The low bid method has been the most common competitive bid selection approach used for public projects in the U.S. construction industry. This method is usually coupled with a prequalification process to ensure that the lowest bidder has the financial capacity, the necessary experience, and...

This dissertation examines global groups at work through an intensive study of cross-national student teams and case studies of exemplar companies that work across boundaries. We consider the role of transactive memory systems (TMS) as a way to create effective team processes. A TMS is a...

Engineers and product designers have developed sophisticated models to predict the technical performance of their designs, yet they seldom quantify how performance affects the desirability of the resulting products to consumers. Without this information, managers have difficulty judging which...

The work of this dissertation is concerned with the study of the effectiveness ofparadigms of production flexibility to either improve system performance or mitigatesystem risk. A brief introduction to the concept of operational flexibility is provided inChapter I. In Chapter II, we consider a...

Energy security and climate change issues have increased the call for improved energy efficiency from all sectors of the economy, especially the transportation sector. While vehicle manufacturers can in principle make their current vehicle offerings more fuel efficient, historically they have...

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are being increasingly used in the classroom to provide users of computer simulations with a friendly and visual approach to specifying all input parameters and increased configuration flexibility. In this study, the authors first describe a number of software...

In this paper, we consider a multiple-stage tandem production/inventory system producing a single product. Processing time at each stage is assumed to have a general stationary processing time distribution. The cost of holding work-in-process (WIP) inventory is different at each stage....

We consider a make-to-stock production/inventory system consisting of a single deteriorating machine which produces a single item. We formulate the integrated decisions of maintenance and production using a Markov Decision Process. The optimal dynamic policy is shown to have a rather complex...

Decision makers in dynamic environments such as air traffic control, firefighting, and call center operations adapt in real-time using outcome feedback. Understanding this adaptation is important for influencing and improving the decisions made. Recently, stimulus-response (S-R) learning models...

We introduce a diffusion of innovation model based on a network threshold approach. Realistic network and threshold data were gathered regarding the diffusion of new software tools within part of a large organization. Novel model features are a second threshold for innovation rejection and a...