Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Operational Squadron Scheduling, Khaled A. Almannaei

Theses and Dissertations

The 28th Operational Weather Squadron (28th OWS) is responsible for producing and disseminating mission planning and execution weather analyses and forecasts. The squadron must prepare schedules that meet the needs of their mission while dealing with real-world constraints such as time windows, task priorities, and intermittent recurring missions. The 28th OWS's manning consists of active duty, deployed in-place, reserve, civilian and contract personnel. In this research, a scheduling model and algorithm are provided as an approach to crew scheduling for the 28th Operational Weather Squadron. Scheduling in the 28th OWS is complex and can be time consuming. This model will …

Modular Crates – A Holistic Design Approach For Optimizing Cube Size In Industrial Packaging, Marshal Louie, Kumar B

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Global market is a field where all industries strive to provide personalized product for every customer demand in order to compete with their competitors in the business battlefield. Product personalization varies with customer to customer which increases the product variety. When the product size variability is vast, producing packages for every individual product is not only difficult but also increases the design time, production time, total manufacturing cost and inventory cost. For the present scenario, Industrial packages does not opt customizability for variable product sizes. Customized package for personalized product is achievable only by redesigning the existing distribution package with …

Generating Strong Diversity Of Opinions: Agent Models Of Continuous Opinion Dynamics, Christopher W. Weimer

Theses and Dissertations

Opinion dynamics is the study of how opinions in a group of individuals change over time. A goal of opinion dynamics modelers has long been to find a social science-based model that generates strong diversity -- smooth, stable, possibly multi-modal distributions of opinions. This research lays the foundations for and develops such a model. First, a taxonomy is developed to precisely describe agent schedules in an opinion dynamics model. The importance of scheduling is shown with applications to generalized forms of two models. Next, the meta-contrast influence field (MIF) model is defined. It is rooted in self-categorization theory and improves …

Origami-Based Deployable Ballistic Barrier, Kenny Seymour, Dakota Burrow, Alex Avila, Terri Bateman, David C. Morgan, Spencer P. Magleby, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

This paper demonstrates how recent developments in origami crease pattern adaptation, surrogate folds, and thickness accommodation techniques enabled development of an origami-based deployable ballistic barrier. The barrier crease pattern was employed using the membrane-fold technique for surrogate folds and to assist in thickness accommodation. A proof-of-concept barrier was fabricated and tested, demonstrating ballistic resistance, a large deployment ratio, and rapid deployment times.

Methods To Support The Project Selection Problem With Non-Linear Portfolio Objectives, Time Sensitive Objectives, Time Sensitive Resource Constraints, And Modeling Inadequacies, Neil C. Ranly

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force relies upon information production activities to gain insight regarding uncertainties affecting important system configuration and in-mission task execution decisions. Constrained resources that prevent the fulfillment of every information production request, multiple information requestors holding different temporal-sensitive objectives, non-constant marginal value preferences, and information-product aging factors that affect the value-of-information complicate the management of these activities. This dissertation reviews project selection research related to these issues and presents novel methods to address these complications. Quantitative experimentation results demonstrate these methods’ significance.

The Military Inventory Routing Problem: Utilizing Heuristics Within A Least Squares Temporal Differences Algorithm To Solve A Multiclass Stochastic Inventory Routing Problem With Vehicle Loss, Ethan L. Salgado

Theses and Dissertations

Military commanders currently resupply forward operating bases (FOBs) from a central location within an area of operations mainly via convoy operations in a way that closely resembles vendor managed inventory practices. Commanders must decide when and how much inventory to distribute throughout their area of operations while minimizing soldier risk. Technology currently exists that makes utilizing unmanned cargo aerial vehicles (CUAVs) for resupply an attractive alternative due to the dangers of utilizing convoy operations. Enemy actions in wartime environments pose a significant risk to a CUAV's ability to safely deliver supplies to a FOB. We develop a Markov decision process …

Multi-Level Multi-Objective Programming And Optimization For Integrated Air Defense System Disruption, Aaron M. Lessin

Theses and Dissertations

The U.S. military's ability to project military force is being challenged. This research develops and demonstrates the application of three respective sensor location, relocation, and network intrusion models to provide the mathematical basis for the strategic engagement of emerging technologically advanced, highly-mobile, Integrated Air Defense Systems. First, we propose a bilevel mathematical programming model for locating a heterogeneous set of sensors to maximize the minimum exposure of an intruder's penetration path through a defended region. Next, we formulate a multi-objective, bilevel optimization model to relocate surviving sensors to maximize an intruder's minimal expected exposure to traverse a defended border region, …

Identifying Criteria To Predict Army Rifle Marksmanship Proficiency, Katlin Makina Anglin

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The United States Army requires each Soldier to develop marksmanship proficiency in an effort to achieve combat readiness. Soldiers currently develop marksmanship proficiency through Basic Rifle Marksmanship (BRM) training, but significant skill deficiencies are apparent at the end of training. These skill deficiencies remain throughout training because instructors rarely assess Soldiers objectively before the final qualification, reducing the opportunity for instructors to diagnose skill deficiencies until it is too late. Therefore, the goal of the current research is to identify individual differences and sensor-based performance measures for inclusion in a formative assessment during BRM training. The results of the current …

Secondary Frequency Stochastic Optimal Control In Independent Microgrids With Virtual Synchronous Generator-Controlled Energy Storage Systems, Ting Yang, Yajian Zhang, Zhaoxia Wang, Haibo Pen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing proportion of renewable energy in microgrids (MGs), its stochastic fluctuation of output power has posed challenges to system safety and operation, especially frequency stability. Virtual synchronous generator (VSG) technology, as one effectivemethod, was used to smoothen frequency fluctuation and improve the system's dynamic performance,which can simulate the inertia and damping of the traditional synchronous generator. This study outlines the integration of VSG-controlled energy storage systems (ESSs) and traditional synchronous generators so they jointly participate in secondary frequency regulation in an independent MG. Firstly, a new uncertain state-space model for secondary frequency control is established, considering the measurement …

Acuta Enews June 2009, Vol 38, No. 6

ACUTA Newsletters

In This Issue

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

Tech Talk: How Safe Do You Feet?................Kevin Tanzilto, Dux PR

"Financial Crisis Activity in Washington" Newsletter

ACUTA Web Seminar: Designing & Deploying 802.11n on a College Campus

Board Report...................... George Denbow, Univ. of Texas-Austin, ACUTA Secretary/Treasurer

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

lnfo Links ............. Randy Hayes, univ. of Northern lowa

Renewed Your Membership?

Web Page Lists Free Audio & Web Seminars from Vendors

ACUTA Corporate Liaison Committee Provides Website

Are You Linked ln? Do You Tweet?

The Value of Unified Communications .............Gary Audin, Delphi, …

Presenting To Senior Decision Makers: Clear, Concise & Complete, Kirk Michealson

Operations Management Presentations

Your manager just assigned you to lead a new project for your Vice President. You have many questions! What are the details of the project? What does the VP want to see in briefings? Does the VP have an advocate for pre-briefs? What information is important to include in the presentation? How detailed should the information be? How should the information be presented? Are there any best practices in developing presentations? In this webinar, you will learn strategies for sharing important information with key stakeholders in your career – and how to actually get them to listen!

Analysis Of Shanghai Aviation Hub Logistics Competitiveness, Tuo Chen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Rest Period On Fatigue Using Electromyography During Manual Lifting, Nandakumar Prabhakar

LSU Master's Theses

Manual materials handing (MMH) is the main cause and concern for injuries in the working population which lead to musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). MSDs significantly contribute to the cost of workers’ compensation and loss of productivity, thus impacting economy of the United States. MSDs are mainly caused due to over exertion and fatigue experienced by workers involved in manual materials handling. In addition to over-exertion and fatigue, lack of short and frequent rest intervals between tasks contributes to the risk of MSDs. The objective of this research was to study the effect of rest period on muscle fatigue using electromyography (EMG) …

Robust Engineering Of Dynamic Structures In Complex Networks, Walter Botongo Bomela

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Populations of nearly identical dynamical systems are ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems, in which each unit plays a crucial role in determining the functioning of the ensemble. Robust and optimal control of such large collections of dynamical units remains a grand challenge, especially, when these units interact and form a complex network. Motivated by compelling practical problems in power systems, neural engineering and quantum control, where individual units often have to work in tandem to achieve a desired dynamic behavior, e.g., maintaining synchronization of generators in a power grid or conveying information in a neuronal network; in this dissertation, …

Effects Of Lighting And Noise On Performance And Situation Awareness In An Air Traffic Control Task, Saralee Pruksaritanon, Andrew Dattel Ph.D., Steven Hampton Ed.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

Work environment influences an individual’s performance and situation awareness (SA). This study aims to investigate the effects of lighting and noise levels on performance and situation awareness in an air traffic control (ATC) task. These two variables are important in the domain of ATC because the task requires an individual to receive and process information both visually and auditorily. The results are useful for designing air traffic control rooms, which are set differently among different air navigation service providers. The subjects are 16 students majoring in Air Traffic Management (ATM) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) – Daytona Beach, FL. The …

Robust Allocation Of Funds For Nonstructural Flood Risk Mitigation In Coastal Louisiana, Simón Gómez Sierra, David R. Johnson, Matthew P. Shisler, Zachariah T. Richardson

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Coastal Louisiana is a critical economic, ecological and cultural asset, acting as a major hub for waterborne commerce, fisheries, and the petrochemical industry, and also as one of the world’s unique wetlands. Unfortunately, this rich environment is in great danger from the threat of hurricanes and storm surge flooding. Direct economic losses are estimated to average $2.7 billion per year under current conditions, and this could increase to $12 billion a year, or more, within 50 years if nothing is done. To prevent this catastrophe, Louisiana has developed a Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, which plans to spend …

Efvs Effects On Pilot Performance, Michael Campbell, Nsikak Udo-Imeh, Steven J. Landry

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Flight tests have been conducted at Purdue University using a computer-based flying simulator in an attempt to determine and measure the effects of Enhanced Flight Vision Systems (EFVS) on the performance of pilots during landing. Knowledge of these effects could help guide future design and implementation of EFVS in modern commercial aircraft, and further increase pilots’ ability to control the aircraft in low-visibility conditions. The problem that has faced researchers in the past has revolved around the difficulty in interpreting the data which is generated by these tests. The difficulty in making a generalized conclusion based on the large amount …

Space Architecture Assessment Using System-Of-Systems Methodologies, Liam Durbin, Cesare Guariniello, Daniel Delaurentis

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

As technologies in the space exploration community are further developed, mission complexity and the associated risks have become greater. Dozens of complicated system interactions may result in unexpected, potentially dangerous emergent behaviors. Early efforts are underway by NASA to map potential system architectures (collections of systems which fulfill design requirements) for future human space exploration missions. However, current mission complexity requires the determination of emergent behaviors, as well as time requirements, and safety levels of complicated space exploration architectures, which current analysis methods in use cannot address. To that end, a newer technique has been developed—System Operability Dependency Analysis (SODA). …

Economic Model Predictive Control Design Via Nonlinear Model Identification, Laura Giuliani, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Increasing pushes toward next-generation/smart manufacturing motivate the development of economic model predictive control (EMPC) designs which can be practically deployed. For EMPC, the constraints, objective function, and accuracy of the state predictions would benefit from process models that describe the process physics. However, obtaining first- principles models of chemical process systems can be time-consuming or challenging such that it is preferable to develop physics-based process models automatically from process operating data. In this work, we take initial steps in this direction by suggesting that because experiments that are used to characterize first-principles models often target specific types of data, an …

Proposing A Sparse Weighted Directed Network Construction Method And A Novel Mutual-Information Based Sparse Feature Selection Algorithm For Multivariate Time-Series Analysis And Its Application In Medical Diagnostic Problems, Rahilsadat Hosseini

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The main purpose of this study is feature engineering/learning from multivariate (MV) time-series to achieve a more interpretable model by dimension reduction. This aim is fulfilled in 2 main parts. In part 1, we proposed a network estimation approach namely SWDN which stands for sparse weighted directed network. In this approach, the directed subgraph of the underlying network was detected by maximum spanning tree (MST) algorithm that created a null model of connections with maximum inter-dependence (pairwise correlation or mutual information) forming the backbone structure of the MV time-series as an empirical reference. The edge weights were estimated using the …

Supervised Sparse Learning With Applications In Bioinformatics, Kin Ming Puk

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

In machine learning and mathematical optimization, sparse learning is the use of mathematical norms such as L1-norm, group norm and L21-norm in order to seek a trade-off between the goodness-of-fit measure and sparsity of the result. Sparsity of result leads to a parsimonious learning model - in other words, only few features from the data matrix are required to build the learning model and for further interpretation. The motivations of employing sparse learning in bioinformatics are two-fold: firstly, a parsimonious learning model enhances the explanatory power; and secondly, a parsimonious model generally allows better prediction and generalizes better to new …

Adjusting For Time Varying Confounding In Adaptive Interdisciplinary Pain Management Program, Nilabh Ohol

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Interdisciplinary pain management combines multiple disciplines of professionals to understand the biological and psychosocial factors causing a patient's pain and to determine the best treatments among many to administer. The Eugene McDermott Center of Pain at University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas runs a two stage adaptive interdisciplinary pain management program with the aim to improve current and future pain outcomes. The sequential treatment regime for the pain and the observational nature of data yield to time varying confounding and a form of endogeneity. This yields biased estimates of the treatment effects which is undesirable. Our adaptive …

Feature-Based Discretization Of A Turbine Disk For Probabilistic Risk Assessment, Michael Thomas, Jace Carter, Lloyd Matson, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

There is an economic need to extend the useful life of jet engine rotors. Retirement-for-Cause (RFC) is a lifing method that allows for the continued operation of components passed traditional life limits. Under RFC, an extension of damage tolerance, components are deemed safe for a further service interval using non-destructive inspections (NDI) for crack like defe cts. As components are kept in-service beyond their designed service life it is essential that the probability of failure (POF), or risk, of continued service is known. Under current FAA rotor design certification practices the component POF is analyzed using a probabilistic framework focused …

Tk-Mars: An Efficient Approach For Deterministic And Stochastic Black-Box Optimization, Hadis Anahideh

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Surrogate optimization approaches for black-box functions focus on approximating the underlying function, using metamodeling techniques, in order to optimize computationally expensive simulation models. Historically, surrogate optimization models have been validated by deterministic (noiseless) functions with every variable being significant. As a result, many surrogate optimization models used interpolating surrogates. However, many real world experiments often times include parameters that are insignificant and uncertainties associated with the black-box function. Using traditional interpolating surrogate optimization methods can lead to surrogate models with unnecessary predictors and sensitivity to noise. Consequently, a surrogate model with flexible, non-interpolating, and parsimonious characteristics is required to overcome …

Evaluation Criteria For Selecting Nosql Databases In A Single Box Environment, Ryan D. Engle, Brent T. Langhals, Michael R. Grimaila, Douglas D. Hodson

Faculty Publications

In recent years, NoSQL database systems have become increasingly popular, especially for big data, commercial applications. These systems were designed to overcome the scaling and flexibility limitations plaguing traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs). Given NoSQL database systems have been typically implemented in large-scale distributed environments serving large numbers of simultaneous users across potentially thousands of geographically separated devices, little consideration has been given to evaluating their value within single-box environments. It is postulated some of the inherent traits of each NoSQL database type may be useful, perhaps even preferable, regardless of scale. Thus, this paper proposes criteria conceived to …

Modeling The Innovation Ecosystem And Development Of A Dynamic Innovation Index, Henriette Schoen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The topic of innovation currently generates a tremendous amount of interest around the world. Innovation is considered an essential part of the solution to creating more jobs and improving the socio-economic conditions of many countries around the globe. Innovation comes about through the existence of many interrelated solutions to socio-economic problems in an extensively interconnected network, which create value for each other. Such a complex creativity and innovation value-creating network is here called an Innovation Ecosystem (IE). The main objective of this dissertation research is to improve the current understanding of the IE by developing a simulation model that uses …

Methods For Online Feature Selection For Classification Problems, Alaleh Razmjoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online learning is a growing branch of machine learning which allows all traditional data mining techniques to be applied on an online stream of data in real-time. In this dissertation, we present three efficient algorithms for feature ranking in online classification problems. Each of the methods are tailored to work well with different types of classification tasks and have different advantages. The reason for this variety of algorithms is that like other machine learning solutions, there is usually no algorithm which works well for all types of tasks. The first method, is an online sensitivity based feature ranking (SFR) which …

Achieving Universal Liaisons And Healthcare Contact Center Centralization Through The Use Of Decision Support Tools, Jared S. Fiacco

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Healthcare contact centers often experience a large volume of calls and traditional standardized guidelines can be difficult to follow during an active call. While more common workflows can be memorized, they change often because Healthcare is a dynamic field. Constant updates to workflows, an abundance of different processes and provider preferences, and a fast paced environment can lead Customer Service Liaisons (CSLs) to handle patient inquiries incorrectly. Active decision support tools enable a CSL to follow an updated workflow without needing to navigate through complex guidelines and emails. This research shows that contact center centralization through the use of decision …

Design And Qualification Of A Robust Polyurethane Based Conformal Coating Process For Sodimms, Rajat Dhiman

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Conformal coatings protect printed circuit board assemblies, including the electronic components that the assemblies are populated with. A variety of materials and application methods can be used to conformally coat assemblies. The process setup is crucial to repeatable process reliability. The manual spray based conformal coating is widely used. This method of application was selected due to its compatibility, affordability, and efficiency with the required application. Polyurethanes, one of the families of conformal coatings, provide resistance against abrasion, heat, and chemicals while reducing the risk of tin whiskers. In order to minimize the need for rework and create an efficient, …

Solving School Bus Routing And Student Assignment Problems With Heuristic And Column Generation Approach., Di Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we solve a school bus routing problem of transporting students including special education (handicapped) students and assigning them in Oldham county education district. The main contribution of this research is that we consider special education students (Type-2) along with other students (Type-1) and design a comprehensive school bus schedule to transport both kinds of students at the same time. Also, a student assignment mathematical model is presented to optimize the number of bus stops in use as well as one important measure of service quality, the total student walking distance. Comparing to the classic clustering methods, heuristic …