The purpose of this study was to gather a detailed understanding and encompassing list of topics for an Engineering Management Online Handbook. To better understand the profession of Engineering Management, the history of the profession is discussed. Although an Engineering Management Handbook currently exists on the World Wide Web, this study incorporates surveys of practicing engineers and current literature research. General perceptions and comments were collected from practicing engineers about the current state of the Handbook as it exists at the website of the American Society for Engineering Management (www.ASEM.org). It seems as though the main contributors currently are professors associated with the American Society for Engineering Management. Of the 26 topics listed on the Table of Contents, only a handful contains relevant links that have been updated in the past year. Corresponding handbooks were studied and reviewed for gaps or new philosophies and tools. Topics were analyzed and compared to the Engineering Management Body of Knowledge. Recommendations and an encompassing list of topics are provided.

Employee retention is critical to an organization’s competitive position. Employees are resources; and a “good” employee is a valuable asset. From a system’s perspective, employees are critical elements that are needed to ensure the output can be produced effectively and efficiently. Thus, management of this resource is critical for a company’s success. Maintaining a stable workforce in the boat manufacturing industry is a challenge. This is especially true in the assembly area where the average job is unskilled and not considered a career position. The purpose of this study is to identify the individual and organizational factors that contribute to high turnover in the boating industry. This study investigates employee perceptions about the work and management based on a satisfaction survey; and identifies which factors create the most dissatisfaction and lead to turnover.The study used the survey method to collect data from assembly workers of four different companies in the boating industry. A 32-item survey, which measures attitudes and perceptions about the organization, was developed and administered by HR specialists at each company. Results showed that encouragement of suggestions, communication, and involvement in the change process had the greatest impact on employees’ perceptions of a company’s long-term success and those perceptions are highly influential in predicting voluntary exit.

The purpose of this study was to gather a detailed understanding and encompassing list of topics for an Engineering Management Online Handbook. To better understand the profession of Engineering Management, the history of the profession is discussed. Although an Engineering Management Handbook currently exists on the World Wide Web, this study incorporates surveys of practicing engineers and current literature research. General perceptions and comments were collected from practicing engineers about the current state of the Handbook as it exists at the website of the American Society for Engineering Management (www.ASEM.org). It seems as though the main contributors currently are professors associated with the American Society for Engineering Management. Of the 26 topics listed on the Table of Contents, only a handful contains relevant links that have been updated in the past year. Corresponding handbooks were studied and reviewed for gaps or new philosophies and tools. Topics were analyzed and compared to the Engineering Management Body of Knowledge. Recommendations and an encompassing list of topics are provided.

This thesis examines the practice of Business Process Modeling (BPM) in the field of contracts management. Government defense contractors are heavily burdened by contracts which have ended, but have not been finalized and closed. In order to keep good relations with organizations regulating government contracts, contractors have been forced to devise a strategy to address contract closeouts. Through utilization of BPM practices, an organization is able to not only model the flow of their contract closeout process, but simulate the performance of their process under varying conditions so that goals and deadlines may be met. Data was collected about a defense contractor’s contract closeout process, and a simulation model was created to mimic the behavior of the system over the time to complete the contract closeout process. Various levels of resources were used in simulating the process to test the performance and throughput of the system. Using simulation software, the closeout process was able to be successfully modeled under varying resource levels. The simulation models included true worker process times with integrated schedules, including holidays, over the expected period of performance. The simulation produced a realistic model which allows an organization to plan their resources to accomplish their contract closeout process under specified conditions and deadlines. This work also provides a base for further studies involving BPM and the field of contracts management.

This research developed a process to identify condition deficiencies and sustainment requirements to assist in the development of strategic management plans for aerospace ground test systems that may be unique in design, operation, and/or maintenance.Subject matter experts can use the process to evaluate the condition of a test asset by inputting data into the developed software system. The process was designed around the concept of evaluating the condition of a system against ten parameters that encompass all of the aspects of a system that would be considered in determining its overall condition. A scale of zero (failed) to ten (new condition) is used to score both the current and the future (five years hence) state of the system. A relative aggregate scores approach is used to assign an overall condition value. Questions related to the forecasted workload of the facility and criticality of the asset in meeting the forecasted test programs provide a measure of the asset criticality and thereby assist management with project prioritization. Four different types of condition data output reports are available to management teams.The process was tested and internally validated by evaluating the condition of over three-hundred aerospace ground test assets.

In many segments of the chemical industry, emphasis is nowadays placed upon meeting customer needs. This imposes new requirements in terms of various product quality specifications as well as due dates for deliveries, and provides an important incentive for the development of comprehensive procedures for the design and scheduling of multiproduct batch processes. Previous studies fail to address many of the specific issues involved in batch processing, such as distinct due dates, inventory costs, changeover costs, the choice between existing and new equipment, and the many potential alternatives in the synthesis of batch networks. In this thesis, flexible procedures based on the simulated algorithm have been developed to provide a global treatment of scheduling, design, synthesis, and retrofit, with special emphasis on the issues most relevant to batch processes. The flexibility of simulated annealing allows the optimization of complete economic objectives including capital, operating, labor, inventory, and changeover costs as well as penalties for early and late production. The simulated annealing algorithm has been adapted to handle the complex problem structures that arise in design and synthesis. The choice of economic objectives, the effect of uncertainties on the scheduling of flowshops, and the planning of multiplants have been investigated. Optimal scheduling and planning have been incorporated in a design and synthesis procedure to generate processes that are both economical, and capable of meeting a fluctuating demand. This procedure has been extended to retrofit design, to allow the choice between existing and new equipment, and develop a unified treatment of planning, retrofit, and design. Finally, the choice of operating conditions together with design, synthesis, and scheduling has been examined and applied to the batch production of chain growth polymers. The robustness of the optimization procedures has been checked by solving a variety of previously published examples. Significant extensions of these problems have also been developed to explore new issues and the interactions between the different decisions levels. These procedures allow a comprehensive and flexible treatment of a wide class of problems in batch design and scheduling.

Research on the area of queueing networks has been extensive over the last decades. This is largely due to their ability to model many complex systems which are receiving growing attention such as flexible manufacturing systems, assembly lines, facility planning problems, computer and communication networks, transportation systems and so on. The focus of prior research has been on queueing networks with unrestricted storage or buffer capacities and queueing networks with restricted buffer capacities where external arrivals and departures are allowed, that is, open finite queueing networks. In contrast, the field of closed finite queueing networks, where no arrival to or departures from the system are allowed, has been relatively neglected due in part to their more difficult mathematical tractability. This dissertation represents a contribution to narrow this gap by concentrating on the important field of closed finite queueing networks and their optimization problems. First, an efficient numerical approximation is developed to evaluate the performance measures of this type of network where blocking can occur after service. Secondly, the optimal resource allocation problem is addressed by combining mostly elements of queueing theory and nonlinear optimization. The proposed approximation method is based on expanding and decomposing the closed network to account for the blocking phenomenon for which an adapted version of the Expansion Method is used in conjunction with a especially developed Equalization Phase and the well known Mean Value Analysis. This approximation is applicable to network topologies with tandem nodes or combinations of split and merge sequences that have exponential service times and one-server stations. The resulting numerical evaluations are computational efficient and render excellent results as compared to simulation results under a variety of testing conditions. This method is then embedded in an optimization scheme to study the resource allocation problem with the objective of optimizing a nonlinear cost function that integrates system throughput, cycle time, and the number of buffer spaces in the network. The flexibility of this objective function provides for a potentially great number of applications. The emphasis here is however on manufacturing and communication systems. The optimization procedure solves for the suboptimal buffer allocation at each node or station, and for the suboptimal number of customers or entities circulating in the closed queueing network. The solution to the buffer allocation problem is achieved via Powell's nonlinear unconstrained optimization, where necessary tests are provided to ensure deadlock-free solutions. Then, building upon this scheme, a search with backward and forward sweeps is applied to find the best setting for the number of customers. This problem is highly complex, since no known closed form expression exists for the objective function and because the problem is nonlinear and integral in nature. Discussions on the applicability, convergence, and computational analysis of the procedure are presented, as well as comparisons against pertinent simulation results.

The primary focus of this research is on the distributed allocation of dynamically arriving interdependent tasks to the agents of a heterogeneous multi-agent system in an uncertain environment. This dissertation consists of three parts. First, we develop a centralized task allocation model which explicitly considers the communication between the agents in coordinated problem solving. The tasks enter the system with certain payment and specific processing requirements. The agents are grouped into different types based on their processing capabilities. A task can only be processed by an appropriate agent. Processing of the tasks incurs certain operational cost on the multi-agent system resulting from processing and communication costs. The performance of an agent system is defined as the discounted sum of rewards over an infinite time horizon. We formulate the task assignment problem as a Markov decision problem and show that a stationary policy exists. An action elimination procedure is proposed that decreases the action space for each state. Moreover, a heuristic policy is proposed based on certain structural properties and is shown to perform close to 1% of the policy obtained from computational methods. The second part of the dissertation studies different distributed task allocation models and shows that distributed task allocation may be preferable over centralized task allocation despite their lower performance for the agent system. Each of these decision methods are evaluated based on the computational costs incurred in the decision making and the information exchange cost between the agents. The task allocation methods are classified into different scopes such as system level, group level, and individual level. For each level of scope, we consider both off-line and on-line decision procedures. The composite performance of each model is computed in order to evaluate cost effectiveness of a decision method. We show that centralized methods may not be preferred due to excessive decision costs involved. We also investigate the performance of multi-agent systems under partial information about other agents in the system. The third and final part of the dissertation investigates the effect of organizational structures on the performance of multi-agent systems. We study different organizational structures resulting from coalition formation between individual agents in the multi-agent systems. The coalitions are formed between agents to benefit from the increased state information. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Critically ill patients suffering from either closed head trauma or septic shock were studied retrospectively to see if the mathematical programming technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) could be used to develop models to assess an individual patient's progress in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Unlike current logistic regression models that focus on the mean values for groups of patients, the DEA models evaluate each patient individually by calculating an “efficiency” score based on a patient's ability to maximize output for a given set of physiologic inputs. Patients with high efficiency scores were found to have a better chance of making a full recovery than similarly injured patients that were inefficient, even when the latter had more “normal” values for their variables. New hybrid models that combine DEA with discriminant analysis and correspondence analysis were also developed and their potential role in the ICU is explored. DEA models in the ICU need further study before implementation but appear to offer physicians a deeper understanding of their patients and a better opportunity to improve patient outcome than presently used models based on regression.

Evaluating the user experience (UX) associated with product interaction is a challenge for current human-systems developers. This is largely due to a lack of theoretical guidance for directing how best to assess the UX and a paucity of tools to support such evaluation. This dissertation provided a framework and tools for guiding and supporting evaluation of the user experience. This doctoral research involved reviewing the literature on UX, using this knowledge to build first build a theoretical model of the UX construct and later develop a theoretical model to for the evaluation of UX in order to aid evaluators – the integrated User eXperience EValuation (iUXEV), and empirically validating select components of the model through three case studies. The developed evaluation model was subjected to a three phase validation process that included the development and application of different components of the model separately. The first case study focused on developing a tool and method for assessing the affective component of UX which resulted in lessons learned for the integration of the tool and method into the iUXEV model. The second case study focused on integrating several tools that target different components of UX and resulted in a better understanding of how the data could be utilized as well as identify the need for an integration method to bring the data together. The third case study focused on the application of the results of an usability evaluation on an organizational setting which resulted in the identification of challenges and needs faced by practitioners. Taken together, this body of research, from the theoretically-driven iUXEV model to the newly developed emotional assessment tool, extends the user experience / usability body of knowledge and state-of-practice for interaction design practitioners who are challenged with holistic user experience evaluations, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in UX design and evaluation.