Supervisory Committee Dr. Andrew Rowe (Department of Mechanical Engineering) Supervisor Dr. Peter Wild (Department of Mechanical Engineering Co-Supervisor Dr. Curran Crawford (Department of Mechanical Engineering) Departmental Member Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) represent a promising future direction for the personal transportation sector in terms of decreasing the reliance on fossi...

Distillery spentwash contains high chemical oxygen demand (COD), biological oxygen demand (BOD), color, total dissolved solids (TDS) and other contaminants even after biological treatment. The effluent can’t be discharged as such in the surface water bodies or land without further treatment. Reverse osmosis (RO) treatment plants have been installed in many of the distilleries at tertiary level ...

We present a stochastic traffic engineering framework for optimizing bandwidth provisioning and path selection in networks. The objective is to maximize revenue from serving demands, which are uncertain and specified by probability distributions. We consider a two-tier market structure, where demands in the two markets are associated with different unit revenues and uncertainties. Based on mean...

Some of the biggest challenges in the retail sourcing lie in predicting demand for a new article and making purchase decisions such as quantity, source, transportation mode and time of the order. Such decisions become more complex and time consuming as the number of SKUs and suppliers increase. The thesis addresses the issue of managing retail sourcing using forecasting and optimization based d...

BioModel Engineering is the science of designing, constructing and analyzing computational models of biological systems. It is inspired by concepts from software engineering and computing science. This paper illustrates a major theme in BioModel Engineering, namely that identifying a quantitative model of a dynamic system means building the structure, finding an initial state, and parameter fit...

We study an NP-hard (and MaxSNP-hard) problem in trees—Multicommodity Demand Flow—dealing with demand flows between pairs of nodes and trying to maximize the value of the routed flows. This problem has been intensively studied for trees as well as for general graphs mainly from the viewpoint of polynomialtime approximation algorithms. By way of contrast, we provide an exact dynamic programming ...

Over recent years, the model-based parameter tuning of computational systems has become an emergent research topic. When the considered systems are subject of stochastic effects, the parameter tuning can be seen as a noisy optimization task, as often faced in production engineering. In this paper, the current research on parameter optimization is discussed based on experiences from an engineeri...

In the paper engineering methods for control of distributed parameter systems given by numerical structures on complex shape 3D definition domains are presented. Controlled systems are interpreted as lumped-input/distributed-output systems. Schemes of distributed parameter control loops are arranged. A web-based control design environment from www.dpscontrol.sk will be introduced: Distributed P...

Emphasis on effective demand management is becoming increasingly recognized as an important factor in operations performance. Operations models that account for supply costs and constraints as well as a supplier’s ability to influence demand characteristics can lead to an improved match between supply and demand. This paper presents a class of optimization models that allow a supplier to select...