Industrial Engineering Master's Theses

Performance comparison of statistical process control methods to monitor grouped data and rare events in healthcare applications

Zeynep Karakus — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:54:30 PDT

Health expenditures in the United States reached $2.6 trillion in 2010, over ten times the $256 billion spent in 1980. In 2011, national health spending is estimated to have neared $2.7 trillion. While there is broad agreement that the increase in costs must be controlled, there is disagreement over the driving issues. To improve healthcare performance, we must change our way of working; however, change does not always indicate improvement. The changes that produce improvement and those that do not need to be distinguished and related aspects of performance must be measured. Health care costs are an ever growing burden...

Towards standards in user interface design of networked devices

Sanel Selimovic — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:43:40 PDT

Networked appliances have long held promise of making people's lives easier by allowing users complete access over their functionality through an intermediate device such as a tablet computer. Corporations often see no benefits to standardizing user interface across their multiple appliances, or they feel that their proprietary software offers them a competitive edge in the marketplace. This thesis explores the underlying set of principles for home appliances. It attempts to identify user expectations in terms of what they want to see in their networked appliances in terms of features and functionality, but also provide guidelines for future developers. To accomplish...

Shortfall online: the development of an educational computer game for teaching sustainable engineering to millennial generation students

Zachary Andrew Gennett — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:13:58 PDT

Millennial Generation students bring significant learning and teaching challenges to the classroom, because of their unique learning styles, breadth of interests related to social and environmental issues, and intimate experiences with technology. As a result, there has been an increased willingness at many universities to experiment with pedagogical strategies that depart from a traditional "learning by listening" model, and move toward more innovative methods involving active learning through computer games. In particular, current students typically express a strong interest in sustainability in which economic concerns must be weighed relative to environmental and social responsibilities. A game-based setting could prove very...

A Monte Carlo factorial design approach for assessing environmentally responsible manufacturing cost-benefit tradeoffs

Amin Torabkhani — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:17:59 PST

The increased degradation rate of natural resources and heightened interest in sustainable resources have led to a variety of practices that companies can implement to reduce their environmental impact. To create a culture for change in industry, both engineering and business students should understand how to assess the tradeoffs among economic, technical and environmental factors if they are to become socially, as well as fiscally responsible designers, manufacturers or leaders. Therefore, students must be imparted with knowledge regarding interactions among multiple disciplines of economics, technology, environment, as well as social and cultural values. One challenge of teaching sustainability involves creation...