Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Runger, George C.
Description
Accelerated life testing (ALT) is the process of subjecting a product to stress conditions (temperatures, voltage, pressure etc.) in excess of its normal operating levels to accelerate failures. Product failure typically results from multiple stresses acting on it simultaneously. Multi-stress factor ALTs are challenging as they increase the number of experiments due to the stress factor-level combinations resulting from the increased number of factors. Chapter 2 provides an approach for designing ALT plans with multiple stresses utilizing Latin hypercube designs that reduces the simulation cost without loss of statistical efficiency. A comparison to full grid and large-sample approximation methods illustrates the approach computational cost gain and flexibility in determining optimal stress settings with less assumptions and more intuitive unit allocations.
Implicit in the design criteria of current ALT designs is the assumption that the form of the acceleration model is correct. This is unrealistic assumption in many real-world problems. Chapter 3 provides an approach for ALT optimum design for model discrimination. We utilize the Hellinger distance measure between predictive distributions. The optimal ALT plan at three stress levels was determined and its performance was compared to good compromise plan, best traditional plan and well-known 4:2:1 compromise test plans. In the case of linear versus quadratic ALT models, the proposed method increased the test plan's ability to distinguish among competing models and provided better guidance as to which model is appropriate for the experiment.
Chapter 4 extends the approach of Chapter 3 to ALT sequential model discrimination. An initial experiment is conducted to provide maximum possible information with respect to model discrimination. The follow-on experiment is planned by leveraging the most current information to allow for Bayesian model comparison through posterior model probability ratios. Results showed that performance of plan is adversely impacted by the amount of censoring in the data, in the case of linear vs. quadratic model form at three levels of constant stress, sequential testing can improve model recovery rate by approximately 8% when data is complete, but no apparent advantage in adopting sequential testing was found in the case of right-censored data when censoring is in excess of a certain amount.
Implicit in the design criteria of current ALT designs is the assumption that the form of the acceleration model is correct. This is unrealistic assumption in many real-world problems. Chapter 3 provides an approach for ALT optimum design for model discrimination. We utilize the Hellinger distance measure between predictive distributions. The optimal ALT plan at three stress levels was determined and its performance was compared to good compromise plan, best traditional plan and well-known 4:2:1 compromise test plans. In the case of linear versus quadratic ALT models, the proposed method increased the test plan's ability to distinguish among competing models and provided better guidance as to which model is appropriate for the experiment.
Chapter 4 extends the approach of Chapter 3 to ALT sequential model discrimination. An initial experiment is conducted to provide maximum possible information with respect to model discrimination. The follow-on experiment is planned by leveraging the most current information to allow for Bayesian model comparison through posterior model probability ratios. Results showed that performance of plan is adversely impacted by the amount of censoring in the data, in the case of linear vs. quadratic model form at three levels of constant stress, sequential testing can improve model recovery rate by approximately 8% when data is complete, but no apparent advantage in adopting sequential testing was found in the case of right-censored data when censoring is in excess of a certain amount.
ContributorsNasir, Ehab (Author) / Pan, Rong (Thesis advisor) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Kao, Ming-Hung (Committee member) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Every year, more than 11 million maritime containers and 11 million commercial trucks arrive to the United States, carrying all types of imported goods. As it would be costly to inspect every container, only a fraction of them are inspected before being allowed to proceed into the United States. This dissertation proposes a decision support system that aims to allocate the scarce inspection resources at a land POE (L-POE), to minimize the different costs associated with the inspection process, including those associated with delaying the entry of legitimate imports. Given the ubiquity of sensors in all aspects of the supply chain, it is necessary to have automated decision systems that incorporate the information provided by these sensors and other possible channels into the inspection planning process. The inspection planning system proposed in this dissertation decomposes the inspection effort allocation process into two phases: Primary and detailed inspection planning. The former helps decide what to inspect, and the latter how to conduct the inspections. A multi-objective optimization (MOO) model is developed for primary inspection planning. This model tries to balance the costs of conducting inspections, direct and expected, and the waiting time of the trucks. The resulting model is exploited in two different ways: One is to construct a complete or a partial efficient frontier for the MOO model with diversity of Pareto-optimal solutions maximized; the other is to evaluate a given inspection plan and provide possible suggestions for improvement. The methodologies are described in detail and case studies provided. The case studies show that this MOO based primary planning model can effectively pick out the non-conforming trucks to inspect, while balancing the costs and waiting time.
ContributorsXue, Liangjie (Author) / Villalobos, Jesus René (Thesis advisor) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Maltz, Arnold (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Temporal data are increasingly prevalent and important in analytics. Time series (TS) data are chronological sequences of observations and an important class of temporal data. Fields such as medicine, finance, learning science and multimedia naturally generate TS data. Each series provide a high-dimensional data vector that challenges the learning of the relevant patterns This dissertation proposes TS representations and methods for supervised TS analysis. The approaches combine new representations that handle translations and dilations of patterns with bag-of-features strategies and tree-based ensemble learning. This provides flexibility in handling time-warped patterns in a computationally efficient way. The ensemble learners provide a classification framework that can handle high-dimensional feature spaces, multiple classes and interaction between features. The proposed representations are useful for classification and interpretation of the TS data of varying complexity. The first contribution handles the problem of time warping with a feature-based approach. An interval selection and local feature extraction strategy is proposed to learn a bag-of-features representation. This is distinctly different from common similarity-based time warping. This allows for additional features (such as pattern location) to be easily integrated into the models. The learners have the capability to account for the temporal information through the recursive partitioning method. The second contribution focuses on the comprehensibility of the models. A new representation is integrated with local feature importance measures from tree-based ensembles, to diagnose and interpret time intervals that are important to the model. Multivariate time series (MTS) are especially challenging because the input consists of a collection of TS and both features within TS and interactions between TS can be important to models. Another contribution uses a different representation to produce computationally efficient strategies that learn a symbolic representation for MTS. Relationships between the multiple TS, nominal and missing values are handled with tree-based learners. Applications such as speech recognition, medical diagnosis and gesture recognition are used to illustrate the methods. Experimental results show that the TS representations and methods provide better results than competitive methods on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets. Moreover, the proposed approaches naturally provide solutions to similarity analysis, predictive pattern discovery and feature selection.
ContributorsBaydogan, Mustafa Gokce (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The complexity of supply chains (SC) has grown rapidly in recent years, resulting in an increased difficulty to evaluate and visualize performance. Consequently, analytical approaches to evaluate SC performance in near real time relative to targets and plans are important to detect and react to deviations in order to prevent major disruptions.
Manufacturing anomalies, inaccurate forecasts, and other problems can lead to SC disruptions. Traditional monitoring methods are not sufficient in this respect, because com- plex SCs feature changes in manufacturing tasks (dynamic complexity) and carry a large number of stock keeping units (detail complexity). Problems are easily confounded with normal system variations.
Motivated by these real challenges faced by modern SC, new surveillance solutions are proposed to detect system deviations that could lead to disruptions in a complex SC. To address supply-side deviations, the fitness of different statistics that can be extracted from the enterprise resource planning system is evaluated. A monitoring strategy is first proposed for SCs featuring high levels of dynamic complexity. This presents an opportunity for monitoring methods to be applied in a new, rich domain of SC management. Then a monitoring strategy, called Heat Map Contrasts (HMC), which converts monitoring into a series of classification problems, is used to monitor SCs with both high levels of dynamic and detail complexities. Data from a semiconductor SC simulator are used to compare the methods with other alternatives under various failure cases, and the results illustrate the viability of our methods.
To address demand-side deviations, a new method of quantifying forecast uncer- tainties using the progression of forecast updates is presented. It is illustrated that a rich amount of information is available in rolling horizon forecasts. Two proactive indicators of future forecast errors are extracted from the forecast stream. This quantitative method re- quires no knowledge of the forecasting model itself and has shown promising results when applied to two datasets consisting of real forecast updates.
Manufacturing anomalies, inaccurate forecasts, and other problems can lead to SC disruptions. Traditional monitoring methods are not sufficient in this respect, because com- plex SCs feature changes in manufacturing tasks (dynamic complexity) and carry a large number of stock keeping units (detail complexity). Problems are easily confounded with normal system variations.
Motivated by these real challenges faced by modern SC, new surveillance solutions are proposed to detect system deviations that could lead to disruptions in a complex SC. To address supply-side deviations, the fitness of different statistics that can be extracted from the enterprise resource planning system is evaluated. A monitoring strategy is first proposed for SCs featuring high levels of dynamic complexity. This presents an opportunity for monitoring methods to be applied in a new, rich domain of SC management. Then a monitoring strategy, called Heat Map Contrasts (HMC), which converts monitoring into a series of classification problems, is used to monitor SCs with both high levels of dynamic and detail complexities. Data from a semiconductor SC simulator are used to compare the methods with other alternatives under various failure cases, and the results illustrate the viability of our methods.
To address demand-side deviations, a new method of quantifying forecast uncer- tainties using the progression of forecast updates is presented. It is illustrated that a rich amount of information is available in rolling horizon forecasts. Two proactive indicators of future forecast errors are extracted from the forecast stream. This quantitative method re- quires no knowledge of the forecasting model itself and has shown promising results when applied to two datasets consisting of real forecast updates.
ContributorsLiu, Lei (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Janakiram, Mani (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Public health surveillance is a special case of the general problem where counts (or rates) of events are monitored for changes. Modern data complements event counts with many additional measurements (such as geographic, demographic, and others) that comprise high-dimensional covariates. This leads to an important challenge to detect a change that only occurs within a region, initially unspecified, defined by these covariates. Current methods are typically limited to spatial and/or temporal covariate information and often fail to use all the information available in modern data that can be paramount in unveiling these subtle changes. Additional complexities associated with modern health data that are often not accounted for by traditional methods include: covariates of mixed type, missing values, and high-order interactions among covariates. This work proposes a transform of public health surveillance to supervised learning, so that an appropriate learner can inherently address all the complexities described previously. At the same time, quantitative measures from the learner can be used to define signal criteria to detect changes in rates of events. A Feature Selection (FS) method is used to identify covariates that contribute to a model and to generate a signal. A measure of statistical significance is included to control false alarms. An alternative Percentile method identifies the specific cases that lead to changes using class probability estimates from tree-based ensembles. This second method is intended to be less computationally intensive and significantly simpler to implement. Finally, a third method labeled Rule-Based Feature Value Selection (RBFVS) is proposed for identifying the specific regions in high-dimensional space where the changes are occurring. Results on simulated examples are used to compare the FS method and the Percentile method. Note this work emphasizes the application of the proposed methods on public health surveillance. Nonetheless, these methods can easily be extended to a variety of applications where counts (or rates) of events are monitored for changes. Such problems commonly occur in domains such as manufacturing, economics, environmental systems, engineering, as well as in public health.
ContributorsDavila, Saylisse (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Committee member) / Young, Dennis (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
The Cognitive Decision Support (CDS) model is proposed. The model is widely applicable and scales to realistic, complex decision problems based on adaptive learning. The utility of a decision is discussed and four types of decisions associated with CDS model are identified. The CDS model is designed to learn decision utilities. Data enrichment is introduced to promote the effectiveness of learning. Grouping is introduced for large-scale decision learning. Introspection and adjustment are presented for adaptive learning. Triage recommendation is incorporated to indicate the trustworthiness of suggested decisions.
The CDS model and methodologies are integrated into an architecture using concepts from cognitive computing. The proposed architecture is implemented with an example use case to inventory management.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is discussed as an alternative, generalized adaptive learning engine for the CDS system to handle the complexity of many problems with unknown environments. An adaptive state dimension with context that can increase with newly available information is discussed. Several enhanced components for RL which are critical for complex use cases are integrated. Deep Q networks are embedded with the adaptive learning methodologies and applied to an example supply chain management problem on capacity planning.
A new approach using Ito stochastic processes is proposed as a more generalized method to generate non-stationary demands in various patterns that can be used in decision problems. The proposed method generates demands with varying non-stationary patterns, including trend, cyclical, seasonal, and irregular patterns. Conventional approaches are identified as special cases of the proposed method. Demands are illustrated in realistic settings for various decision models. Various statistical criteria are applied to filter the generated demands. The method is applied to a real-world example.
The CDS model and methodologies are integrated into an architecture using concepts from cognitive computing. The proposed architecture is implemented with an example use case to inventory management.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is discussed as an alternative, generalized adaptive learning engine for the CDS system to handle the complexity of many problems with unknown environments. An adaptive state dimension with context that can increase with newly available information is discussed. Several enhanced components for RL which are critical for complex use cases are integrated. Deep Q networks are embedded with the adaptive learning methodologies and applied to an example supply chain management problem on capacity planning.
A new approach using Ito stochastic processes is proposed as a more generalized method to generate non-stationary demands in various patterns that can be used in decision problems. The proposed method generates demands with varying non-stationary patterns, including trend, cyclical, seasonal, and irregular patterns. Conventional approaches are identified as special cases of the proposed method. Demands are illustrated in realistic settings for various decision models. Various statistical criteria are applied to filter the generated demands. The method is applied to a real-world example.
ContributorsKee, Seho (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Escobedo, Adolfo (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Janakiram, Mani (Committee member) / Rogers, Dale (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020