ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
The main objective of this research is to develop an integrated method to study emergent behavior and consequences of evolution and adaptation in engineered complex adaptive systems (ECASs). A multi-layer conceptual framework and modeling approach including behavioral and structural aspects is provided to describe the structure of a class of engineered complex systems and predict their future adaptive patterns. The approach allows the examination of complexity in the structure and the behavior of components as a result of their connections and in relation to their environment. This research describes and uses the major differences of natural complex adaptive systems (CASs) with artificial/engineered CASs to build a framework and platform for ECAS. While this framework focuses on the critical factors of an engineered system, it also enables one to synthetically employ engineering and mathematical models to analyze and measure complexity in such systems. In this way concepts of complex systems science are adapted to management science and system of systems engineering. In particular an integrated consumer-based optimization and agent-based modeling (ABM) platform is presented that enables managers to predict and partially control patterns of behaviors in ECASs. Demonstrated on the U.S. electricity markets, ABM is integrated with normative and subjective decision behavior recommended by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The approach integrates social networks, social science, complexity theory, and diffusion theory. Furthermore, it has unique and significant contribution in exploring and representing concrete managerial insights for ECASs and offering new optimized actions and modeling paradigms in agent-based simulation.
ContributorsHaghnevis, Moeed (Author) / Askin, Ronald G. (Thesis advisor) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis advisor) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Wu, Tong (Committee member) / Hedman, Kory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Ionizing radiation used in the patient diagnosis or therapy has negative effects on the patient body in short term and long term depending on the amount of exposure. More than 700,000 examinations are everyday performed on Interventional Radiology modalities [1], however; there is no patient-centric information available to the patient or the Quality Assurance for the amount of organ dose received. In this study, we are exploring the methodologies to systematically reduce the absorbed radiation dose in the Fluoroscopically Guided Interventional Radiology procedures. In the first part of this study, we developed a mathematical model which determines a set of geometry settings for the equipment and a level for the energy during a patient exam. The goal is to minimize the amount of absorbed dose in the critical organs while maintaining image quality required for the diagnosis. The model is a large-scale mixed integer program. We performed polyhedral analysis and derived several sets of strong inequalities to improve the computational speed and quality of the solution. Results present the amount of absorbed dose in the critical organ can be reduced up to 99% for a specific set of angles. In the second part, we apply an approximate gradient method to simultaneously optimize angle and table location while minimizing dose in the critical organs with respect to the image quality. In each iteration, we solve a sub-problem as a MIP to determine the radiation field size and corresponding X-ray tube energy. In the computational experiments, results show further reduction (up to 80%) of the absorbed dose in compare with previous method. Last, there are uncertainties in the medical procedures resulting imprecision of the absorbed dose. We propose a robust formulation to hedge from the worst case absorbed dose while ensuring feasibility. In this part, we investigate a robust approach for the organ motions within a radiology procedure. We minimize the absorbed dose for the critical organs across all input data scenarios which are corresponding to the positioning and size of the organs. The computational results indicate up to 26% increase in the absorbed dose calculated for the robust approach which ensures the feasibility across scenarios.
ContributorsKhodadadegan, Yasaman (Author) / Zhang, Muhong (Thesis advisor) / Pavlicek, William (Thesis advisor) / Fowler, John (Committee member) / Wu, Tong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The signing of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 created a need for Title 1 principals to conceptualize and operationalize parent engagement. This study examines how three urban principals in Arizona implemented the mandates of the Act as it pertains to parent involvement. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to examine how principals operationalize and conceptualize parent involvement as they navigate barriers and laws particular to the state of Arizona. This study sought to understand issues surrounding parent involvement in Title 1 schools in Arizona. The beliefs and interview dialogue of the principals as it pertains to parent engagement provided an understanding of how urban principals in Arizona implement the aspects of No Child Left Behind Act that deal with parent involvement. The research study concluded that parents have community cultural wealth that contributes to the success of the students of engaged parents and that cultural responsive leadership assists principals with engaging parents in their schools. The research concludes that a gap exists between how parents and principals perceive and construct parent engagement versus what is prescribed in No Child Left Behind Act.
ContributorsConley, Loraine (Author) / Brayboy, Bryan (Thesis advisor) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Scott, Kimberly (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The purpose of the research study was to explore the perceptions of Navajo mothers and Navajo fathers in the development and childrearing practices of their children and to what extent each parent was involved in their children by gender and age. The objective of the interviews was to capture the perceptions of each parent as to child development and childrearing practices as well as the beliefs that they have on parental involvement. In the current study, the interviews provided information regarding attitudes and perceptions of parental involvement from the Navajo mothers and the Navajo fathers who participated in the study. By using probing questions, deeper insights into the understanding and perceptions of parental involvement were obtained.
ContributorsTsosie, Berdina (Author) / Appleton, Nicholas A (Thesis advisor) / Spencer, Dee A (Committee member) / Duplissis, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Facility location models are usually employed to assist decision processes in urban and regional planning. The focus of this research is extensions of a classic location problem, the Weber problem, to address continuously distributed demand as well as multiple facilities. Addressing continuous demand and multi-facilities represents major challenges. Given advances in geographic information systems (GIS), computational science and associated technologies, spatial optimization provides a possibility for improved problem solution. Essential here is how to represent facilities and demand in geographic space. In one respect, spatial abstraction as discrete points is generally assumed as it simplifies model formulation and reduces computational complexity. However, errors in derived solutions are likely not negligible, especially when demand varies continuously across a region. In another respect, although mathematical functions describing continuous distributions can be employed, such theoretical surfaces are generally approximated in practice using finite spatial samples due to a lack of complete information. To this end, the dissertation first investigates the implications of continuous surface approximation and explicitly shows errors in solutions obtained from fitted demand surfaces through empirical applications. The dissertation then presents a method to improve spatial representation of continuous demand. This is based on infill asymptotic theory, which indicates that errors in fitted surfaces tend to zero as the number of sample points increases to infinity. The implication for facility location modeling is that a solution to the discrete problem with greater demand point density will approach the theoretical optimum for the continuous counterpart. Therefore, in this research discrete points are used to represent continuous demand to explore this theoretical convergence, which is less restrictive and less problem altering compared to existing alternatives. The proposed continuous representation method is further extended to develop heuristics to solve the continuous Weber and multi-Weber problems, where one or more facilities can be sited anywhere in continuous space to best serve continuously distributed demand. Two spatial optimization approaches are proposed for the two extensions of the Weber problem, respectively. The special characteristics of those approaches are that they integrate optimization techniques and GIS functionality. Empirical results highlight the advantages of the developed approaches and the importance of solution integration within GIS.
ContributorsYao, Jing (Author) / Murray, Alan T. (Thesis advisor) / Mirchandani, Pitu B. (Committee member) / Kuby, Michael J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
As a result of the district program evaluation, a follow up on teacher perceptions of an online collaboration versus face to face collaboration approach was deemed necessary. The interviews were conducted with eight teachers from a suburban southwest K-8 public school district. After all teachers had participated in a 10 week program evaluation comparing online team teacher collaboration with face-to-face team teacher collaboration, the interview process began. One teacher from each grade level team was randomly selected to participate in the interview process. Analysis of the interview responses was inconclusive. Findings were confounded by the apparent lack of understanding of major concepts of Professional Learning Communities on the part of the participants. Assumptions about participant knowledge must be tested prior to investigations of the influence of either face to face or online format as delivery modes.
ContributorsTucker, Pamela K (Author) / McCoy, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Gehrke, Rebecca (Committee member) / Ham, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Descriptionno
ContributorsTrujillo, Gabriel (Author) / Powers, Jeanne (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo E. (Committee member) / Baracy, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Vehicles powered by electricity and alternative-fuels are becoming a more popular form of transportation since they have less of an environmental impact than standard gasoline vehicles. Unfortunately, their success is currently inhibited by the sparseness of locations where the vehicles can refuel as well as the fact that many of the vehicles have a range that is less than those powered by gasoline. These factors together create a "range anxiety" in drivers, which causes the drivers to worry about the utility of alternative-fuel and electric vehicles and makes them less likely to purchase these vehicles. For the new vehicle technologies to thrive it is critical that range anxiety is minimized and performance is increased as much as possible through proper routing and scheduling. In the case of long distance trips taken by individual vehicles, the routes must be chosen such that the vehicles take the shortest routes while not running out of fuel on the trip. When many vehicles are to be routed during the day, if the refueling stations have limited capacity then care must be taken to avoid having too many vehicles arrive at the stations at any time. If the vehicles that will need to be routed in the future are unknown then this problem is stochastic. For fleets of vehicles serving scheduled operations, switching to alternative-fuels requires ensuring the schedules do not cause the vehicles to run out of fuel. This is especially problematic since the locations where the vehicles may refuel are limited due to the technology being new. This dissertation covers three related optimization problems: routing a single electric or alternative-fuel vehicle on a long distance trip, routing many electric vehicles in a network where the stations have limited capacity and the arrivals into the system are stochastic, and scheduling fleets of electric or alternative-fuel vehicles with limited locations to refuel. Different algorithms are proposed to solve each of the three problems, of which some are exact and some are heuristic. The algorithms are tested on both random data and data relating to the State of Arizona.
ContributorsAdler, Jonathan D (Author) / Mirchandani, Pitu B. (Thesis advisor) / Askin, Ronald (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Muhong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Descriptionno
ContributorsSalabiye-Gishey, Leclare Ellen (Author) / Spencer, Dee A. (Thesis advisor) / Appleton, Nicholas A. (Committee member) / Hotchkiss, Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Given the current focus on high-stakes accountability in America's public schools, this study examined teacher evaluation specific to physical education. This study revealed current teacher evaluation practices used in physical education, perceptions of school administrators related to the value of the physical education evaluation process, and the perceptions of the physical education teachers related to the value of the evaluation process. The first phase of this study was an interpretive document analysis study conducted on four separate teacher evaluation systems commonly used within the public school system to evaluate physical education teachers. Those four systems were: Marzanos teacher evaluation model, Danielson framework for teaching (FFT), Rewarding Excellence in Instruction and Leadership (REIL), and Teacher Advancement Program (TAP). A separate evaluation instrument specific to physical education created by the National Association of Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) was used as a comparative evaluation tool. Evidence suggests that two of the four teacher evaluation systems had a high percentage of alignment with the NASPE instrument (TAP 87.5%, FFT 82.5%). The Marzano teacher evaluation model had the least amount of alignment with the NASPE instrument (62.5%). The second phase of this study was a phenomenological approach to understanding administrators' and physical education teachers' perceptions to teacher evaluation specific to physical education. The participants in this study were administrators and physical education teachers from an urban school district. An informal survey and formal semi-structured interviews were used to reveal perceptions of teacher evaluation specific to physical education. Evidence from the administrator's informal survey and formal semi-structured interviews revealed four common themes: (1) "I value PE, but I live in reality" (administrators value physical education, but practice in reality); (2) "good teaching is good teaching"; (3) "I know my limitations, and I want
eed help" (relative to teacher evaluation in PE); and (4) where's the training beef? Evidence from the physical education teacher's informal survey and formal semi-structured interviews revealed three common themes: (a) physical education is valued, but not prioritized; (b) teacher evaluation in physical education is "greatly needed, yet not transparent; (c) physical educators are not confident in their evaluator.
eed help" (relative to teacher evaluation in PE); and (4) where's the training beef? Evidence from the physical education teacher's informal survey and formal semi-structured interviews revealed three common themes: (a) physical education is valued, but not prioritized; (b) teacher evaluation in physical education is "greatly needed, yet not transparent; (c) physical educators are not confident in their evaluator.
ContributorsNorris, Jason (Author) / Van Der Mars, Hans (Thesis advisor) / Beardsley, Audrey (Thesis advisor) / Kulinna, Pamela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014