In this thesis, several stochastic optimization models are presented to determine the number of airport arrival slots that should be made available for distribution via a market mechanism. Considerable attention is paid to the structure and mathematical properties of each of these models, with...

Actions such as the WEEE Directive and RoHS Directive are forcing electronics suppliers to transition their products from tin-lead to lead-free solder in order to support consumer goods. The defense and avionics industries obtain their parts from the same suppliers and must adapt to these new...

Providing a defensible basis for allocating resources for critical infrastructure and key resource protection is an important and challenging problem. Investments can be made in countermeasures that improve the security and hardness of a potential target exposed to a security hazard, deterrence...

At the heart of any decision problem is some degree of "flexibility" in how to act. Most often, we aim to extract greatest possible value from this inherent flexibility. The three essays compiled here are aligned with this same general aim, but we have an important secondary concern: to...

Over the last few decades there has been a great increase in the number of cars in the United States. Given the importance of vehicle ownership on both transport and land-use planning and its relationship with energy consumption, the environment and health, the growth in the number of vehicles...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) utilization in the Construction Industry has been limited to a few large organizations. Significant segments of the industry are either not aware of or have not been able to adopt this new technology successfully. The largest groups of construction...

There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States. The construction industry is heavily dependent on immigrant labor, legal and illegal, for production. The construction industry, nationally, employs approximately 1,000,000 illegal immigrants; almost...

Road users fail to realize their role in congestion. This thesis aims to calculate the appropriate charges required for users of I-495 - the Capital Beltway surrounding Washington, D.C. - in order to fulfill their portion of congestion costs. By developing a model from existing data that...

This work emphasizes the importance for egress model users to choose a model for each project with the appropriate input features and simulation capabilities. This report also gives model users a mechanism for choosing the appropriate model by providing a detailed egress model review (Chapter...