Logistics managers rely on increasingly sophisticated technologies to track demand and associated inventories, allowing rapid response to meet anticipated demand, avoid shortfalls while minimizing transportation and inventory carrying costs. This ability to respond gives rise to complex decision...

Speculation plays an ever-increasing role in optimizing the execution of programs in computer architecture. Speculative decision-makers are typically required to have high speed and small size, thus limiting their complexity and capability. Because of these restrictions, predictors often...

Due to special characteristics of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), the ―transaction cost‖ in PPPs is more than other delivery methods. Although there have been some attempts to study transaction costs in PPPs in Europe, transaction costs of PPPs in the US has not been explored well, and...

Scour depths in estuaries are often estimated using imprecise models that were developed for riverine systems and do not consider the various processes responsible for the removal of sediment in a tidal system. In a tidal or estuarine environment, the flow changes directions with the tide...

Privately Financed Infrastructure (PFI) projects are characterized by huge and irreversible investments and are faced with various risks. Project performance risks, such as project completion time and costs, affect the project value significantly, particularly in project development phase. This...

This research focuses on the detection and assessment of informal processes within an organization. Informal processes are defined as activities that are not formalized with respect to the inputs, resources, and/or controls; or an activity that deviates from a formal process. Informal processes...

Recent years have seen an upsurge in terrorist activity. Many studies have shown that the United States' transportation infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. This is especially true for bridges. While the probability of an attack's occurrence is very low, the structural response and...

This thesis develops a method for optimizing the construction phases for rail transit extension projects with the objective of maximizing net present worth and examines the economic feasibility of such extension projects under different financial constraints. A Simulated Annealing Algorithm is...

Under most reliability model assumptions, all failures in a population are considered to come from the same distribution. Each individual failure time is assumed to provide information about the likely failure times of all other devices in the population. However, from time to time, process...

Probabilistic Risk Assessment is being increasingly used in a number of industries such as nuclear, aerospace, chemical process, to name a few. Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) characterizes risk in terms of three questions: (1) What can go wrong? (2) How likely is it? (3) What are the...