Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The inefficient logistics in the construction industry is wasting vast amounts of time and resources. The major contracting firms are aware of the problem and have developed new logistics systems to reduce the waste, but all in vain. The developments are not accepted in practice. This thesis seeks to find and then reduce the factors that make implementation difficult. A literature review provides a theoretical framework. Both a quantitative and a qualitative study are addressed to site managers in larger contracting firms, as well as their suppliers. Results reveal that the three major obstacles are organisational inertia, communication difficulties and poor knowledge management. To overcome these problems, both current theories and empirical results suggest that problems and solution should be shared between production managers on seminars or similar. Know-how must be retained and shared between projects by developing standards for knowledge management on central level in the organisation.

Determining the optimal terminal box airflow is a complex process which is influenced by various factors, such as weather condition, supply air temperature, primary air fraction and internal load. A guideline for determination of a cost efficient minimum airflow setpoint for VAV terminal box units is drawn in this research. The most efficient optimal minimum airflow setpoint should not be a fix setting, but should be changing with zone load and ventilation requirement. A fixed minimum airflow is used in conventional control strategies. The terminal box minimum airflow required is not a constant since the supply air temperature, fresh air fraction and zone load are different. It is important to set up the minimum airflow to ensure IAQ and thermal comfort and to minimize energy consumption. Analysis has been carried out to compare how the supply air temperature, fresh air fraction and zone load affect the minimum airflow setting of an exterior zone. And 30% of design airflow is not always a good number, and may cause comfort issue or ventilation problem. If the minimum airflow is set higher than required, terminal boxes will have significantly simultaneous heating and cooling, and consume more fan power in the AHUs. If the minimum airflow is set lower than required, indoor air quality (IAQ) will be a concern. Energy saving ratio study is conducted to estimate the energy saving benefit by implementing an optimized minimum airflow.

Workflow management is more and more popular and its technologies are becoming more and more mature. However, an important feature that is essential to many business process are left unsolved ¡V namely the unexpected exception handling. Not only does unexpected exceptions degrade the performance of WFMS, it also reflects the defects of workflow design. Our research proposes a framework that uses case-based reasoning to find exception handling rules from historical exception instances. These exception handling rules can help both improving exception handling performance and enabling workflow evolution. Our framework includes an exception taxonomy, an exception case base, and a set of exception naïve models. When an exception occurs, it is classified into a particular category according to the exception taxonomy. Within the category a number of attributes are compared and a naïve model that best represents the incoming exception is identified. It is then adapt to the current environment for an appropriate handling approach. We discuss in the thesis how to discover naïve models from a set of exception instances. A case is finally studied to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework and address the issues of some subtle considerations.

Thesis (M.S. in Mechanical Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis by Martin G. Sarch. Includes bibliographical references. Available online at two web addresses.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. / Kok-Meng Lee, Committee Chair; Shreyes Melkote, Committee Member; Bruce Webster, Committee Member; William Singhose, Committee Member; Chen Zhou, Committee Member. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M.S. in Mechanical Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Fotis A. Papoulias, Charles N. Calvano. Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-112). Also available online.

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