While there are many ways to evaluate a user interface design, the user's mental workload and situation awareness (SA) are particularly important considerations in the supervisory control of safety-critical systems. Typically, operators of these systems must monitor high-volume, time-sensitive status information. Interface design for this domain can be challenging and...
Behavioral modeling is increasingly an imperative component of system design as the systems under construction become more and more complex. Without behavioral modeling available to the modern designer, design and verification of these systems would be much more laborious. Additionally, with the increasing computational power of today's modeling and simulation...
Trends in wireless networks are increasingly pointing towards a future with multi-hop
networks deployed in multi-channel environments. In this thesis, we present the design
for iMAC—a protocol targeted at medium access control in such environments. iMAC
uses control packets on a common control channel to faciliate a three-way handshake
between...
Production planning in fish processing is heavily dependent on the raw material supply. Because of the uncertainties associated with the quantity of catch and its composition, planning for production is a difficult task. Until recently the fish processing plants in Iceland also had to accept the entire loads of fishing...
For many decades, production and assembly lines have played an important role in industrial manufacturing systems. In particular, they have proved to be an efficient way to organize the production of high volume products in many industries. In their effort to improve the efficiency of production lines, researchers encountered two...
To be competitive in domestic and international markets, manufacturing management is routinely faced with the decision to automate or replace existing production facilities with advanced manufacturing technologies. Installation of advanced manufacturing technologies requires high capital investment, and there is much evidence to suggest that automation for automation's sake has proven...
Uninhabited aerial vehicles, also called UAVs are currently controller by a combination of a human pilot at a remote location, and autopilot systems similar to those found on commercial aircraft. As UAVs transition from remote piloting to fully autonomous operation, control laws must be developed for the tasks to be...
This dissertation addresses two fundamental problems in computer vision—namely,
multitarget tracking and event recognition in videos. These problems are challenging
because uncertainty may arise from a host of sources, including motion blur,
occlusions, and dynamic cluttered backgrounds. We show that these challenges can be
successfully addressed by using a multiscale,...
The objective of this research was to provide a definitive description of the processes within the physician-patient encounter in an office setting. This description would take the form of a formal process model of the encounter in a provider's office setting, as this represents the most common situation during patient...
This work presents a residential load simulation framework that allows the user to test the effectiveness of peak reduction, peak shifting, and valley filling load management strategies on a representative residential load prior to physical smart sensor and load control deployment. The simulation methodology uses household occupancy, appliance time-of-use, and...