Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

The Root Causes Of Errant Ordered Radiology Exams, Benjamin Duman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to determine why there was a high number of errant radiology orders from requesting physicians at ATA Hospital. As the researcher, I wanted to clearly define errant orders, determine the root causes of errant orders, and further, make recommendations that would help diminish current as well as future order errors. This study answers three research questions: RQ1. Exactly what are the performance problems associated with errant orders within ATA Hospital’s radiology department that warrant further research? RQ2. What causes the increase in errant radiological orders at ATA Hospital? And, RQ3. What types of performance …

Using Electronic Faculty Course Portfolios To Showcase Classroom Practices And Student Learning, Paul Savory, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Faculty course portfolios are a valuable medium for documenting and making visible the serious intellectual work of teaching. Developing a faculty course portfolio follows the same process one uses to explore a research question. Faculty members inquire, analyze, and document their teaching practices and the resulting student learning and then make the results accessible for use, review, and assessment by one’s peers. In this article, we introduce four types of electronic course portfolios that sponsor different forms of inquiry into student learning. We highlight the major components of each type, offer advice in developing them, and share examples of each. …

Simpler Packaging, Tomiko Oden

Graphic Communication

This project explains how product packaging is become more "green", and thus more simple. Packaging needs to go beyond just simplifying materials and graphics - it needs to create a simpler process in order to reduce wasted time, energy, and resources.

Is The Test Of Senior Friendly ⁄Child Resistant Packaging Ethical?, Laura Bix, Javier De La Fuente, Kenneth D. Pimple, Eric Kou

Industrial Technology and Packaging

Research has documented the drastic reduction of unintentional poisonings of children since the introduction of child resistant (CR) packaging. However, studies also indicate that consumers report difficulty using CR packages, in part because tests which determine the ‘senior friendliness’ of CR designs that are used throughout the world disallow people with ‘overt or obvious’ disabilities from being test subjects. Our review of drug package usability suggests that the current tests of CR packaging can and should be revised to correct this problem. We use US legislation, regulation and data to exemplify these points, but the conclusions are applicable to all …

2-D And 3-D Assessment Of Cambered And Symmetric Airfoils: A Cfd Study, Tuncay Kamas

All Theses

A two dimensional and three dimensional computational study has been carried out respectively regarding aerodynamic forces affecting a symmetric airfoil, NACA0015 and a cambered airfoil, NACA2414. The negative lift (down force) and drag forces were predicted through the simulation of airflows over inverted rear-wings in different configurations namely; varying incidences i.e. angles of attack of the airfoils, two dimensional cross section of the inverted rear wings to be mounted on back of a car, and varying speeds of initial airflow.
The downforce increases as the angle of attack increases however, if an inverted rear wing is fixed on a car …

A Scanpath Comparison Of The Salient Features Of Weather Among General Aviation Pilots Based On Training And Experience, Michael Sawyer

All Dissertations

Over the last 20 years the number of annual accidents in general aviation has seen a steady decline. The annual number of fatal accidents, however, has remained relatively stable. Adverse weather is consistently cited as a leading cause of fatal accidents in general aviation; weather accidents have a fatality rate nearly four times that of other general aviation accidents. Reviews of accident data reveal that often these accidents occur when inexperienced pilots who are certified only for visual flight rules flight continue into adverse weather. The Situation Assessment Hypothesis suggests these accidents occur when pilots fail to accurately recognize weather …

Real-Time Vehicle Parameter Estimation And Adaptive Stability Control, John Limroth

All Dissertations

This dissertation presents a novel Electronic Stability Control (ESC) strategy that is capable of adapting to changing vehicle mass, tire condition and road surface conditions. The benefits of ESC are well understood with regard to assisting drivers to maintain vehicle control during extreme handling maneuvers or when extreme road conditions such as ice are encountered. However state of the art ESC strategies rely on known and invariable vehicle parameters such as vehicle mass, yaw moment of inertia and tire cornering stiffness coefficients. Such vehicle parameters may change over time, especially in the case of heavy trucks which encounter widely varying …

Human Error In Mining: A Multivariable Analysis Of Mining Accidents/Incidents In Queensland, Australia And The United States Of America Using The Human Factors Analysis And Classification System Framework, Jessica Patterson

All Dissertations

Historically, mining has been viewed as an inherently high-risk industry. Nevertheless, the introduction of new technology and a heightened concern for safety has yielded marked reductions in accident and injury rates over the last several decades. In an effort to further reduce these rates, the human factors associated with incidents/accidents need to be addressed. A modified version of the Human Factors Classification and Analysis System (HFCAS-MI) was used to analyze lost time accidents and high-potential incidents from across Queensland, Australia and fatal accidents from the United States of America (USA) to identify human factor trends and system deficiencies within mining. …

An Investigation On The Use And Flexibility Of Genetic Algorithms For Logistic Regression, Sara Yoder

All Dissertations

Social scientists and other users of large data sets often desire a model to predict the probability that some condition exists, such as the probability that a person has diabetes or that a credit card transaction will be fraudulent. In general, this can be done by data mining techniques, which allow multiple records of data composed of numerous independent variables and one dependent variable to be examined in a statistical fashion to make a predictive model. One particular technique used is logistic regression. Logistic regression forms a predictive model based on a set of independent variables by assigning coefficients to …

Adaptive Type-2 Fuzzy Maintenance Advisor For Offshore Power Systems, Zhaoxia Wang, C. S. Chang, Fan Yang, W. W. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper maintenance strategies are very desirable for minimizing the operational and maintenance costs of power systems without sacrificing reliability. Condition-based maintenance has largely replaced time-based maintenance because of the former's potential economic benefits. As offshore substations are often remotely located, they experience more adverse environments, higher failures, and therefore need more powerful analytical tools than their onshore counterpart. As reliability information collected during operation of an offshore substation can rarely avoid uncertainties, it is essential to obtain consistent estimates of reliability measures under changing environmental and operating conditions. Some attempts with type-1 fuzzy logic were made with limited success in …

An Environment That Fosters Shared Leadership And The Effects On Engineering Education: An Analysis And Proposed Structure, Brian J. Galli, Ray Luechtefeld

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Engineers must not only have design and technical skills, but they must also possess the ability to work in and lead teams, adopt and adapt to change, and act as leaders who can think in terms of the bigger picture. to develop these skills, engineering students must be actively involved in their education and trained to continually learn. Many engineering students have become accustomed to traditional forms of education, which can lead to passivity and dependence on faculty to tell them what to know and why they need to know it. Research in organizational behavior suggests a solution can lie …

Detecting The Process' 1.5 Sigma Shift: A Quantitative Study, James R. Stevenson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Process behavior can change with time. In this study an attempt was made to discover whether the Six Sigma™ claim of changes in the process mean stayed within +/- 1.5 sigma units. Several process groups were examined for a particular firm that made metal castings, machined parts, tested major components and assembled these into a vehicle that was a product sold to the customer. As the assembly progressed, deficiencies were identified and recorded. Analyses employed cumulative sum (CUSUM) sequence charts, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series analyses, minimum mean square error (MMSE) exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), Shewhart control …

Long-Term Prediction Of Time Series By Combining Direct And Mimo Strategies, Souhaib Ben Taieb, Gianluca Bontempi, Antti Sorjamaa, Amaury Lendasse

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Reliable and Accurate Prediction of Time Series over Large Future Horizons Has Become the New Frontier of the Forecasting Discipline. Current Approaches to Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Rely Either on Iterated Predictors, Direct Predictors Or, More Recently, on the Multi-Input Multi- Output (MIMO) Predictors. the Iterated Approach Suffers from the Accumulation of Errors, the Direct Strategy Makes a Conditional Independence Assumption, Which Does Not Necessarily Preserve the Stochastic Properties of the Time Series, While the MIMO Technique is Limited by the Reduced Flexibility of the Predictor. the Paper Compares the Direct and MIMO Strategies and Discusses their Respective Limitations to …

Acuta Enews November 2009, Vol. 38, No. 11

ACUTA Newsletters

ln This Issue

From ACUTA Headquarters: Announcing ACUTA Connections ............Jeri Semer, CAE, Exec. Dir

Audio Seminar: "Cutting the Telecom Power Bill"

Deadline Approaching for Institutional Excellence Awards

Tech Talk: Forecast: Cloudy, with a Slight Chance of Lost Data? .............Kevin Tanzillo, Dux PR 3

UNC to Place Wind Turbines along the Outer Banks......................... From Campus technology News Update

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

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

Washington Update Newsletter for ACUTA Members

Bring Fall Seminar to Your Desktop 6 Remember: Nominate Now for 2010-2011 Board of Directors

Send Payments Direct to ACUTA

Addressing …

Developing Processes And Criteria For External Reviews Of Scholarly Teaching, Paul Savory, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

This workshop explores theoretical questions and practical strategies for how to develop peer reviewers for faculty required to document their scholarly teaching. After reading two mini case-studies of how faculty have documented the intellectual work of their teaching, participants will engage in guided discussion about reviewing and assessing such work and about developing faculty communities equipped to do such work. Presenter(s) also will seek feedback on guidelines that they have developed for external reviewers of SOTL work.

Measurement And Analysis Of Shocks To Products Packaged In Pails In Single Parcel Ground Shipments, Sher Paul Singh, Jay Singh, Pakapol Kittipinyovath

Industrial Technology and Packaging

The objective of this study was to measure and analyse the shocks and impacts experienced by pails in the single parcel distribution environment, with and without a secondary corrugated shipper. The study was conducted in the FedEx Ground shipping environment in the USA. Instrumented 5 gal pails were shipped with and without an outer corrugated box, and with and without handling (precautionary warning) labels, from East Lansing, Michigan to destinations in California and New York. Data recorders were used to collect and analyse shock distribution data (drop heights, drop orientations and number of drops). The results showed that the precautionary …

A Model For Sustainable Humanitarian Engineering Projects, Evan A. Thomas, Bernard Amadei, Robyn Sandekian

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The engineering profession should embrace a new mission statement?to contribute to the building of a more sustainable, stable, and equitable world. Recently, engineering students and professionals in the United States have shown strong interest in directly addressing the needs of developing communities worldwide. That interest has taken the form of short-and medium-term international trips through Engineers Without Borders?USA and similar organizations. There are also several instances where this kind of outreach work has been integrated into engineering education at various US institutions such as the University of Colorado at Boulder. This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with balancing …

Acuta Enews October 2009, Vol. 38, No. 10

ACUTA Newsletters

In This lssue

Nominate Now for 2010-2011 Board of Directors

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

Tech Talk To Blog or Not to Blog....................Kevin Tanzillo, Dux PR

Nominate Now for Institutional Excellence Award

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

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

Audio Seminar: "Cutting the Telecom Power Bill"

Tweet Tweet?................. .Amy Burton, Mgr., Membership Marketing & Corp. Relations

Get Your ACUTA Logo Here

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

Financial Crisis Activity in Washington Newsletter

Welcome New Members

Leed Certification Workbook For Eco-Charrette Process Improvement At The Boeing Company, Wesley R. Fromm

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Companies across the globe are greening their portfolios. In an effort to define green construction, the United States Green Building Coalition (USGBC) has developed Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification. LEED provides a means for measurement and accountability in sustainable design. However, the volume of information to be processed when considering a building's candidacy is daunting. The LEED Certification Workbook for Eco-Charrette Process Improvement at the Boeing Company takes on this task. By utilizing observations from Boeing's Shared Services Group in Seal Beach, California, the designed solution meets the requirements for an effective gathering of stakeholders in the …

Course Portfolio - Discrete Event Simulation, Paul Savory

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

This course portfolio, written by Dr. Paul Savory, provides an overview of his Discrete Event Simulation course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It offers an overview of the course goals, a summary of the classroom activities for achieving them, and a detailed assessment of student learning. He highlights his introduction of the simul8 programming environment to his students. In addition to exploring his students’ learning, Dr. Savory also explores different approaches for documenting his teaching by including multimedia clips (video and audio), uses graphs, uses color, and incorporates images. The resulting portfolio is one that can be reviewed, shared, and …

Effect Of Manufacturer's Joint Fastening Techniques On Compression Strength Of Corrugated Fiberboard Boxes, Jay Singh, A. Attema, Eric Olsen, Keith Vorst

Industrial Technology and Packaging

A flat piece of corrugated fiberboard, which has been cut, slotted and scored, is often referred to as a box blank. For several box styles, in order to convert the box blank into a box, its two ends must be fastened together with tape, staples or adhesives such as water soluble glues. The location at which the two ends meet is known as the manufacturer's joint. There are several variations within the three fastening techniques mentioned with most corrugated box manufacturers following their own protocols for fastening the manufacturer's joints. This study explored the compression and tensile strengths of RSC …

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi service has undergone radical revamp in recent years. In particular, significant investments in communication system and GPS devices have improved quality of taxi services through better dispatches. In this paper, we propose to leverage on such infrastructure and build a service choice model that helps individual drivers in deciding whether to serve a specific taxi stand or not. We demonstrate the value of our model by applying it to a real-world scenario. We also highlight interesting new potential approaches that could significantly improve the quality of taxi services.

Sharing Mobile Multimedia Annotations To Support Inquiry-Based Learning Using Mobitop, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin-Leng Theng, Quang Minh Nguyen, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Ee Peng Lim, Chew-Hung Chang, Kalyani Chatterjea, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile devices used in educational settings are usually employed within a collaborative learning activity in which learning takes place in the form of social interactions between team members while performing a shared task. We introduce MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a geospatial digital library system which allows users to contribute and share multimedia annotations via mobile devices. A key feature of MobiTOP that is well suited for collaborative learning is that annotations are hierarchical, allowing annotations to be annotated by other users to an arbitrary depth. A group of student-teachers involved in an inquiry-based learning activity in geography …

A Job-Shop Scheduling Model Using Genetic Algorithm And Giffler Thompson Approach, Nikhil Deepak Bumb

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The major objective of this thesis topic is to study the challenging research subject of job shop scheduling with the intent of optimizing the makespan. The job - shop scheduling problem is one of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems. The main aim of scheduling is an efficient allocation of shared resources like machines, operators or both over time for competing activities.

This research focuses on developing a model for optimizing job shop scheduling problem using genetic algorithm and the Giffler Thompson (priority dispatching rule) technique. Considering different parameters, the model comes up with an appropriate way to schedule the tasks …

Application Of Systems Engineering To Rapid Prototyping For Close Air Support, John M. Colombi, Richard G. Cobb

Faculty Publications

Twenty-first century military operations have brought forth many new challenges for the Armed Forces of the United States. One such challenge is with new operating environments, where current systems are not always effective. While it is desirable to apply a systems engineering approach to best meet critical user needs, there may be a misconception that systems engineering requires a lengthy and detailed process not nimble enough for a rapid prototyping effort. This article describes how a classic systems engineering methodology was successfully tailored to the rapid development of potential material solutions to meet a critical operational need. Key observations are …

Reinforcement-Learning-Based Output-Feedback Control Of Nonstrict Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems With Application To Engine Emission Control, Peter Shih, Brian C. Kaul, Jagannathan Sarangapani, J. A. Drallmeier

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel reinforcement-learning-based output adaptive neural network (NN) controller, which is also referred to as the adaptive-critic NN controller, is developed to deliver the desired tracking performance for a class of nonlinear discrete-time systems expressed in nonstrict feedback form in the presence of bounded and unknown disturbances. The adaptive-critic NN controller consists of an observer, a critic, and two action NNs. The observer estimates the states and output, and the two action NNs provide virtual and actual control inputs to the nonlinear discrete-time system. The critic approximates a certain strategic utility function, and the action NNs minimize the strategic utility …

Energy-Efficient, Flow-Specific Medium Access Using Preamble Sampling, T. Owens Walker Iii, Murali Tummala, John Mceachen

United States Navy: Publications

Current wireless sensor network applications face challenging power constraints that demand low duty cycles. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient, flow-specific medium access scheme that is capable of achieving low duty cycles while taking advantage of the performance improvements available through a flow-specific medium access approach. The scheme is based on an adaptive sleep and wake cycle that responds to changes in both contention and non-contention traffic loads through the use of preamble sampling. A preamble sampling probability parameter is introduced to manage the trade-off between energy efficiency and network throughput and delay performance. A performance analysis is conducted …

Model For Virtual Physical Layer Communication Over Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks, Thomas Childers, Yow Thiam Poh, John Mceachen, Murali Tummala

United States Navy: Publications

A method for file transfer utilizing forward error correction (FEC) to pass traffic over deployed wireless sensor networks is studied. The entire wireless sensor network is modeled as an error-prone virtual physical link. Previous work in the area of terminal communication across the sensor network is expanded upon to include file transfer in order to provide a more capable channel and a basis for testing the performance obtained through erasure coding. The results of the FEC implementation are examined using multiple sensor network configurations. While the error correction method proved effective, larger topologies presented congestion issues due to the sensors’ …

Enabling Rfid Technology In Irish Hospitals, Khaled Ismail, Amr Arisha

Conference papers

Hospitals represent a significant part of healthcare systems and account for no less than 60% of the entire healthcare service in most of developed countries. Therefore, improving service in hospitals is an important element to the process of healthcare reform. Better use of resources, more consistent quality, and a higher service level are the keys to rationalise the huge expenditure in healthcare systems due to higher growth in demand. Even though massive spending has been directed towards hospital improvement in Ireland, services provided in Irish hospitals are ranked relatively low comparing to the other European countries. Growth of population, aging, …

Risk Assessment Model For Emergency Departments In Dublin Hospitals, Michael Thorwarth, Amr Arisha

Conference papers

The internal dynamics of emergency departments (ED) in Irish hospitals represent complex non-linear stochastic systems with an environment of uncertainty, variability and limited resources. Planning and managing such systems pose overwhelming demands. To improve operations, patient service, resource planning, and real-time reaction to unexpected events, sophisticated tools to efficiently achieve these goals must be applied.

Advanced solution techniques (e.g. simulation and optimisation) have been successfully applied in manufacturing operations to improve the delivery, cost-effectiveness and service quality. Yet, random arrival of patients, limited resources and multitasking are challenges in EDs that add more complexity to this critical area. This study …