Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Operations Research
- Creators: Ju, Feng
Description
This research is to address the design optimization of systems for a specified reliability level, considering the dynamic nature of component failure rates. In case of designing a mechanical system (especially a load-sharing system), the failure of one component will lead to increase in probability of failure of remaining components. Many engineering systems like aircrafts, automobiles, and construction bridges will experience this phenomenon.
In order to design these systems, the Reliability-Based Design Optimization framework using Sequential Optimization and Reliability Assessment (SORA) method is developed. The dynamic nature of component failure probability is considered in the system reliability model. The Stress-Strength Interference (SSI) theory is used to build the limit state functions of components and the First Order Reliability Method (FORM) lies at the heart of reliability assessment. Also, in situations where the user needs to determine the optimum number of components and reduce component redundancy, this method can be used to optimally allocate the required number of components to carry the system load. The main advantage of this method is that the computational efficiency is high and also any optimization and reliability assessment technique can be incorporated. Different cases of numerical examples are provided to validate the methodology.
In order to design these systems, the Reliability-Based Design Optimization framework using Sequential Optimization and Reliability Assessment (SORA) method is developed. The dynamic nature of component failure probability is considered in the system reliability model. The Stress-Strength Interference (SSI) theory is used to build the limit state functions of components and the First Order Reliability Method (FORM) lies at the heart of reliability assessment. Also, in situations where the user needs to determine the optimum number of components and reduce component redundancy, this method can be used to optimally allocate the required number of components to carry the system load. The main advantage of this method is that the computational efficiency is high and also any optimization and reliability assessment technique can be incorporated. Different cases of numerical examples are provided to validate the methodology.
ContributorsBala Subramaniyan, Arun (Author) / Pan, Rong (Thesis advisor) / Askin, Ronald (Committee member) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Efforts to enhance the quality of life and promote better health have led to improved water quality standards. Adequate daily fluid intake, primarily from tap water, is crucial for human health. By improving drinking water quality, negative health effects associated with consuming inadequate water can be mitigated. Although the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets and enforces federal water quality limits at water treatment plants, water quality reaching end users degrades during the water delivery process, emphasizing the need for proactive control systems in buildings to ensure safe drinking water.Future commercial and institutional buildings are anticipated to feature real-time water quality sensors, automated flushing and filtration systems, temperature control devices, and chemical boosters. Integrating these technologies with a reliable water quality control system that optimizes the use of chemical additives, filtration, flushing, and temperature adjustments ensures users consistently have access to water of adequate quality. Additionally, existing buildings can be retrofitted with these technologies at a reasonable cost, guaranteeing user safety.
In the absence of smart buildings with the required technology, Chapter 2 describes developing an EPANET-MSX (a multi-species extension of EPA’s water simulation tool) model for a typical 5-story building. Chapter 3 involves creating accurate nonlinear approximation models of EPANET-MSX’s complex fluid dynamics and chemical reactions and developing an open-loop water quality control system that can regulate the water quality based on the approximated state of water quality. To address potential sudden changes in water quality, improve predictions, and reduce the gap between approximated and true state of water quality, a feedback control loop is developed in Chapter 4.
Lastly, this dissertation includes the development of a reinforcement learning (RL) based water quality control system for cases where the approximation models prove inadequate and cause instability during implementation with a real building water network. The RL-based control system can be implemented in various buildings without the need to develop new hydraulic models and can handle the stochastic nature of water demand, ensuring the proactive control system’s effectiveness in maintaining water quality within safe limits for consumption.
ContributorsGhasemzadeh, Kiarash (Author) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Thesis advisor) / Boyer, Treavor (Committee member) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
In this dissertation, a cyber-physical system called MIDAS (Managing Interacting Demand And Supply) has been developed, where the “supply” refers to the transportation infrastructure including traffic controls while the “demand” refers to its dynamic traffic loads. The strength of MIDAS lies in its ability to proactively control and manage mixed vehicular traffic, having various levels of autonomy, through traffic intersections. Using real-time traffic control algorithms MIDAS minimizes wait times, congestion, and travel times on existing roadways. For traffic engineers, efficient control of complicated traffic movements used at diamond interchanges (DI), which interface streets with freeways, is challenging for normal human driven vehicular traffic, let alone for communicationally-connected vehicles (CVs) due to stochastic demand and uncertainties. This dissertation first develops a proactive traffic control algorithm, MIDAS, using forward-recursion dynamic programming (DP), for scheduling large set of traffic movements of non-connected vehicles and CVs at the DIs, over a finite-time horizon. MIDAS captures measurements from fixed detectors and captures Lagrangian measurements from CVs, to estimate link travel times, arrival times and turning movements. Simulation study shows MIDAS’ outperforms (a) a current optimal state-of-art optimal fixed-cycle time control scheme, and (b) a state-of-art traffic adaptive cycle-free scheme.
Subsequently, this dissertation addresses the challenges of improving the road capacity by platooning fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), resulting in smaller headways and greater road utilization. With the MIDAS AI (Autonomous Intersection) control, an effective platooning strategy is developed, and optimal release sequence of AVs is determined using a new forward-recursive DP that minimizes the time-loss delays of AVs. MIDAS AI evaluates the DP decisions every second and communicates optimal actions to the AVs.
Although MIDAS AI’s exact DP achieves optimal solution in almost real-time compared to other exact algorithms, it suffers from scalability. To address this challenge, the dissertation then develops MIDAS RAIC (Reinforced Autonomous Intersection Control), a deep reinforcement learning based real-time dynamic traffic control system for AVs at an intersection. Simulation results show the proposed deep Q-learning architecture trains MIDAS RAIC to learn a near-optimal policy that minimizes the total cumulative time loss delay and performs nearly as well as the MIDAS AI.
ContributorsPotluri, Viswanath (Author) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Thesis advisor) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Zhou, Xuesong (Committee member) / Sefair, Jorge (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The use of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) is a pillar of modern health care. Annually, the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients are saved through ready access to safe, fresh, blood-type compatible RBCs. Worldwide, hospitals have the common goal to better utilize available blood units by maximizing patients served and reducing blood wastage. Managing blood is challenging because blood is perishable, its supply is stochastic and its demand pattern is highly uncertain. Additionally, RBCs are typed and patient compatibility is required.
This research focuses on improving blood inventory management at the hospital level. It explores the importance of hospital characteristics, such as demand rate and blood-type distribution in supply and demand, for improving RBC inventory management. Available inventory models make simplifying assumptions; they tend to be general and do not utilize available data that could improve blood delivery. This dissertation develops useful and realistic models that incorporate data characterizing the hospital inventory position, distribution of blood types of donors and the population being served.
The dissertation contributions can be grouped into three areas. First, simulations are used to characterize the benefits of demand forecasting. In addition to forecast accuracy, it shows that characteristics such as forecast horizon, the age of replenishment units, and the percentage of demand that is forecastable influence the benefits resulting from demand variability reduction.
Second, it develops Markov decision models for improved allocation policies under emergency conditions, where only the units on the shelf are available for dispensing. In this situation the RBC perishability has no impact due to the short timeline for decision making. Improved location-specific policies are demonstrated via simulation models for two emergency event types: mass casualty events and pandemic influenza.
Third, improved allocation policies under normal conditions are found using Markov decision models that incorporate temporal dynamics. In this case, hospitals receive replenishment and units age and outdate. The models are solved using Approximate Dynamic Programming with model-free approximate policy iteration, using machine learning algorithms to approximate value or policy functions. These are the first stock- and age-dependent allocation policies that engage substitution between blood type groups to improve inventory performance.
This research focuses on improving blood inventory management at the hospital level. It explores the importance of hospital characteristics, such as demand rate and blood-type distribution in supply and demand, for improving RBC inventory management. Available inventory models make simplifying assumptions; they tend to be general and do not utilize available data that could improve blood delivery. This dissertation develops useful and realistic models that incorporate data characterizing the hospital inventory position, distribution of blood types of donors and the population being served.
The dissertation contributions can be grouped into three areas. First, simulations are used to characterize the benefits of demand forecasting. In addition to forecast accuracy, it shows that characteristics such as forecast horizon, the age of replenishment units, and the percentage of demand that is forecastable influence the benefits resulting from demand variability reduction.
Second, it develops Markov decision models for improved allocation policies under emergency conditions, where only the units on the shelf are available for dispensing. In this situation the RBC perishability has no impact due to the short timeline for decision making. Improved location-specific policies are demonstrated via simulation models for two emergency event types: mass casualty events and pandemic influenza.
Third, improved allocation policies under normal conditions are found using Markov decision models that incorporate temporal dynamics. In this case, hospitals receive replenishment and units age and outdate. The models are solved using Approximate Dynamic Programming with model-free approximate policy iteration, using machine learning algorithms to approximate value or policy functions. These are the first stock- and age-dependent allocation policies that engage substitution between blood type groups to improve inventory performance.
ContributorsDumkrieger, Gina (Author) / Mirchandani, Pitu B. (Thesis advisor) / Fowler, John (Committee member) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Modern manufacturing systems are part of a complex supply chain where customer preferences are constantly evolving. The rapidly evolving market demands manufacturing organizations to be increasingly agile and flexible. Medium term capacity planning for manufacturing systems employ queueing network models based on stationary demand assumptions. However, these stationary demand assumptions are not very practical for rapidly evolving supply chains. Nonstationary demand processes provide a reasonable framework to capture the time-varying nature of modern markets. The analysis of queues and queueing networks with time-varying parameters is mathematically intractable. In this dissertation, heuristics which draw upon existing steady state queueing results are proposed to provide computationally efficient approximations for dynamic multi-product manufacturing systems modeled as time-varying queueing networks with multiple customer classes (product types). This dissertation addresses the problem of performance evaluation of such manufacturing systems.
This dissertation considers the two key aspects of dynamic multi-product manufacturing systems - namely, performance evaluation and optimal server resource allocation. First, the performance evaluation of systems with infinite queueing room and a first-come first-serve service paradigm is considered. Second, systems with finite queueing room and priorities between product types are considered. Finally, the optimal server allocation problem is addressed in the context of dynamic multi-product manufacturing systems. The performance estimates developed in the earlier part of the dissertation are leveraged in a simulated annealing algorithm framework to obtain server resource allocations.
This dissertation considers the two key aspects of dynamic multi-product manufacturing systems - namely, performance evaluation and optimal server resource allocation. First, the performance evaluation of systems with infinite queueing room and a first-come first-serve service paradigm is considered. Second, systems with finite queueing room and priorities between product types are considered. Finally, the optimal server allocation problem is addressed in the context of dynamic multi-product manufacturing systems. The performance estimates developed in the earlier part of the dissertation are leveraged in a simulated annealing algorithm framework to obtain server resource allocations.
ContributorsJampani Hanumantha, Girish (Author) / Askin, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Drinking water quality violations are widespread in the United States and elsewhere in the world. More than half of Americans are not confident in the safety of their tap water, especially after the 2014 Flint, Michigan water crisis. Other than accidental contamination events, stagnation is a major cause of water quality degradation. Thus, there is a pressing need to build a real-time control system that can make control decisions quickly and proactively so that the quality of water can be maintained at all times. However, towards this end, modeling the dynamics of water distribution systems are very challenging due to the complex fluid dynamics and chemical reactions in the system. This challenge needs to be addressed before moving on to modeling the optimal control problem. The research in this dissertation leverages statistical machine learning approaches in approximating the complex water system dynamics and then develops different optimization models for proactive and real-time water quality control. This research focuses on two effective ways to maintain water quality, flushing of taps and injection of chlorine or other disinfectants; both of these actions decrease the equivalent “water age”, a useful proxy for water quality related to bacteria growth. This research first develops linear predictive models for water quality and subsequently linear programming optimization models for proactive water age control via flushing. The second part of the research considers both flushing and disinfectant injections in the control problem and develops mixed integer quadratically constrained optimization models for controlling water age. Different control strategies for disinfectant injections are also evaluated: binary on-off injections and continuous injections. In the third part of the research, water demand is assumed to be uncertain and stochastic. The developed approach to control the system relates to learning the optimal real-time flushing decisions by combing reinforced temporal-difference learning approaches with linear value function approximation for solving approximately the underlying Markov decision processes. Computational results on widely used simulation models demonstrates the developed control systems were indeed effective for water quality control with known demands as well as when demands are uncertain and stochastic.
ContributorsLi, Xiushuang (Author) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Thesis advisor) / Boyer, Treavor (Committee member) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Natural disasters are occurring increasingly around the world, causing significant economiclosses. To alleviate their adverse effect, it is crucial to plan what should be done in response
to them in a proactive manner. This research aims at developing proactive and real-time
recovery algorithms for large-scale power networks exposed to weather events considering
uncertainty. These algorithms support the recovery decisions to mitigate the disaster impact, resulting in faster recovery of the network. The challenges associated with developing
these algorithms are summarized below:
1. Even ignoring uncertainty, when operating cost of the network is considered the problem will be a bi-level optimization which is NP-hard.
2. To meet the requirement for real-time decision making under uncertainty, the problem could be formulated a Stochastic Dynamic Program with the aim to minimize
the total cost. However, considering the operating cost of the network violates the
underlying assumptions of this approach.
3. Stochastic Dynamic Programming approach is also not applicable to realistic problem sizes, due to the curse of dimensionality.
4. Uncertainty-based approaches for failure modeling, rely on point-generation of failures and ignore the network structure.
To deal with the first challenge, in chapter 2, a heuristic solution framework is proposed, and its performance is evaluated by conducting numerical experiments. To address the second challenge, in chapter 3, after formulating the problem as a Stochastic Dynamic Program, an approximated dynamic programming heuristic is proposed to solve the problem. Numerical experiments on synthetic and realistic test-beds, show the satisfactory performance of the proposed approach. To address the third challenge, in chapter 4, an efficient base heuristic policy and an aggregation scheme in the action space is proposed. Numerical experiments on a realistic test-bed verify the ability of the proposed method to
recover the network more efficiently. Finally, to address the fourth challenge, in chapter 5, a simulation-based model is proposed that using historical data and accounting for the interaction between network components, allows for analyzing the impact of adverse events on regional service level. A realistic case study is then conducted to showcase the applicability of the approach.
ContributorsInanlouganji, Alireza (Author) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Thesis advisor) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Reddy, T. Agami (Committee member) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021