Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Truckload Shipment Planning And Procurement, Neo Nguyen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents three issues encountered by a shipper in the context of truckload transportation. In all of the studies, we utilize optimization techniques to model and solve the problems. Each study is inspired from the real world and much of the data used in the experiments is real data or representative of real data.

The first topic is about the freight consolidation in truckload transportation. We integrate it with a purchase incentive program to increase truckload utilization and maximize profit. The second topic is about supporting decision making collaboration among departments of a manufacturer. It is a bi-objective optimization …

An Optimization Method For Estimating Joint Parameters Of The Hip And Knee, Ben Tesch

Theses and Dissertations

Biomechanics, generally speaking, concerns the application of engineeringprinciples to the study of living things. This work is concerned withhuman movement analysis, a subfield of biomechanics, where the methodsof classical mechanics are applied to human movement. This field hascontributed to the general understanding of human movement, and itstechniques are used in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Centralto the field is the process of measuring human movement. Since classicalmechanics deals with the motion of rigid bodies, and ideal measurementsystem would be able to accurately record the exact pose --- combinedposition and orientation --- of the bones. The techniques that reachthis ideal …

High Dimensional Non-Linear Optimization Of Molecular Models, Joseph C. Fogarty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Molecular models allow computer simulations to predict the microscopic properties of macroscopic systems. Molecular modeling can also provide a fully understood test system for the application of theoretical methods. The power of a model lies in the accuracy of the parameter values which govern its mathematical behavior. In this work, a new software, called ParOpt, for general high dimensional non-linear optimization will be presented. The software provides a very general framework for the optimization of a wide variety of parameter sets. The software is especially powerful when applied to the difficult task of molecular model parameter optimization. Three applications of …

Optimization Of Switch Virtual Keyboard By Using Computational Modelling, Xiao Zhang

Open Access Theses

In this thesis, I first reviewed some keyboard technologies used by people with motor difficulties, and described design elements that influence efficiency. I cast the design of a switch keyboard as an optimization problem, and arrangement of keys on such a keyboard as a Mixed Integer Programming problem. One significant variable in the MIP problem, the error rate, is related to several other variables. I treated modeling of the error rate as a parameter estimation problem, and used a data mining method. I designed HCI experiments to gather data for parameter estimation, using Bayesian logistic regression model. The empirical data …

Optimal Contract Design For Co-Development Of Companion Diagnostics, Rodney T. Tembo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the number of new drugs requiring companion diagnostics rises, more and more partnerships are formed between drug and diagnostics manufacturers to develop the necessary companion diagnostic. An increasingly significant issue is that of the optimal revenue/profit sharing or compensation schemes for such partnerships. We investigate the structure of an optimal compensation scheme under a scenario where a large pharmaceutical firm that is developing a drug intends to partner with a smaller diagnostics firm to develop a companion diagnostic test for the drug. We describe an optimal contract as one that maximizes the pharmaceutical firm's expected profits while offering enough …

Organic Fluids And Passive Cooling In A Supercritical Rankine Cycle For Power Generation From Low Grade Heat Sources, Rachana Vidhi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Low grade heat sources have a large amount of thermal energy content. Due to low temperature, the conventional power generation technologies result in lower efficiency and hence cannot be used. In order to efficiently generate power, alternate methods need to be used. In this study, a supercritical organic Rankine cycle was used for heat source temperatures varying from 125°C to 200°C. Organic refrigerants with zero ozone depletion potential and their mixtures were selected as working fluid for this study while the cooling water temperature was changed from 10-25°C. Operating pressure of the cycle has been optimized for each fluid at …

An Integral Framework For Sustainable Building Design, Bushra Asfari

Masters Theses

Selection of materials for building design is a delicate process hinged of a number of factors which can be cost or environmental related, depending on the objectives of the design. This process becomes more difficult when designers are faced with several material options for each building component. This thesis presents the design and development of a framework that enables designers understand the trade-off between cost and environmental related factors when selecting materials for building design. The framework is based on the integration of Autodesk Revit, Microsoft access, and modeling modified Harmony search multi-objective optimization tool adapted to account for material …

Methods For Quantitative Local Structure Analysis Of Crystalline Materials Employing High Performance Computing, Tara Marie Michels-Clark

Doctoral Dissertations

A fundamental computational methodology was investigated to extract quantitative local structure information from single crystal diffuse scattering data. The principles of a highly efficient, parallelizable local structure analysis using massively parallel computing resources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are demonstrated on an organic hydrocarbon compound containing stacking faults, Tris(bicyclo[2.1.1]hexeno)benzene. A probabilistic model of the stacking variations with a five layer interaction depth was developed. The final model structure motif statistics are verified using the steady state distribution of Markov matrix representing the four to five layer transitions. The computations revealed that highly parallelizable “structure-clones” could replace less computationally efficient …

Indefinite Knapsack Separable Quadratic Programming: Methods And Applications, Jaehwan Jeong

Doctoral Dissertations

Quadratic programming (QP) has received significant consideration due to an extensive list of applications. Although polynomial time algorithms for the convex case have been developed, the solution of large scale QPs is challenging due to the computer memory and speed limitations. Moreover, if the QP is nonconvex or includes integer variables, the problem is NP-hard. Therefore, no known algorithm can solve such QPs efficiently. Alternatively, row-aggregation and diagonalization techniques have been developed to solve QP by a sub-problem, knapsack separable QP (KSQP), which has a separable objective function and is constrained by a single knapsack linear constraint and box constraints. …

Poisson Distributed Individuals Control Charts With Optimal Limits, Negin Enayaty Ahangar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The conventional method used in attribute control charts is the Shewhart three sigma limits. The implicit assumption of the Normal distribution in this approach is not appropriate for skewed distributions such as Poisson, Geometric and Negative Binomial. Normal approximations perform poorly in the tail area of the these distributions. In this research, a type of attribute control chart is introduced to monitor the processes that provide count data. The economic objective of this chart is to minimize the cost of its errors which is determined by the designer. This objective is a linear function of type I and II errors. …

High Multiplicity Strip Packing, Devin Price

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

An instance of the two-dimensional strip packing problem is specified by n rectangular items, each having a width, 0 < w_n ≤ 1, and height, 0 < h_n ≤ 1. The objective is to place these items into a strip of width 1, without rotations, such that they are nonoverlapping and the total height of the resulting packing is minimized. In this thesis, we consider the version of the two-dimensional strip packing problem where there is a constant number K of distinct rectangle sizes and present an OPT + K - 1 polynomial-time approximation algorithm for it. This beats a previous algorithm …

Scheduling And Resource Allocation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yosef Alayev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In computer science and telecommunications, wireless sensor networks are an active research area. Each sensor in a wireless sensor network has some pre-defined or on demand tasks such as collecting or disseminating data. Network resources, such as broadcast channels, number of sensors, power, battery life, etc., are limited. Hence, a schedule is required to optimally allocate network resources so as to maximize some profit or minimize some cost. This thesis focuses on scheduling problems in the wireless sensor networks environment. In particular, we study three scheduling problems in the wireless sensor networks: broadcast scheduling, sensor scheduling for area monitoring, and …

Using Prior Knowledge And Learning From Experience In Estimation Of Distribution Algorithms, Mark Walter Hauschild

Dissertations

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) are stochastic optimization techniques that explore the space of potential solutions by building and sampling explicit probabilistic models of promising candidate solutions. One of the primary advantages of EDAs over many other stochastic optimization techniques is that after each run they leave behind a sequence of probabilistic models describing useful decompositions of the problem. This sequence of models can be seen as a roadmap of how the EDA solves the problem. While this roadmap holds a great deal of information about the problem, until recently this information has largely been ignored. My thesis is that …

Degradation Of Hydrazine And Monomethylhydrazine For Fuel Waste Streams Using Alpha-Ketoglutaric Acid, Carolina Franco

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alpha-ketoglutaric acid (AKGA) is an organic acid important for the metabolism of essential amino acids as well as for the transfer of cellular energy. It is a precursor of glutamic acid which is produced by the human body during the Krebs Cycle. AKGA has a specific industrial interest as it can be taken as a dietary supplement and is also widely used as a building block in chemical synthesis. Collectively termed as hydrazine (HZs), hydrazine (HZ) and monomethylhydrazine (MMH) are hypergolic fuels that do not need an ignition source to burn. Because of the particular HZs' characteristics the National Aeronautics …

Contributions To Global Optimization Using Interval Methods And Speculation, Angel Fernando Garcia Contreras

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Most electronic devices we are familiar with, such as cell phones and computers, are small and require similarly small electronic components arranged and connected in small areas. Finding the right size and arrangement of the components inside a device can be a challenge. The manufacturing process of the components limits their possible size, some components have specific needs to operate at a certain speed, and the total area of the device is also limited. In portable devices, these designs have one important objective: that the entire device consumes the minimum amount of electricity possible, so the device can keep functioning …

Performance Modeling And Optimization Techniques For Heterogeneous Computing, Supada Laosooksathit

Doctoral Dissertations

Since Graphics Processing Units (CPUs) have increasingly gained popularity amoung non-graphic and computational applications, known as General-Purpose computation on GPU (GPGPU), CPUs have been deployed in many clusters, including the world's fastest supercomputer. However, to make the most efficiency from a GPU system, one should consider both performance and reliability of the system.

This dissertation makes four major contributions. First, the two-level checkpoint/restart protocol that aims to reduce the checkpoint and recovery costs with a latency hiding strategy in a system between a CPU (Central Processing Unit) and a GPU is proposed. The experimental results and analysis reveals some benefits, …

Reformulations For Control Systems And Optimization Problems With Impulses, Jacob Blanton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies two different techniques for analyzing control systems whose dynamics include impulses, or more specifically, are measure-driven. In such systems, the state trajectories will have discontinuities corresponding to the atoms of the Borel measure driving the dynamics, and these discontinuities require further definition in order for the control system to be treated with the broad range of results available to non-impulsive systems. Both techniques considered involve a reparameterization of the system variables including state, time, and controls. The first method is that of the graph completion, which provides an explicit reparameterization of the time and state variables. The …

Biofuel Feedstock Optimization Considering Different Land Cover Scenarios And Watershed Impacts, Rodney Wayne Vance

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

With an increased demand for renewable energy production, especially the conversion of biomass to biofuels, perennial grasses are gaining interest as a renewable source of biofuel feedstocks. Identifying the trade-offs between bioenergy crop cultivation and nutrient runoff, erosion, and water requirements will be important as the demand for these crops continues to grow. The primary objective of this study is develop an integrated optimal control model that estimates the potential effects on water quality and demand and soil erosion from cultivating switchgrass and other perennial grasses instead of conventional crops at the watershed scale. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool …