regular basis for lowering logistics costs while maintaining or increasing service levels. CRP shifts the replenishment responsibility to the upstream partner to avoid the bullwhip effect across the supply chain. This dissertation aims to quantify, measure, and expand the benefits of CRP for the purpose of reducing logistics cost and improving customer service. The developed models in this dissertation are all applied in different case …

An Economic Analysis Of Residential Photovoltaic Systems With And Without Energy Storage, Rodney Moses Kizito

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Residential photovoltaic (PV) systems serve as a source of electricity generation that is separate from the traditional utilities. Investor investment into residential PV systems provides several financial benefits such as federal tax credit incentives for installation, net metering credit from excess generated electricity added back to the grid, and savings in price per kilowatt-hour (kWh) from the PV system generation versus the increasing conventional utility price per kWh. As much benefit as stand-alone PV systems present, the incorporation of energy storage yields even greater benefits. Energy storage (ES) is capable of storing unused PV provided energy from daytime periods of …

Decision Support System For Container Port Selection Using Multiple-Objective Decision Analysis, Rivelino De Icaza

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ports are essential for maritime transportation and global supply chains since they are nodes that connect the sea- and land-based modes of transportation. With containerization and supply chains stimulating global trade, ports are challenged to adjust to changes in the market to create value to their customers. Therefore, this dissertation research focuses on the container port selection decision analysis to provide information to help shipping lines select the best port for their shipping networks. Since the problem is complex, dynamic, and involves multiple and conflicting criteria, the research proposes to use the multi-objective decision analysis with Value-Focused Thinking approach. The …

Using Approximate Dynamic Programming To Control An Electric Vehicle Charging Station System, Ying Chen

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Dynamic programming (DP) as a mathematical programming approach to optimize a system evolving over time has been applied to solve the multi-stage optimization problems in a lot of areas such as manufacturing systems and environmental engineering. Due to the “curses of dimensionality”, traditional DP method is only able to solve a low dimensional problem or problems under very limiting restrictions, In order to employ DP to solve high-dimensional practical complex systems, approximate dynamic programming (ADP) is proposed. Several versions of ADP has been introduced in the literature and for this study, the author takes advantage of design and analysis of …

Models And Methodologies To Address Emerging Needs In Network And Supply Chain Optimization, Forough Enayaty Ahangar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we model three different security scenarios and propose solution methodologies to address each problem.

Chapter 2 presents a large-scale optimization approach for solving a dynamic bi-level network interdiction problem (NIP) in which interdiction activities must be scheduled in order to minimize the cumulative maximum flow over a finite time horizon. A logic-based decomposition (LBD) approach is proposed that utilizes constraint programming to exploit the scheduling nature of this dynamic NIP. Chapter 3 considers a set of centers to which content (e.g., data or smuggled items), are assigned to ensure availability. An interdictor (e.g., border security officials) attempts …

Personalized Decision Modeling For Intervention And Prevention Of Cancers, Fan Wang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Personalized medicine has been utilized in all stages of cancer care in recent years, including the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. Since prevention and early intervention are particularly crucial in reducing cancer mortalities, personalizing the corresponding strategies and decisions so as to provide the most appropriate or optimal medical services for different patients can greatly improve the current cancer control practices. This dissertation research performs an in-depth exploration of personalized decision modeling of cancer intervention and prevention problems. We investigate the patient-specific screening and vaccination strategies for breast cancer and the cancers related to human papillomavirus (HPV), representatively. Three popular …

The Effect Of Magnification Loupes On Dental Hygienists' Posture While Exploring, Emily Ludwig, Gayle B. Mccombs, Susan L. Tolle, Daniel M. Russell

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of dental magnification loupes on posture during instrumentation.

Methods: A convenience sample of 27 right-handed dental hygienists, with no prior history of injuries or disabilities of the head, neck, or trunk region, enrolled in the study. Baseline posture calibration was taken and tri-axial accelerometers were placed on four locations of the head and trunk (occipital region of head; cervical vertebrae C5; thoracic vertebrae T5; lumbar vertebrae L1) to measure acceleration and the orientation of the body to gravity. Participants were randomly assigned to wear self-supplied magnification loupes during either …

Cyber-Physical System Characterization And Co-Regulation Of A Quadrotor Uas, Seth E. Doebbeling

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in which a host of real-time computational tasks contending for shared resources must be cooperatively managed to obtain mission objectives. Traditionally, control of the UAS is designed assuming a fixed, high sampling rate in order to maintain reliable performance and margins of stability. But emerging methods challenge this design by dynamically allocating resources to computational tasks, thereby affecting control and mission performance. To apply these emerging strategies, a characterization and understanding of the effects of timing on control and trajectory following performance is required. Going beyond traditional control evaluation techniques, …

Simulation Modeling Approach For Evaluating A Solution Designed To Alleviate The Congestion Of Passenger Flow At The Composure Area Of Security Checkpoints, Maria Luisa Janer Rubio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a previous study, we found that replacing the exit roller of a security checkpoint lane for a continuously circulating conveyor could potentially increase the throughput of passengers by over 28% while maintaining the TSA security-waiting time limit (Janer and Rossetti 2016). This study intends to expand this previous effort by investigating the impact of this circulating conveyor on the secondary screening related processes. Leone and Liu (2011) found that imposing a limit on the x-ray screening time, and diverting any item exceeding this limit to secondary screening, could decrease the waiting time by 43%. Our objective is to verify …

Is It We Or They? The Effect Of Identity On Collaboration And Performance In Buyer-Supplier Relationships, Siqi Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s scale-driven and technology-intensive global economy, collaboration becomes the supply chain’s core capability (Liker and Choi, 2004). A well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive advantage (Kanter, 1994). Retailers are increasingly relying on their suppliers to reduce costs, improve quality, and develop new processes and products faster than their rivals’ vendors can. On the other hand, suppliers benefit from retailers that they are able to monitor store-level demand in real time in order to ensure the top-selling items are in-stock or the accuracy and timeliness of retailer’s demand forecast. Previous literature has shown …

Well-Tuned Algorithms For The Team Orienteering Problem With Time Windows, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Kun Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) is the extension of the Orienteering Problem (OP) where each node is limited by a predefined time window during which the service has to start. The objective of the TOPTW is to maximize the total collected score by visiting a set of nodes with a limited number of paths. We propose two algorithms, Iterated Local Search and a hybridization of Simulated Annealing and Iterated Local Search (SAILS), to solve the TOPTW. As indicated in multiple research works on algorithms for the OP and its variants, determining appropriate parameter values in a statistical …

An Optimization Model For Operating Room Scheduling To Reduce Blocking Across The Perioperative Process, Amin Abedini, Wei Li, Honghan Ye

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Operating room (OR) scheduling is important. Because of increasing demand for surgical services, hospitals must provide high quality care more efficiently with limited resources. When constructing the OR schedule, it is necessary to consider the availability of downstream resources, such as intensive care unit (ICU) and post anaesthesia care unit (PACU). The unavailability of downstream resources causes blockings between every two consecutive stages. In this paper we address the master surgical schedule (MSS) problem in order to minimize blockings between two consecutive stages. First, we present a blocking minimization (BM) model for the MSS by using integer programming, based on …

Decision Models For Fast-Fashion Supply And Stocking Problems In Internet Fulfillment Warehouses, Jingran Zhang

Dissertations

Internet technology is being widely used to transform all aspects of the modern supply chain. Specifically, accelerated product flows and wide spread information sharing across the supply chain have generated new sets of decision problems. This research addresses two such problems. The first focuses on fast fashion supply chains in which inventory and price are managed in real time to maximize retail cycle revenue. The second is concerned with explosive storage policies in Internet Fulfillment Warehouses (IFW).

Fashion products are characterized by short product life cycles and market success uncertainty. An unsuccessful product will often require multiple price discounts to …

Supply Chain Performance In The Pharmaceutical Industry In Pakistan, Fakir Moiz Bokhari

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This research paper investigated the performance of the supply chain system in the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan. The study was based on the hypothesis that the adopted supply chain systems lack proper structures to deal with the challenges of the business environment in which they operate, and as such were underperforming. Therefore, the objective was to ascertain the nature and the dynamics of the SCM (Supply Chain Management) system used in the drug industry. The objectives of the research were anchored on three factors that include Supply Chain Flexibility/Agility Performance, Supply Chain Resource Performance, and Supply Chain Output Performance. These …

Innovative Non-Thermal Food Processing Technologies Used By The Food Industry In The United States, Harlin Kaur Saroya

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis discussed the non-thermal food processing technologies being used within the United States of America. The technologies discussed in this thesis are High- Pressure Processing (HHP), Pulsed Electric Field, Pulsed Light, Irradiation, Ultra Sound, Oscillating Magnetic Fields, and Cold Atmospheric Plasma. A survey was designed and conducted to study the major reasons behind a preference for a particular technology by the organization, and the limitations for not implementing specific technologies. The survey participants were management level, food scientists and, food technologists employed by food processing companies. The questionnaire consisted of ten questions related to demographics, current technology, barriers from …

Improving Resource Management In The Afghan Air Force, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Tamiko L. Ritschel

Faculty Publications

The nascent Afghan Air Force (AAF) is rapidly changing with new platforms programmed and existing platforms expanding. As US and coalition forces draw down, the transition of financial responsibility from American to Afghan processes is on the horizon.

Shortest Path Problem Under Trapezoidal Neutrosophic Information, Florentin Smarandache, Said Broumi, Mohamed Talea, Assia Bakali

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this research paper, a new approach is proposed for computing the shortest path length from source node to destination node in a neutrosophic environment. The edges of the network are assigned by trapezoidal fuzzy neutrosophic numbers. A numerical example is provided to show the performance of the proposed approach.

A Critical Path Problem Using Triangular Neutrosophic Number, Florentin Smarandache, Mai Mohamed, Yongquan Zhou, Mohamed Abdel-Baset

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is one of several related techniques for planning and managing of complicated projects in real world applications. In many situations, the data obtained for decision makers are only approximate, which gives rise of neutrosophic critical path problem. In this paper, the proposed method has been made to find the critical path in network diagram, whose activity time uncertain. The vague parameters in the network are represented by triangular neutrosophic numbers, instead of crisp numbers. At the end of paper, two illustrative examples are provided to validate the proposed approach.

Continuous Permeability Measurement During Unidirectional Vacuum Infusion Processing, David Wayne Hoagland

Theses and Dissertations

Composite materials have traditionally been used in high-end aerospace parts and low-end consumer parts. The reason for this separation in markets is the wide gap in technology between pre-preg materials processed in an autoclave and chop strand fiberglass blown into an open mold. Liquid composite molding has emerged as a bridge between inexpensive tooling and large, technical parts. Processes such as vacuum infusion have made it possible to utilize complex layups of reinforcement materials in an open mold style set-up, creating optimal conditions for composites to penetrate many new markets with rapid innovation. Flow simulation for liquid composite molding is …

Concept Of Operations And High Level Requirements Framework For The Development Of A Computational Tool For Bridge Deterioration Analysis, Gabrielle Sue Leesman

Theses and Dissertations

In developing the lifecycles of a system, maintenance and support must be considered. Associated with this portion of the life cycle are periods between needs of maintenance and the cost of each type of maintenance. Previously a few state deterioration models have been created separately to better predict these maintenance cycles for varying ages, materials, traffic flow, and environmental conditions in the deck, substructure, and superstructure of bridges. A particular analysis tool from previous studies involves the development of Markov Chain (MC) models. This paper presents a systematic process to develop MC bridge deterioration models for state/federal transportation agencies. A …

Geometry Driven Probabilistic Models For Shape Matching, Classification And Retrieval, Mark Matthew Moyou

Theses and Dissertations

Emulating human vision in a computational framework—known as computer vision—is one of the next major research areas being pursued; this emulation of vision can be viewed from a Systems Engineering perspective. The goal would be to design and develop an Intelligent Vision System built on a framework that could be tailored for specific vision applications. One of the fundamental components of vision is shape, so to design effective vision systems one needs to incorporate shape based algorithms as a core component. This dissertation progresses three facets of shape analysis algorithms: classification, retrieval and registration. Through the use of probabilistic models …

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

Diversity Team Building: Impact On Virtual Team Performance, Nina C. Magpili-Smith

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Although organizations have addressed diversity issues at the organizational-level with resulting positive employee outcomes, lack of scholarly attention to team-level interventions remain. Team-level interventions would benefit organizations more directly as they address issues directly related to task accomplishment. Since diversity may lead to negative performance results for teams, a team building intervention based on the latest empirical research was developed and tested to address the potential performance losses associated to diversity in decision-making teams. The team building intervention provides six crucial elements, namely (1) direct experience of how deep-level team diversity affect team dynamics, (2) diversity education, (3) cultivation of …

Ict Adoption And Use In Tanzania Smes, Cuthbert Msuya

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The purpose of this paper was to establish the status of ICTs adoption and use in Tanzania SMEs. Previously, it was shown that there is a shortage of comprehensive, accurate and up to date data on many aspects of the SMEs sector including the level of ICT adoption and use. This has affected government efforts aimed at development of this important sector in the economic development of the country. Results show that: (i) By year 2014, adoption of ICTs in SMEs had grown from almost non-existence in year 2004 to 80.1% computer technology use, and over 56.6% for use of …

A Low-Dimensional Vector Representation For Words Using An Extreme Learning Machine, Paula Lauren, Guangzhi Qu, Guang Bin Huang, Paul Watta, Amaury Lendasse

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Word Embeddings Are a Low-Dimensional Vector Representation of Words that Incorporates Context. Two Popular Methods Are Word2vec and Global Vectors (Glove). Word2vec is a Single-Hidden Layer Feedforward Neural Network (Slfn) that Has an Auto-Encoder Influence for Computing a Word Context Matrix using Backpropagation for Training. Glove Computes the Word Context Matrix First Then Performs Matrix Factorization on the Matrix to Arrive at Word Embeddings. Backpropagation is a Typical Training Method for SLFN's, which is Time Consuming and Requires Iterative Tuning. Extreme Learning Machines (Elm) Have the Universal Approximation Capability of SLFN's, based on a Randomly Generated Hidden Layer Weight Matrix …

Design And Manufacture Of A Waste Compactor Prototype: A Step Towards Implementing A Non-Burn Health Care Waste Disposal In Developing Countries, Tito Mwinuka

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Non-burn technology is the only safe way of handling and disposing infectious healthcare waste. It involves steam treatment of infectious waste at temperatures higher than 121 o C for a minimum of 30 minutes before disposing them just like other municipal waste. Infectious healthcare waste is normally only about 10 25% of all healthcare waste. In this paper, design, manufacturing and testing of a waste compactor for reducing waste volume to facilitate its handling is discussed. Preliminary tests show that the waste volume can be reduced to less than 10% of its original volume using the developed compactor. Waste compactors …

Space-Time Transportation System Modelling: From Traveler’S Characteristics To The Network Design Problem, Mohsen Parsafard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traditional network design problems only consider the long-term stationary travel patterns (e.g., fixed OD demand) and short-term variations of human mobility are ignored. This study aims to integrate human mobility characteristics and travel patterns into network design problems using a space-time network structure. Emerging technologies such as location-based social network platforms provide a unique opportunity for understanding human mobility patterns that can lead to advanced modeling techniques. To reach our goal, at first multimodal network design problems are investigated by considering safety and flow interactions between different modes of transport. We develop a network reconstruction method to expand a single-modal …