Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2014. / 125 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-189). / High-speed rail (HSR) is drawing attention as an environmentally-friendly transportation mode, and is expected to be a solution for socio-technical transportation issues in many societies. Currently, its market has been rapidly expanding all over the world. In the US, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) released a strategic vision to develop new HSRs in 2008, specifically focusing on 10 corridors, including the Northeast Corridor (NEC) from Boston to Washington D.C. With such rapid growth, safety is a growing concern in HSR projects; in fact, there have been two HSR accidents over the past three years. In developing a new HSR system, it is crucial to conduct risk analysis based on lessons learned from these past accidents. Furthermore, for risk analysis of complex socio-technical systems such as HSR systems, a holistic system-safety approach focusing not only on physical domains but also on institutional levels is essential. With these perspectives, this research proposes a new system-based safety risk analysis methodology for complex socio-technical systems. This methodology is based on the system safety approach, called STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes). As a case study, the proposed HSR project in the NEC is analyzed by this methodology. This methodology includes steps of conducting STAMP-based accident analysis, developing a safety model of the HSR system in the NEC, and analyzing safety risks of it based on lessons learned from the analyzed accidents, with a specific focus on the institutional structure. As a result of this analysis, 58 NEC-specific risks are identified, and with them, weaknesses of safety-related regulations applied to the project are discussed. Additionally, this research introduces System Dynamics to analyze further detailed causal relations of the identified risks and discusses its potential usage for risk analysis. Thus, this thesis research concludes with specific recommendations about safety management in the project in the NEC, making a point that the proposed methodology can be valuable for the actual project processes as a "safety-guided institutional design" tool. / by Soshi Kawakami. / S.M.

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, February 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-42). / With rapid economic growth, China attracts many multinational corporations (MNCs) as a manufacturing center with both its cheap labor cost and a huge consumer market. While doing business in China, most MNCs have faced logistical problems in connection with the transportation of their materials and the flow of information. The research objective of this paper is to describe the current state of Chinese logistics service and identify the logistics barriers that foreign firms have encountered in China. Dell and Wal-Mart are selected as case studies. The thesis analyzes their operating strategies and solutions to various problems they encountered in China and makes some recommendations. / by Manqin Luo. / M.Eng.in Logistics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 608-630). / This research is motivated by the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine's joint call for research in healthcare, promoting the application of principles, tools, and research from engineering disciplines, and complex systems in particular. In 2005, the US healthcare expenditure represented 16% of its GDP, with hospitals representing the largest source of expenditure, as is the case in the United Kingdom. Consequently, the strategies and operations developed and implemented by hospitals have a significant impact on healthcare. Today, it would be hard to find a hospital that is not implementing a Lean initiative or who isn't familiar with its concepts. However, more often than not, their approach has narrowly focused at a process level and inside individual service units like an emergency department. This research seeks to elevate traditionally narrow hospital definitions of lean and explore the broader concepts of lean enterprise principles and Enterprise Architecture (EA) while enhancing our knowledge of hospitals' socio-technical complexity and enriching an emerging EA Framework (EAF) developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Following an extensive longitudinal multidisciplinary literature review, a number of expert interviews, and preliminary empirical findings, an exploratory inductive and deductive hybrid study was designed to collect and concurrently analyze both qualitative and quantitative empirical data from multiple hospital settings over two main phases: * The first phase consisted of recorded interviews with the Chief Executive Officers of seven leading Massachusetts hospitals, who also provided sensitive internal strategy and operations documents. We explored how hospitals currently measure their hospital performance and how their explicit and implicit practices may be improved using lean enterprise principles. e The second phase comprised two in-depth case studies of large leading multidisciplinary hospitals, one located in the US and other in the United Kingdom, and included a total of 13 embedded units of analysis. Multiple sources of evidence were collected including electronic medical records, 54 interviews, observation, and internal documents. Findings were categorized and sorted, as phenomena of interest consistently emerged from the data, and enriched both the EAF, and our understanding of hospitals' EA in particular. In both in-depth hospital cases we found that their EA consisted of multiple internal architectural configurations, and in particular, those with an enriched understanding of EA had made decisions which had improved not only their local performance, but also enhanced their interactions with other service units upstream and downstream. Conversely, worse performing configurations demonstrated a limited understanding of their hospital's EA. We conclude that hospital performance can be improved through an enriched understanding of hospital EA. Furthermore, whilst considering all hospitals included in this study, we propose general and specific recommendations, as well as diagnostic questions, performance dimensions, and metrics, to assist senior hospital leaders in architecting and managing their enterprise. / by Jorge Miguel dos Santos Fradinho. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-80). / The chemical processing industry has faced challenges with achieving improvements in safety performance, and accidents continue to occur. When accidents occur, they usually have a confluence of multiple factors, suggesting that there are underlying complex systemic problems. Moreover, accident investigations often reveal that accidents were preventable and that many of the problems were known prior to those accidents, suggesting that there may have been early warning signs. System-based analysis addresses systemic aspects and leading indicators enable the detection of ineffective controls and degradation of the system. Together, they could enable taking needed actions before an incident or a loss event. To develop process safety indicators, the chemical processing industry currently uses guidelines that are mainly based on the concepts of the "Swiss Cheese Model" and the "Accident Pyramid." The current guidelines lack a systemic approach for developing process safety indicators; the guidelines view indicators as independent measures of the safety of a system (e.g. a failure of a barrier), which can be misleading because it would not identify ineffective controls, such as those associated with the migration of the system towards an unsafe state, or associated with interdependencies between barriers. Moreover, process safety indicators that are currently used in the chemical industry are more focused on lagging as opposed to leading indicators. This main objective of this thesis is to develop a structured system-based method that can assist a hydrocarbon/chemical processing organization in developing system-based process safety leading indicators. Building on developed safety control structures and the associated safety constraints, the proposed method can be used to develop both technical and organizational leading indicators based on the controls, feedbacks, and process models, which, ultimately, can ensure that there is an effective control structure. / by Ibrahim A. Khawaji. / S.M.

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 37). / by Daguang Zhang. / M.Eng.in Logistics

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77). / Market leadership requires effective management of product life cycle, starting from the launch of a new product until its retirement. In this particular project, an exploratory study of business practices in the management of products in the decline phase and the eventual decision of product abandonment is conducted through surveys and interviews of senior executives from Fortune 500 companies, focusing mainly on food, networking equipment, medical devices, consumer electronics and retail industries. Actual names of the companies are not revealed for confidentiality reasons. Also, the implementations, assumptions and level of acceptance of decision support system (DSS) modules on product lifecycle management are analyzed. Finally, companies' business processes are compared and enhancements to current DSS systems are proposed. / by Gokhan Usanmaz. / M.Eng.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-140). / How do enterprises successfully conceive, design, deliver, and operate large-scale, engineered systems? These large-scale projects often involve high complexity, significant technical challenges, a large number of diverse stakeholders, distributed execution, and aggressive goals. In this context, simultaneously meeting technical performance, cost, and schedule goals effectively and efficiently is a serious challenge. In fact, it is rarely accomplished. The nature of an enterprise contributes to this challenge. Enterprises are interorganizational networks with distributed leadership and stakeholders with both common and diverse interests. They are unique from traditional levels of analysis in organizational studies, and in general their behavior is not well understood. They are a prevalent form of organizing work in these large engineering projects, where one organization simply does not have the capability or willingness to take on the entire project by themselves. This work explores the factors that distinguish high performance enterprises from those that are less successful in these large-scale projects. The setting for this research is programs in the aerospace industry. / (cont.) A comparative case study method was used to study nineteen programs spanning the U.S. (mainly defense) aerospace industry in order to develop grounded theory regarding contemporary program execution strategies and distinguishing attributes. Drawing on prior research with high performance teams, several characteristics were explored and refined, eventually resulting in identification of ten best practices. The contribution of this work is codification of these best practices into a coherent framework of complementary elements relating to particular outcomes. The framework articulates three drivers of individual and systemic behaviors: a system of distributed leadership, informal and formal structures. The framework addresses the role each of these plays in enterprise performance. The synergistic combination of the elements enables enterprises to execute planned activities, leverage emergent opportunities, and deal with unforeseen circumstances. For enterprises involved in large-scale engineering projects, these capabilities are a necessity for success. In addition to an academic theory, this framework can be considered an architectural design for high performance enterprises. Putting this enterprise architecture into practice has important implications for both corporate and program management. / by Alexis Kristen Stanke. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2013. / Page 163 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-137). / This research develops a novel approach to long-term power system capacity expansion planning for developing countries by incorporating endogenous demand dynamics resulting from social processes of technology adoption. Conventional capacity expansion models assume exogenous demand growth; however, literature suggests that this assumption is not appropriate for developing countries. The planning approach presented in this research explicitly represents the links between the social and technical components of the power system. As potential customers without electricity select between various supply options to meet their power needs and as existing customers alter their consumption in reaction to the price of electricity and the perceived performance of the grid, the demand for grid power is directly impacted. This thesis demonstrates that neglecting these feedbacks and resorting to simplified assumptions can result in suboptimal investment strategies. By comparing the investment strategies identified using this novel approach to that of more conventional approaches, this research highlights cases in which the incorporation of endogenous demand impacts capacity expansion planning. More specifically, this work proves that incorporating endogenous electricity demand is important when there is a large fraction of the population without access to power or when the improvement in reliability afforded by capacity expansion is large. Employing traditional capacity expansion methods in such cases may lead to the selection of inferior expansion strategies. This research has both academic and applied contributions. Methodologically, this research extends state-of-the-art power system models by combining two generally separate modeling approaches, system dynamics and optimization. These methods are integrated to capture both the technical details of power grid operation and endogenous electricity demand dynamics in order to simulate the performance and evolution of the electric power grid. This research also demonstrates a holistic approach to centralized power planning that enables a more realistic representation of grid demand in developing countries and the identification of strategies that, in some cases, perform better than the strategies identified using traditional approaches. Finally, while this research was inspired by the case of Tanzania, the approach was developed with the flexibility to be applied to other countries with similar power system structure and contextual features. / by Rhonda LeNai Jordan. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-95). / Perishability and stock-outs are two sources of inventory inefficiency in the Washington State tree fruit industry. This thesis measures the size of these inefficiencies in terms of dollars per box, and describes five solutions, four qualitative and one quantitative, that seek to address them. To establish the magnitude of the inefficiencies, I regress various fruit characteristics on a set of sales data, thereby ascertaining the relationship between a fruit's price and its age. I find that the industry loses 5% to 12% of potential revenue due to perishability and propose four qualitative policies designed to reduce these losses. Next, I develop an operational management tool in the form of a mixed-integer optimization model which can be used to make optimal sourcing decisions during stock-out events. I find that the potential savings from improved sourcing decisions are between $0.01 and 0.02 per box. These results confirm that the costs and foregone revenue associated with inventory management are significant and merit the tree fruit industry's attention. / by Jame Sterling Foreman. / M.Eng.in Logistics

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 73-74). / Airlines have been recently debated the management of some of their non-core divisions, such as the Frequent Flyer Program (FFP).A spinoff is a form of corporate contraction that many companies have recently chosen. Through a spinoff, both the parent company and the divested subsidiary can each focus on their own activity, which translates into a better performance of both entities. This thesis studies the circumstances in which a spinoff is a good strategy to pursue, along with some important issues that must be considered when reaching agreements. Spinoffs are basically a "downsizing" of the parent firm; therefore, the smaller firm must be economically more viable by itself than as a part of its parent company. The motivation for analyzing this particular topic comes from a question of current interest: Under what circumstances is it advantageous for an airline to spin off its Frequent Flyer Program, or other divisions that are not related with the airline's operation? In this thesis, an extensive literature review introduces the reader to the different forms of corporate contraction and their performance under different circumstances. Three cases related to the airline industry follow: the spinoffs of TripAdvisor from the web agency Expedia, of Air Canada's FFP Aeroplan, and of American Airline's distribution system Sabre. These three cases illustrate some of the key issues that must be carefully considered when spinning off a subsidiary. The thesis concludes that spinoffs are a smart strategy when the focus of the spun off division is different from that of the parent company. However, to safeguard future business relationships, the two entities must negotiate detailed agreements that are robust enough to perform successfully in all foreseeable circumstances. / by Erika Kutscher. / S.M.in Engineering and Management