Ecoroofs have become more prominent in recent years. However, there is currently no enforceable standard or building code for the design and construction of ecoroofs across the United States (Kraupa, 2014). Further research is needed to determine how ecoroofs respond to roof motion and to develop an appropriate design standard.The...
In the past two decades, the advancement in data collection and storage have led to the accumulation of complex datasets. Consequently, various industries have sought data-driven solutions to predict and detect anomalies. Temporal patterns have emerged as potential features in prediction models that could improve the performance of the identification...
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to significant transformations in global mobility patterns, primarily driven by stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns. These measures resulted in a substantial decline in travel activities worldwide. In the United States, there was a notable reduction in travel demand, with a corresponding decrease in...
High early strength concrete (HESC) allows for faster construction with less impact on traffic, thus reducing the indirect costs associated with a project. There are multiple methods for achieving early strength, such as alternative cements like calcium sulfoaluminate (CSA) or chemically accelerated portland cements. The standard criteria for an HESC...
The performance of transit networks must be measured on a regular basis to understand how well these complex systems fulfill their intended purpose and to identify potential opportunities for improvement. Measuring transit network performance is only achievable by defining a specific set of transit network performance indicators (TNPIs). Different schemes...
Research has shown that emotional connections during lab activities increase learning in chemistry and physics courses. However, little research has examined the effects of emotion in engineering courses, and these studies have recognized a dearth of research examining the ability of students to apply engineering concepts in real-world applications based...
Healthcare access exhibits differing levels of complexity, often requiring multi-disciplinary approaches to study its barriers and enablers. Though Argentina has achieved nominal universal healthcare coverage through its public healthcare system, full effective coverage has not been achieved. The public system also has a parallel private care system, adding further complexity...
Distracted driving is an adverse driving behavior that is widely known to impair the safety of all roadway users and traffic flow. Despite the extensive research efforts on the prevalence and effects of distracted driving on roadway safety and performance, the number of vehicular crashes and fatalities resulting from distracted...
Organizations are constantly looking for innovative strategies to face more stringent competitive environments and the ever increasing market globalization. An alternative these organizations can pursue to respond to these challenges is to optimize their supply chain network (SCN). Important considerations when optimizing a SCN involve determining locations for plants and...
Changes in the global climate and forest management practices have given rise to increasing numbers and severity of wildfires. More than five million acres burned in the United States in 2017, while in Canada 7.4 million acres burned. In particular, an increasing amount of dead woody biomass is a key...
The outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the restrictions implemented in response to it (e.g., stay-at-home orders, social distancing mandates, business closures) had unprecedented effects on the trucking industry. The pandemic prompted the first significant overhaul of federal hours-of-service (HOS) regulations in over 15 years. Prior to the...
Recent statistics regarding large truck crashes reveal that fatality rates of large trucks per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and fatality rates per 1,000 registered vehicles are higher than those for passenger vehicles. These statistics underscore the need for greater efforts by safety professionals to help mitigate the impacts...
An intersection without a traffic light could be a potentially dangerous place to travel through depending on the mindsets of the of the travelers within it. When travelers are traversing an intersection, they generally have one of two different mindsets that influence the actions they do. One mindset they could...
Industrial Engineering is a broad discipline, with a wide range of definitions for the field and the knowledge areas that make up its parts. A conceptual gap exists between the definition of the field of Industrial Engineering and the definitions of each of these parts. To facilitate advancement of the...
Small organizations may face several management challenges, such as developing non-centralized management structures, knowledge retention in rapid turnover environments, complex operations, and diverse stakeholder requirements. Many methodologies exist to address such management challenges, including viable system model, knowledge management, and Toyota production system, or lean manufacturing. Each of these methodologies...
Wildfires are a recurring disaster that threatens communities living close to forests and result in significant financial losses along with negative environmental effects, especially with the increase of wildfire season length and intensity due to climate change and increasing urbanization. Wildfire events can also have a significant impact on the...
Modular construction is increasingly seen as an efficient construction method in terms of time, cost, and energy. The full realization of these advantages partly relies on the efficiency of the production process inside the modular factories, which currently rely on tedious manual monitoring methods or expensive automated techniques. As a...
When pavement markings on roadways are removed, scarring can occur leaving behind traces of where the marking used to be called ghost lines. These ghost lines can confuse drivers on the roadway and divert their attention from the correct lane markings leading them into the false lane. Previous research has...
Creating schedules for the job shop manufacturing system is an extremely difficult task. Although researchers have devoted a lot of attention to generating optimal solutions, these solutions are static, thus they do not update as random events occur that disrupt the system. As smart manufacturing has grown, researchers have been...
YouTube has turned creating, watching, and interacting with videos into a mainstream activity and has substantial impact on modern society as the most popular video sharing site in the world. However, there is a lack of published research using statistically designed experiments which can aid content creators in making and...
Considering the deadly impacts of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes on road safety, many previous studies have put in efforts to find the determinants of CMV crash injury severities. However, studies examining the impact of the different number of lanes on CMV crash
injury severities are lacking. Besides, the importance...
Highway work zones are extremely dangerous environments due to the presence of workers near high-speed traveling vehicles. This dynamic environment results in a disproportionate number of accidents that cause injury and casualty to both drivers and workers due primarily to vehicular intrusions into work zones. Several emerging work zone intrusion...
Variational programming supports efficiently executing many related programs at once by encoding all of the programs in one "variational program" that captures the differences among them statically and explicitly. An open problem in variational programming is how to handle side effects—if two program variants perform different side effects, we cannot...
Moving mixed-model assembly lines are used by many companies to assemble multiple model types of a particular product. A moving assembly line consists of a material movement system that moves jobs at a constant velocity across a series of workstations. The variation in the work content of jobs at workstations...
In this research, the comparative performance of permutation and non-permutation schedules is investigated in an assembly flow shop (AFS) with shift production, where a limited buffer storage is available between two machines. Most of the traditional scheduling problems consider continuous production, i.e., production occurs for 24 hours (3 * 8-hour...
The total manufacturing cost for a part is determined by its process plan, and the total cost includes both processing and material handling costs. This research examines the cost impact of assuming an arbitrary layout when evaluating alternative process plans for production in a new facility. A designed experiment was...
To address several challenges faced in healthcare, the Triple Aim (3A) was targeted by institutions to improve health outcomes and patient experience while reducing the costs of health. Process improvement techniques in manufacturing, such as Lean systems, were applied as tools to achieve the 3A framework. Unfortunately, the high level...
In the face of a disruptive event or prolonged period of stress, resilient performance ischaracterized by preventative measures, effective response, and the integration of lessonslearned. In healthcare, resilience significantly affects patient safety. However, currentguidelines for healthcare performance assessment, such as the Triple Aim, do notconsider physician satisfaction and preventative measures...
In this research, a bi-criteria batching and scheduling problem is investigated in hybrid flow shop environments, where unrelated-parallel machines are run simultaneously with different capacities and eligibilities in processing, in some stages. The objective is to simultaneously minimize a linear combination of the total weighted completion time and total weighted...
In this research, a bi-criteria batching and scheduling problem is investigated in hybrid flow shop environments, where unrelated-parallel machines are run simultaneously with different capacities and eligibilities in processing, in some stages. The objective is to simultaneously minimize a linear combination of the total weighted completion time and total weighted...
An important impact of the genome technology revolution will be the elucidation of mechanisms of cancer pathogenesis, leading to improvements in the diagnosis of cancer and the selection of cancer treatment. Integrated with current well-studied massive knowledge and findings about the role of protein-coding mutations in cancer, demystifying the functional...
Small business energy analysts often specialize in one aspect of the business. This specialized focus is done by necessity due to scarcity of resources and to maintain a proprietary market niche. However, this specialized focus results in a growth inhibitor due to their lack of ability to address all the...
Improving the understanding the relations of sustainability behaviors in manufacturing systems and actively engaging with manufacturers (especially SMEs) in sustainability efforts is key to the long-term success of U.S. industry and the natural environment. This study addresses this urgent need by establishing a systemic approach for the design of costing...
Simulated Annealing and Threshold Accepting are two stochastic search algorithms that have been successfully used on a variety of complex and difficult problem sets. Due to their stochastic nature they are not guaranteed to produce the same result for each run. This means that these techniques actually produce a distribution...
As the growth in demand for sustainable manufacturing continues, companies must begin to make conscious design decisions with regard to the sustainability of their products. This means balancing economics of production with environmental and social performance. Thus, design and manufacturing engineers must consider economic, environmental, and social aspects simultaneously when...
Auctions are used to solve resource allocation problem between many agents and many items in real-world settings. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is possible for selfish agents to manipulate the system for their own interest at the expense of the social welfare. Such manipulation can be prevented using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves...
This study focused on the potential water and energy savings from implementing a revised schedule of a recirculation pump connected to a condensing gas tankless water heater located in a study home in Portland, Oregon. The existing recirculation pump activation schedule was studied for its impact on the overall water...
Physical activity recognition using accelerometer data is a rapidly emerging field with many real-world applications. Much of the previous work in this area has assumed that the accelerometer data has already been segmented into pure activities, and the activity recognition task has been to classify these segments. In reality, activity...
Air traffic flow management over the U.S. airpsace is a difficult problem. Current management approaches lead to hundreds of thousands of hours of delay, costing billions of dollars annually. Weather and airport conditions may instigate this delay, but routing decisions balancing delay with congestion contribute significantly to the propagation of...
In high volume automated discrete item batch production systems, the batches or lots are typically fixed quantity (i.e., size), with setups incurred between the different production lots. Processing times for the fixed-size lots are relatively constant when the workstation is operating however, random workstation disruptions cause variability in the lot...
The continuous improvement of construction operations requires a systematic approach of monitoring and making appropriate control actions. However, the lack of real-time information hinders this workflow and eventually compromises timely and effective decision-making. Project managers spend a great deal of time and effort to solve problems emerging from lack of...
Transportation systems need to get better by moving ever more people while consuming ever fewer resources. To build better transportation systems, planners need an accurate understanding of how people exercise mobility and tools to apply that understanding to the transportation system. Such an understanding can come through the development of...
Teamwork has become a popular operational strategy applied as part of workforce management plans in manufacturing and service industries. Teamwork has been commonly used in organizations to pursue different goals such as increase business operations agility, boost company productivity, improve quality in operations, increase company flexibility, promote collaborative learning, hasten...
Learning novel concepts from relational databases is an important problem with applications in several disciplines, such as data management, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. For a learning algorithm to be effective, the input data should be clean and in some desired representation. However, real-world data is usually heterogeneous – the...
Mountain pine beetle infested forests in the Rocky Mountain region raise complicated economic, environmental, and social impacts and pose severe forest management challenges to land managers and public and private landowners. Harvesting infested forest stands provides an opportunity to utilize otherwise wasted resources, mitigate economics losses to landowners, and generate...
The rapid advancement of manufacturing has led to the creation of a myriad of technologies that facilitate the analysis and simulation of manufacturing processes. These technologies have become a pivotal component in maintaining and improving processes in today’s complex manufacturing environments. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is one such technology that...
Physical experimentation in various scientific and engineering areas continues to be a useful and often necessary approach that is applied in research, development, and for general problem solving. The experimental design process however, is iterative and often involves trial and error. Alternative designs are proposed and evaluated on cost and...
Transportation systems are facing safety and operational challenges with a cost of billions of dollars annually in lost production time and wasted fuel. Infrastructure expansion, previously held as a panacea to most transportation challenges has lost its appeal due to financial, land-use and environmental constraints. Interest is surging in intelligent...
CPM-M4 tool steel is a commonly used knife blade material due to its high strength and wear resistance. The goal of this thesis is to understand how heat treatment parameters affect blade performance and microstructure.Five heat treatments were applied to CPM-M4 steel by varying austenitizing and tempering temperatures. The microstructures...
Manuscript I: The removal of residual casting material from gating has traditionally been performed by abrasive grinding techniques. However, high amounts of belt wear can occur when working with high strength alloys, especially those typically seen in the aerospace industry. An alternative machining process called electrochemical machining (ECM) uses electrolysis...
Monte Carlo simulation is used to quantify and characterize uncertainty in a variety of applications such as financial/engineering economic analysis, and project management. The dependence or correlation between the random variables modeled can also be simulated to add more accuracy to simulations. However, there exists a difference between how correlation...
The use of fossil fuels and their related impact on the environment and global warming have encouraged societies to pursue more sustainable and renewable alternatives, e.g., forest-based bio-oil. Thus, a vital need to decrease the level of greenhouse gas emissions and the tendency of nations to reduce their dependency on...
There are many uncertainties that complex engineered systems will face throughout their lifecycles due to changes in internal and external conditions. It is desirable for complex engineered systems to be resilient against various uncertainties. The ability to overcome such uncertainties should be embedded into the system from the beginning. However,...