In many enterprises and other types of organizations, decision making is both a crucial and a challenging task. Despite their importance, many decisions are still made based on experience and intuition rather than on evidence supported by rigorous approaches. Decisions are often made this way...

In this article, we describe simulation-based decision support techniques for evaluation of operational plans within effects-based planning. Using a decision support tool, developers of operational plans are able to evaluate thousands of alternative plans against possible courses of events and...

This article presents a mathematical model for barge transport planning on the river Rhine, which is part of a decision support system (DSS) recently taken into use by the Swiss company Omya. The system is operated by Omya's regional office in Cologne, Germany, responsible for distribution...

An individual s decision to place a close family member in a nursing home is both difficult and crucial. To assist consumers with such a decision, several initiatives have led to the creation of public websites designed to communicate quality indicators for nursing homes. However, a majority of...

This research focuses on developing a crop decision planning model to help farmers make decisions for an upcoming crop year. The decisions consist of which crops to plant, the amount of land to allocate to each crop, when to grow, when to harvest, and when to sell. The objective is to maximize...

Problem: Engineering design decisions require the integration of information from multiple and disparate sources. However, this information is often independently created, limited to a single perspective, and not formally represented, thus making it difficult to formulate decisions. Hence, the...

A look at today's US military will see them operating much beyond the scope of protecting and defending the United States. These operations now consist of, but are not limited to humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and conflict resolution. This broad spectrum of operational environments has...

In this thesis, a decision model for examining prescribed risk management practices in engineering design is presented. The decision model explicitly considers the effects that design decisions under uncertainty have on the overall utility of the design process. These effects are important to...

This thesis focuses on the developing of statistical methodology in reliability and quality engineering, and to assist the decision-makings at enterprise level, process level, and product level.In Chapter II, we propose a multi-level statistical modeling strategy to characterize data from...

The use of computer modeling is fast increasing in almost everyscientific, engineering and business arena. This dissertationinvestigates some challenging issues in design, modeling andanalysis of computer experiments, which will consist of four majorparts. In the first part, a new approach is...