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Every year, millions of guests visit theme parks internationally. Within that massive population, accidents and emergencies are bound to occur. Choosing the correct location for emergency responders inside of the park could mean the difference between life and death. In an effort to provide the utmost safety for the guests

Every year, millions of guests visit theme parks internationally. Within that massive population, accidents and emergencies are bound to occur. Choosing the correct location for emergency responders inside of the park could mean the difference between life and death. In an effort to provide the utmost safety for the guests of a park, it is important to make the best decision when selecting the location for emergency response crews. A theme park is different from a regular residential or commercial area because the crowds and shows block certain routes, and they change throughout the day. We propose an optimization model that selects staging locations for emergency medical responders in a theme park to maximize the number of responses that can occur within a pre-specified time. The staging areas are selected from a candidate set of restricted access locations where the responders can store their equipment. Our solution approach considers all routes to access any park location, including areas that are unavailable to a regular guest. Theme parks are a highly dynamic environment. Because special events occurring in the park at certain hours (e.g., parades) might impact the responders' travel times, our model's decisions also include the time dimension in the location and re-location of the responders. Our solution provides the optimal location of the responders for each time partition, including backup responders. When an optimal solution is found, the model is also designed to consider alternate optimal solutions that provide a more balanced workload for the crews.
ContributorsLivingston, Noah Russell (Author) / Sefair, Jorge (Thesis director) / Askin, Ronald (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems and Operations Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
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Description
A principal goal of this dissertation is to study wireless network design and optimization with the focus on two perspectives: 1) socially-aware mobile networking and computing; 2) security and privacy in wireless networking. Under this common theme, this dissertation can be broadly organized into three parts.

The first part studies socially-aware

A principal goal of this dissertation is to study wireless network design and optimization with the focus on two perspectives: 1) socially-aware mobile networking and computing; 2) security and privacy in wireless networking. Under this common theme, this dissertation can be broadly organized into three parts.

The first part studies socially-aware mobile networking and computing. First, it studies random access control and power control under a social group utility maximization (SGUM) framework. The socially-aware Nash equilibria (SNEs) are derived and analyzed. Then, it studies mobile crowdsensing under an incentive mechanism that exploits social trust assisted reciprocity (STAR). The efficacy of the STAR mechanism is thoroughly investigated. Next, it studies mobile users' data usage behaviors under the impact of social services and the wireless operator's pricing. Based on a two-stage Stackelberg game formulation, the user demand equilibrium (UDE) is analyzed in Stage II and the optimal pricing strategy is developed in Stage I. Last, it studies opportunistic cooperative networking under an optimal stopping framework with two-level decision-making. For both cases with or without dedicated relays, the optimal relaying strategies are derived and analyzed.

The second part studies radar sensor network coverage for physical security. First, it studies placement of bistatic radar (BR) sensor networks for barrier coverage. The optimality of line-based placement is analyzed, and the optimal placement of BRs on a line segment is characterized. Then, it studies the coverage of radar sensor networks that exploits the Doppler effect. Based on a Doppler coverage model, an efficient method is devised to characterize Doppler-covered regions and an algorithm is developed to find the minimum radar density required for Doppler coverage.

The third part studies cyber security and privacy in socially-aware networking and computing. First, it studies random access control, cooperative jamming, and spectrum access under an extended SGUM framework that incorporates negative social ties. The SNEs are derived and analyzed. Then, it studies pseudonym change for personalized location privacy under the SGUM framework. The SNEs are analyzed and an efficient algorithm is developed to find an SNE with desirable properties.
ContributorsGong, Xiaowen (Author) / Zhang, Junshan (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
While network problems have been addressed using a central administrative domain with a single objective, the devices in most networks are actually not owned by a single entity but by many individual entities. These entities make their decisions independently and selfishly, and maybe cooperate with a small group of other

While network problems have been addressed using a central administrative domain with a single objective, the devices in most networks are actually not owned by a single entity but by many individual entities. These entities make their decisions independently and selfishly, and maybe cooperate with a small group of other entities only when this form of coalition yields a better return. The interaction among multiple independent decision-makers necessitates the use of game theory, including economic notions related to markets and incentives. In this dissertation, we are interested in modeling, analyzing, addressing network problems caused by the selfish behavior of network entities. First, we study how the selfish behavior of network entities affects the system performance while users are competing for limited resource. For this resource allocation domain, we aim to study the selfish routing problem in networks with fair queuing on links, the relay assignment problem in cooperative networks, and the channel allocation problem in wireless networks. Another important aspect of this dissertation is the study of designing efficient mechanisms to incentivize network entities to achieve certain system objective. For this incentive mechanism domain, we aim to motivate wireless devices to serve as relays for cooperative communication, and to recruit smartphones for crowdsourcing. In addition, we apply different game theoretic approaches to problems in security and privacy domain. For this domain, we aim to analyze how a user could defend against a smart jammer, who can quickly learn about the user's transmission power. We also design mechanisms to encourage mobile phone users to participate in location privacy protection, in order to achieve k-anonymity.
ContributorsYang, Dejun (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Global optimization (programming) has been attracting the attention of researchers for almost a century. Since linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) had been well studied in early stages, MILP methods and software tools had improved in their efficiency in the past few years. They are now fast

Global optimization (programming) has been attracting the attention of researchers for almost a century. Since linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) had been well studied in early stages, MILP methods and software tools had improved in their efficiency in the past few years. They are now fast and robust even for problems with millions of variables. Therefore, it is desirable to use MILP software to solve mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. For an MINLP problem to be solved by an MILP solver, its nonlinear functions must be transformed to linear ones. The most common method to do the transformation is the piecewise linear approximation (PLA). This dissertation will summarize the types of optimization and the most important tools and methods, and will discuss in depth the PLA tool. PLA will be done using nonuniform partitioning of the domain of the variables involved in the function that will be approximated. Also partial PLA models that approximate only parts of a complicated optimization problem will be introduced. Computational experiments will be done and the results will show that nonuniform partitioning and partial PLA can be beneficial.
ContributorsAlkhalifa, Loay (Author) / Mittelmann, Hans (Thesis advisor) / Armbruster, Hans (Committee member) / Escobedo, Adolfo (Committee member) / Renaut, Rosemary (Committee member) / Sefair, Jorge (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Breeding seeds to include desirable traits (increased yield, drought/temperature resistance, etc.) is a growing and important method of establishing food security. However, besides breeder intuition, few decision-making tools exist that can provide the breeders with credible evidence to make decisions on which seeds to progress to further stages of development.

Breeding seeds to include desirable traits (increased yield, drought/temperature resistance, etc.) is a growing and important method of establishing food security. However, besides breeder intuition, few decision-making tools exist that can provide the breeders with credible evidence to make decisions on which seeds to progress to further stages of development. This thesis attempts to create a chance-constrained knapsack optimization model, which the breeder can use to make better decisions about seed progression and help reduce the levels of risk in their selections. The model’s objective is to select seed varieties out of a larger pool of varieties and maximize the average yield of the “knapsack” based on meeting some risk criteria. Two models are created for different cases. First is the risk reduction model which seeks to reduce the risk of getting a bad yield but still maximize the total yield. The second model considers the possibility of adverse environmental effects and seeks to mitigate the negative effects it could have on the total yield. In practice, breeders can use these models to better quantify uncertainty in selecting seed varieties
ContributorsOzcan, Ozkan Meric (Author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis advisor) / Gel, Esma (Thesis advisor) / Sefair, Jorge (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Nowadays, wireless communications and networks have been widely used in our daily lives. One of the most important topics related to networking research is using optimization tools to improve the utilization of network resources. In this dissertation, we concentrate on optimization for resource-constrained wireless networks, and study two fundamental resource-allocation

Nowadays, wireless communications and networks have been widely used in our daily lives. One of the most important topics related to networking research is using optimization tools to improve the utilization of network resources. In this dissertation, we concentrate on optimization for resource-constrained wireless networks, and study two fundamental resource-allocation problems: 1) distributed routing optimization and 2) anypath routing optimization. The study on the distributed routing optimization problem is composed of two main thrusts, targeted at understanding distributed routing and resource optimization for multihop wireless networks. The first thrust is dedicated to understanding the impact of full-duplex transmission on wireless network resource optimization. We propose two provably good distributed algorithms to optimize the resources in a full-duplex wireless network. We prove their optimality and also provide network status analysis using dual space information. The second thrust is dedicated to understanding the influence of network entity load constraints on network resource allocation and routing computation. We propose a provably good distributed algorithm to allocate wireless resources. In addition, we propose a new subgradient optimization framework, which can provide findgrained convergence, optimality, and dual space information at each iteration. This framework can provide a useful theoretical foundation for many networking optimization problems. The study on the anypath routing optimization problem is composed of two main thrusts. The first thrust is dedicated to understanding the computational complexity of multi-constrained anypath routing and designing approximate solutions. We prove that this problem is NP-hard when the number of constraints is larger than one. We present two polynomial time K-approximation algorithms. One is a centralized algorithm while the other one is a distributed algorithm. For the second thrust, we study directional anypath routing and present a cross-layer design of MAC and routing. For the MAC layer, we present a directional anycast MAC. For the routing layer, we propose two polynomial time routing algorithms to compute directional anypaths based on two antenna models, and prove their ptimality based on the packet delivery ratio metric.
ContributorsFang, Xi (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013