Operations Research Master's Theses

Biobjective location of a semi-desirable facility on a network with mixed metrics

Emre Yavuz — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:06:36 PDT

For the last few decades, increasing public awareness and higher environmental standards have been giving rise to intensive research on operational location models for semi-desirable facilities which provide an important service to the community but also have adverse effects on people and the environment. Examples of these facilities are power plants, chemical plants, airports, incinerators and waste dumps. Therefore, these facilities should be located far away from population centers, but not too far away because transportation cost may become excessive.

In this Thesis, we formulate the Euclidean maximin with the network minisum biobjective location model for a semi-desirable facility. Our...

Time dependent truck routing and driver scheduling problem with hours of service regulations

Vidit Divyang Shah — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:23:18 PST

Driver fatigue is the cause of many truck crashes taking place today. In order to improve safety, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has implemented revised Hours-of-Service (HOS) regulations effective on October 1^st 2005. According to the revised rules, drivers should take a break of 10 consecutive hours after 11 hours of driving time or 14 hours of duty time that includes driving time and service time such as loading and unloading cargo. This has caused a severe increase in the cost for the trucking industry which in turn hurt shippers and ultimately customers. A systematic way for routing...

Misuse and performance of individuals charts in statistical process control for single parameter distributions of unknown stability

Rashmi Rohan Shenoy — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:23:17 PST

Individuals (XmR) control charts are used in statistical process control for monitoring processes when data occur one at a time, infrequently, or no rational sub-grouping is obvious. Although these charts are based on the assumption of normally distributed data, they sometimes are used as somewhat of an omnibus chart that is robust for all types of data. This thesis discusses the incorrect use of these charts on time between (exponential), number between (geometric), Poisson, and binomial data and compares their performance with other approaches via Monte Carlo simulation. In each case, control limits were calculated using four different methods: 3-sigma...