Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Security Of Wireless Sensor Networks, Mauricio Tellez Nava

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

With the rapid technological advancements of sensors, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become the main technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). We investigated the security of WSNs in an environmental monitoring system with the goal to improve the overall security. We implemented a Secure Temperature Monitoring System (STMS), which served as our investigational environment. Our results revealed a security flaw found in the bootstrap loader (BSL) password used to protect firmware in the MSP430 MCU chips. We demonstrated how the BSL password could be brute forced in a matter of days. Furthermore, we illustrate how an attacker can reverse …

Working At Tds Telecom This Summer: Cad To Gis Transform And Creating Arcgis Tools By Using Python Scripts, Zhen Yuan

Sustainability and Social Justice

My summer internship at TDS telecom last for 3 months from June to August of 2015, where I learned many academic skills and techniques during this process. Except these skills I also learned a lot from this traveling to Wisconsin itself. TDS telecom is an American local telecommunication company which is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. And this internship was a paid full-time internship which can be separated into two parts: manually transferring CAD data and creating python scripts to transfer the CAD data.

Using Value-Focused Thinking For Engineered Resilient Systems, Colin A. Small

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The DoD needs their systems to be resilient in the face of an ever changing world. To increase resilience in future systems the DoD has created a program called Engineered Resilient Systems. Resilience can be broken down into two parts, mission and platform resilience. Mission resilience is the ability of a system to repel, resist, absorb, and recover from environments and threats that occur on planned missions. Platform resilience is the ability of a system platform to adapt to new missions and new threats.

The University of Arkansas department of Industrial Engineering is working for the ERS program researching resilience. …

Development Of A User Interface To Communicate With Virtual Delta Robot Using Modbus Tcp/Ip And C#, Armin Maraghehmoghaddam

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Business and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Armin Maraghehmoghaddam on May 1, 2016.

Capacity Fade Of Valve Regulated Lead Acid & Lithium Iron Phosphate Batteries Through High Rate, Pulsed Loads, Christopher Lee Williams

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Theses - Archive

Electrochemical energy storage has become more power and energy dense in recent years. Many applications demanding energy storage operate in a pulsed manner. The most common chemistries considered for use in these applications include valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) and lithium-ion (LI). In the work presented here, one of each of these types of batteries has been assembled with ~60 V open circuit potentials (OCPs) and is in the process of experimentally characterizing their capacity fade and impedance growth when they are used to drive a high current pulsed load in a 5 seconds on / 5 seconds off pulsed …

Mathematical Optimization Techniques For Managing Selective Catalytic Reduction For A Fleet Of Coal-Fired Power Plants, Antonio Alejandro Alanis Pena

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Major commercial electricity generation is done by burning fossil fuels out of which coal-fired power plants produce a substantial quantity of electricity worldwide. The United States has large reserves of coal, and it is cheaply available, making it a good choice for the generation of electricity on a large scale. However, one major problem associated with using coal for combustion is that it produces a group of pollutants known as nitrogen oxides (NOx). NOx are strong oxidizers and contribute to ozone formation and respiratory illness. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the quantity of NOx emitted to the atmosphere in …

Discriminating Parkinson's Disease Using Functional Connectivity And Brain Network Analysis, Daniel Gellerup

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Theses - Archive

In this study, we explored the use of functional connectivity patterns in fMRI data to classify subjects on the basis of Parkinson's disease. We explore various brain networks and features. We partition our fMRI data in 5 filtered frequency ranges. We use a proximal support vector machine paired with a minimum-redundancy and maximum-relevance feature selection method on each frequency range. We use a majority voting ensemble classification method on the results of the proximal support vector machine classification results. We use a double 5-fold cross validation scheme for model validation. We achieve 84% accuracy 74% sensitivity, and 93% specificity. Our …

Operational Decision Making For Medical Clinics Through The Use Of Simulation And Multi-Attribute Utility Theory., Bo Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Currently, health care is a large industry that concerns everyone. Outpatient health care is an important part of the American health care system and is one of the strongest growth areas in the health care system. Many people pay attention to how to keep basic health care available to as many people as possible. A large health care system is usually evaluated by many performance measures. For example, the managers of a medical clinic are concerned about increasing staff utilization; both managers and patients are concerned about patient waiting time. In this dissertation, we study decision making for clinics in …

Statistical Learning Tools With Food Science, Jessica C. Hacker

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The food science discipline has many issues requiring research within academia in order to protect the food that gets distributed from industry. The team within the Center for Food Safety at the University of Arkansas’ Division of Agriculture has been studying the gastrointestinal microbial community in broiler chickens in order to control pathogenic bacteria and improve gut health within the chickens to promote a healthy adult microbiota. This has many positive effects on the quality of the chickens. The team performs a standard method of analysis on every experiment run within a software called QIIME to determine if a treatment …

Developing A Risk Analysis Model To Improve Study Abroad Awareness, Tyler Spain

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

As international education opportunities increase in popularity among U.S. college students (McMurtrie, 2007), it is becoming more and more necessary for study abroad organizations to be aware of the risks students face as they travel abroad. While some international cities are riskier than others, it can be difficult to distinguish between cities which truly carry a high degree of risk for visiting students, and which cities are only perceived to be risky based on various personal misconceptions. The University of Arkansas Office of Study Abroad & International Exchange currently lacks a way to quantifiably analyze the risk of study abroad …

A System Dynamics Approach Applied To Wind Energy System Sustainability, Jenny Maria Tejeda Carlos

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Sustainability of energy systems is one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Access to energy is critical to ensure economic and social development of a nation (UNDP et al., 2000); however, extraction, production and consumption of energy resources are also associated with high volumes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, environmental damage and, in some cases, adverse health effects in communities where energy facilities are located. Renewable energy sources have been considered as an alternative to traditional energy sources to meet energy demand in a sustainable manner (Del Rio and Burguillo, 2008). Wind energy is considered to be one …

Dynamic Constraint Optimal Selection Techniques For Linear Programming, Alireza Noroziroshan

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Linear programming has been studied for over 60 years. It has been considered as one of the most valuable optimization tool for many industrial problems. The simplex algorithm remains the predominant approach to solving linear programming problems. Here we use the simplex method in an active-set frame work to improve it substantially. In general an active-set method obtains solutions by adding one or more problem constraints at a time to solve smaller problems iteratively. In particular, some of these methods have proven to perform significantly faster than the simplex method. In this dissertation we proposed an e?cient constraint selection metric …

Developing A Logistics Risk Assessment Tool, Daniel C. Fritsche

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Economies around the world have thrived in the wake of the development and keen understanding of effective supply chain management practices. As a result, organizations have become more dependent on other organizations to move their products and services to completion due to complex sourcing and shipping arrangements that have precipitated from the formation of sophisticated supply chains. A supply chain is in general a flow of products or services. When this flow is disrupted or halted, disastrous consequences can ensue. In the worst cases, such as with a disaster relief organization like the American Red Cross, disruptions in supply chains …

Engineered Resilient Systems Model Applied To Network Design, Zephan W. Wade

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) is a Department of Defense (DoD) program focusing on the effective and efficient design and development of resilient complex engineered systems throughout their lifecycle. There is growing literature with qualitative definitions of resilience and quantitative models for systems, but these focus typically on systems with one performance measure. In application, many systems have multiple functions and multiple performance measures. This research uses a quantitative resilience framework for ERS that includes system design options, reliability, external threats, vulnerabilities, responses, and consequences assessed on multiple system performance measures. This paper applies the ERS framework to designing resilient networks.

Markov-Based Ranking Methods, Baback Vaziri

Open Access Dissertations

Ranking methods are an essential tool to help make decisions. This dissertation document examines different aspects of the theory and application of pairwise comparison ranking methods, specifically those that use Markov chains. First, a new method is developed to solve a traditional recruiting problem, and is shown to improve the predictive power of its ranking. Next, modifications are made to an existing method that theoretically improves the reliability, while maintaining the rank integrity. Last, a framework is developed that defines a fair and comprehensive ranking method, and several popular methods are evaluated in their ability to adhere to the said …

Baseball Portfolio Optimization, Keegan Henderson

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Portfolio optimization techniques are methods used to determine the best set of stocks in which to invest. Mean-variance optimization, one method of portfolio optimization, attempts to find the set of portfolios that have the maximum expected return at each level of risk (Jorion, 1992). Another technique, Monte Carlo simulation, uses random number generation to create a probability distribution of potential returns (Kwak & Ingall, 2007). This can be used to determine the risk of potential investments not returning a certain desired amount (Thompson & McLeod, 2009). Though traditionally used in the world of finance, these tools can also be utilized …

Use Of Response Surfaces In The Design Of A Simple Step Stress Accelerated Test Plan, Alexander H. Wong

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In designing accelerated testing plans, cost is a factor that is missing in much of the literature. This paper explicits considers cost by developing an optimization model with the objective to minimize costs for a simple step stress accelerated test plan. Two methodologies are employed. One is an optimization approach in which an attempt is made to quantify the behavior of a series-parallel hardware system over all stages of testing using a response surface, and then an optimization model is used to determine the settings for stresses and failure mode modifications for all stages of testing prior to the start …

A Tabu Search, Augment-Merge Heuristic To Solve The Stochastic Location Arc Routing Problem, Tiffany L. Yang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The location arc routing problem (LARP) is a network optimization problem combining strategic facility location decisions and tactical or operational vehicle routing decisions for customer demand located on arcs of a network. The LARP seeks to locate facilities, or depots, and create vehicle delivery routes to minimize costs. The total cost is comprised of three components: fixed facility locations costs, fixed route creation (or vehicle acquisition) costs, and variable arc traversal costs. The applications of the LARP are varied and often include public services such as mail delivery, garbage collection, and street sweeping. In all of these applications, the magnitude …

Production And Inventory Control In Complex Production Systems Using Approximate Dynamic Programming., Han Wu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Production systems focus not only on providing enough product to supply the market, but also on delivering the right product at the right price, while lowering the cost during the production process. The dynamics and uncertainties of modern production systems and the requirements of fast response often make its design and operation very complex. Thus, analytical models, such as those involving the use of dynamic programming, may fail to generate an optimal control policy for modern production systems. Modern production systems are often in possession of the features that allow them to produce various types of product through multiple working …

Green Logistic Network Design : Intermodal Transportation Planning And Vehicle Routing Problems., Xiaoren Duan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to earth's climate change and global warming, environmental consideration in the design of logistic systems is accelerating in recent years. In this research we aim to design an efficient and environmentally friendly logistical system to satisfy both government and carriers. In particular, we considered three problems in this dissertation: intermodal network design, deterministic green vehicle routing problem and stochastic green vehicle routing problem. The first problem aims to design an economic and efficient intermodal network including three transportation modes: railway, highway and inland waterway. The intent of this problem is to increase the utilization percentage of waterway system in …

The Agricultural Growth And Malting Production Of Barley Grains In Northeast Tennessee And Southwest Virginia, Mark Evans Patton Mr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the history and production processes of beer and examines the components that contribute to its brewing. The narrative will provide a timeline of the processes that are required to create the product of beer beginning with the agricultural products and following the brewing processes that result in beer as the finished product. I will also examine the business of agriculture and grain processing and will provide some historical perspectives of grain, beer, and malting. I will also consider whether the growing, processing, and malting of grains in the East Tennessee and Southwest …

A Comparative Usability Study Of Web-Based Personal Health Records., Alexandra Doggett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research on Personal Health Records (PHRs) has focused on applications that are “tethered” to a specific Electronic Health Record (EHR). However, this is a gap in research on the usability of unaffiliated, independent PHRs, as well as a gap in research on college-aged PHR users. Based on this gap in the literature, a single factor, within-subject experiment was conducted using 18 participants from the University of Louisville to determine if one PHR had superior usability and design. The testing included the completion of six tasks in three different PHRs. Dependent variables included task time, mouse movement, mouse clicks, keystrokes, …

The Electropolishing Of Electron Beam Melting, Additively Manufactured Ti6al4v Titanium : Relevance, Process Parameters And Surface Finish., Austin Lassell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the next frontier in manufacturing technology, but with this new frontier comes new challenges in post processing techniques. In an attempt to gain further knowledge of the post processing of metal AM components, the Electropolishing (EP) of Electron Beam Melting (EBM), Additively Manufactured Ti- 6Al-4V alloy parts is investigated in the following work. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is predominant in a number of industries, with electronics and consumer goods, aerospace, automotive and medical constituting the majority of AM sales. For most of these, Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) AM technology is of great interest given the ability of …

Mental Workload Measurement For Competitive Video Games., Jamal Mcfarland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore different ways to measure mental workload for competitive video games using two different techniques: heart rate variability (HRV) and the NASA Task Load Index (TLX). eSports is a rising form of a competitive sport as well as a source of entertainment for people all over the world. I write this in hopes to find efficient and verified ways to estimate mental workload. I also hope this work can pioneer the expansion of literature for the competitive gaming scene.

The study design is a single factor, within-subject design. The single factor was Game …

Simultaneous Optimization And Sampling Of Agent Trajectories Over A Network, Hala Mostafa, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the problem of optimizing the trajectories of agents moving over a network given their preferences over which nodes to visit subject to operational constraints on the network. In our running example, a theme park manager optimizes which attractions to include in a day-pass to maximize the pass’s appeal to visitors while keeping operational costs within budget. The first challenge in this combinatorial optimization problem is that it involves quantities (expected visit frequencies of each attraction) that cannot be expressed analytically, for which we use the Sample Average Approximation. The second challenge is that while sampling is typically done …

Approximate Inference Using Dc Programming For Collective Graphical Models, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau, Daniel Sheldon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collective graphical models (CGMs) provide a framework for reasoning about a population of independent and identically distributed individuals when only noisy and aggregate observations are given. Previous approaches for inference in CGMs work on a junction-tree representation, thereby highly limiting their scalability. To remedy this, we show how the Bethe entropy approximation naturally arises for the inference problem in CGMs. We reformulate the resulting optimization problem as a difference-of-convex functions program that can capture different types of CGM noise models. Using the concave-convex procedure, we then develop a scalable message-passing algorithm. Empirically, our approach is highly scalable and accurate for …

Reinforcement Learning Framework For Modeling Spatial Sequential Decisions Under Uncertainty: (Extended Abstract), Truc Viet Le, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the problem of trajectory prediction, where a trajectory is an ordered sequence of location visits and corresponding timestamps. The problem arises when an agent makes sequential decisions to visit a set of spatial locations of interest. Each location bears a stochastic utility and the agent has a limited budget to spend. Given the agent's observed partial trajectory, our goal is to predict the remaining trajectory. We propose a solution framework to the problem considering both the uncertainty of utility and the budget constraint. We use reinforcement learning (RL) to model the underlying decision processes and inverse RL to …

Robust Influence Maximization, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence Maximization is the problem of finding a fixed size set of nodes, which will maximize the expected number of influenced nodes in a social network. The number of influenced nodes is dependent on the influence strength of edges that can be very noisy. The noise in the influence strengths can be modeled using a random noise or adversarial noise model. It has been shown that all random processes that independently affect edges of the graph can be absorbed into the activation probabilities themselves and hence random noise can be captured within the independent cascade model. On the other hand, …

Optimization Of Rfid System Coverage In A Manufacturing Environment, Scott D. Malatesta

Master's Theses

This paper compiles existing ideas, theories, and experiments across multiple disciplines to provide guidance for a company looking to implement an optimal RFID system in their production facility. The desire is to maximize the information received by the system while minimizing the cost. Four potential layouts of RFID antennas, two with overlapping antenna coverage and two with non-overlapping layouts, are first analyzed to understand the special coverage and the number of antennas required. The value of information is then quantified to determine whether higher coverage layouts are worth the additional costs associated with the higher number of antennas required. It …

Risk Estimation Toward A Natural History Model For Low Grade Glioma Patients, Anh Thi Hoang Pham

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Glioma is a common type of primary brain tumor that represents 28% of all brain tumors and 80% of malignant tumors. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), gliomas account for 53%, 35% and 29% of all brain tumors (68%, 74% and 81% of malignant brain tumors) among children (aged 0-14), teenagers (aged 15-19) and young adults, respectively. Gliomas are often diagnosed through radiological imaging and histopathology. There are two main groups of gliomas following World Health Organization’s classification: Low grade gliomas (LGG), or grade I and II gliomas; and high grade gliomas …