Matching Items (123)
Description
The price based marketplace has dominated the construction industry. The majority of owners use price based practices of management (expectation and decision making, control, direction, and inspection.) The price based/management and control paradigm has not worked. Clients have now been moving toward the best value environment (hire contractors who know what they are doing, who preplan, and manage and minimize risk and deviation.) Owners are trying to move from client direction and control to hiring an expert and allowing them to do the quality control/risk management. The movement of environments changes the paradigm for the contractors from a reactive to a proactive, from a bureaucratic
on-accountable to an accountable position, from a relationship based
on-measuring to a measuring entity, and to a contractor who manages and minimizes the risk that they do not control. Years of price based practices have caused poor quality and low performance in the construction industry. This research identifies what is a best value contractor or vendor, what factors make up a best value vendor, and the methodology to transform a vendor to a best value vendor. It will use deductive logic, a case study to confirm the logic and the proposed methodology.
on-accountable to an accountable position, from a relationship based
on-measuring to a measuring entity, and to a contractor who manages and minimizes the risk that they do not control. Years of price based practices have caused poor quality and low performance in the construction industry. This research identifies what is a best value contractor or vendor, what factors make up a best value vendor, and the methodology to transform a vendor to a best value vendor. It will use deductive logic, a case study to confirm the logic and the proposed methodology.
ContributorsPauli, Michele (Author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis advisor) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
As global competition continues to grow more disruptive, organizational change is an ever-present reality that affects companies in all industries at both the operational and strategic level. Organizational change capabilities have become a necessary aspect of existence for organizations in all industries worldwide. Research suggests that more than half of all organizational change efforts fail to achieve their original intended results, with some studies quoting failure rates as high as 70 percent. Exasperating this problem is the fact that no single change methodology has been universally accepted. This thesis examines two aspect of organizational change: the implementation of tactical and strategic initiatives, primarily focusing on successful tactical implementation techniques. This research proposed that tactical issues typically dominate the focus of change agents and recipients alike, often to the detriment of strategic level initiatives that are vital to the overall value and success of the organizational change effort. The Delphi method was employed to develop a tool to facilitate the initial implementation of organizational change such that tactical barriers were minimized and available resources for strategic initiatives were maximized. Feedback from two expert groups of change agents and change facilitators was solicited to develop the tool and evaluate its impact. Preliminary pilot testing of the tool confirmed the proposal and successfully served to minimize tactical barriers to organizational change.
ContributorsLines, Brian (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth T. (Thesis advisor) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Introductory programming courses, also known as CS1, have a specific set of expected outcomes related to the learning of the most basic and essential computational concepts in computer science (CS). However, two of the most often heard complaints in such courses are that (1) they are divorced from the reality of application and (2) they make the learning of the basic concepts tedious. The concepts introduced in CS1 courses are highly abstract and not easily comprehensible. In general, the difficulty is intrinsic to the field of computing, often described as "too mathematical or too abstract." This dissertation presents a small-scale mixed method study conducted during the fall 2009 semester of CS1 courses at Arizona State University. This study explored and assessed students' comprehension of three core computational concepts - abstraction, arrays of objects, and inheritance - in both algorithm design and problem solving. Through this investigation students' profiles were categorized based on their scores and based on their mistakes categorized into instances of five computational thinking concepts: abstraction, algorithm, scalability, linguistics, and reasoning. It was shown that even though the notion of computational thinking is not explicit in the curriculum, participants possessed and/or developed this skill through the learning and application of the CS1 core concepts. Furthermore, problem-solving experiences had a direct impact on participants' knowledge skills, explanation skills, and confidence. Implications for teaching CS1 and for future research are also considered.
ContributorsBillionniere, Elodie V (Author) / Collofello, James (Thesis advisor) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam G. (Thesis advisor) / VanLehn, Kurt (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT Facility managers have an important job in today's competitive business world by caring for the backbone of the corporation's capital. Maintaining assets and the support efforts cause facility managers to fight an uphill battle to prove the worth of their organizations. This thesis will discuss the important and flexible use of measurement and leadership reports and the benefits of justifying the work required to maintain or upgrade a facility. The task is streamlined by invoking accountability to subject experts. The facility manager must trust in the ability of his or her work force to get the job done. However, with accountability comes increased risk. Even though accountability may not alleviate total control or cease reactionary actions, facility managers can develop key leadership based reports to reassign accountability and measure subject matter experts while simultaneously reducing reactionary actions leading to increased cost. Identifying and reassigning risk that are not controlled to subject matter experts is imperative for effective facility management leadership and allows facility managers to create an accurate and solid facility management plan, supports the organization's succession plan, and allows the organization to focus on key competencies.
ContributorsTellefsen, Thor (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Thesis advisor) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The complexity of the systems that software engineers build has continuously grown since the inception of the field. What has not changed is the engineers' mental capacity to operate on about seven distinct pieces of information at a time. The widespread use of UML has led to more abstract software design activities, however the same cannot be said for reverse engineering activities. The introduction of abstraction to reverse engineering will allow the engineer to move farther away from the details of the system, increasing his ability to see the role that domain level concepts play in the system. In this thesis, we present a technique that facilitates filtering of classes from existing systems at the source level based on their relationship to concepts in the domain via a classification method using machine learning. We showed that concepts can be identified using a machine learning classifier based on source level metrics. We developed an Eclipse plugin to assist with the process of manually classifying Java source code, and collecting metrics and classifications into a standard file format. We developed an Eclipse plugin to act as a concept identifier that visually indicates a class as a domain concept or not. We minimized the size of training sets to ensure a useful approach in practice. This allowed us to determine that a training set of 7:5 to 10% is nearly as effective as a training set representing 50% of the system. We showed that random selection is the most consistent and effective means of selecting a training set. We found that KNN is the most consistent performer among the learning algorithms tested. We determined the optimal feature set for this classification problem. We discussed two possible structures besides a one to one mapping of domain knowledge to implementation. We showed that classes representing more than one concept are simply concepts at differing levels of abstraction. We also discussed composite concepts representing a domain concept implemented by more than one class. We showed that these composite concepts are difficult to detect because the problem is NP-complete.
ContributorsCarey, Maurice (Author) / Colbourn, Charles (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Over the past couple of decades, quality has been an area of increased focus. Multiple models and approaches have been proposed to measure the quality in the construction industry. This paper focuses on determining the quality of one of the types of roofing systems used in the construction industry, i.e. Sprayed Polyurethane Foam Roofs (SPF roofs). Thirty seven urethane coated SPF roofs that were installed in 2005 / 2006 were visually inspected to measure the percentage of blisters and repairs three times over a period of 4 year, 6 year and 7 year marks. A repairing criteria was established after a 6 year mark based on the data that were reported to contractors as vulnerable roofs. Furthermore, the relation between four possible contributing time of installation factors i.e. contractor, demographics, season, and difficulty (number of penetrations and size of the roof in square feet) that could affect the quality of the roof was determined. Demographics and difficulty did not affect the quality of the roofs whereas the contractor and the season when the roof was installed did affect the quality of the roofs.
ContributorsGajjar, Dhaval (Author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis advisor) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Biological systems are complex in many dimensions as endless transportation and communication networks all function simultaneously. Our ability to intervene within both healthy and diseased systems is tied directly to our ability to understand and model core functionality. The progress in increasingly accurate and thorough high-throughput measurement technologies has provided a deluge of data from which we may attempt to infer a representation of the true genetic regulatory system. A gene regulatory network model, if accurate enough, may allow us to perform hypothesis testing in the form of computational experiments. Of great importance to modeling accuracy is the acknowledgment of biological contexts within the models -- i.e. recognizing the heterogeneous nature of the true biological system and the data it generates. This marriage of engineering, mathematics and computer science with systems biology creates a cycle of progress between computer simulation and lab experimentation, rapidly translating interventions and treatments for patients from the bench to the bedside. This dissertation will first discuss the landscape for modeling the biological system, explore the identification of targets for intervention in Boolean network models of biological interactions, and explore context specificity both in new graphical depictions of models embodying context-specific genomic regulation and in novel analysis approaches designed to reveal embedded contextual information. Overall, the dissertation will explore a spectrum of biological modeling with a goal towards therapeutic intervention, with both formal and informal notions of biological context, in such a way that will enable future work to have an even greater impact in terms of direct patient benefit on an individualized level.
ContributorsVerdicchio, Michael (Author) / Kim, Seungchan (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Stolovitzky, Gustavo (Committee member) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Laboratory automation systems have seen a lot of technological advances in recent times. As a result, the software that is written for them are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Existing software architectures and standards are targeted to a wider domain of software development and need to be customized in order to use them for developing software for laboratory automation systems. This thesis proposes an architecture that is based on existing software architectural paradigms and is specifically tailored to developing software for a laboratory automation system. The architecture is based on fairly autonomous software components that can be distributed across multiple computers. The components in the architecture make use of asynchronous communication methodologies that are facilitated by passing messages between one another. The architecture can be used to develop software that is distributed, responsive and thread-safe. The thesis also proposes a framework that has been developed to implement the ideas proposed by the architecture. The framework is used to develop software that is scalable, distributed, responsive and thread-safe. The framework currently has components to control very commonly used laboratory automation devices such as mechanical stages, cameras, and also to do common laboratory automation functionalities such as imaging.
ContributorsKuppuswamy, Venkataramanan (Author) / Meldrum, Deirdre (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Johnson, Roger (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Current information on successful leadership and management practices is contradictory and inconsistent, which makes difficult to understand what successful business practices are and what are not. The purpose of this study is to identify a simple process that quickly and logically identifies consistent and inconsistent leadership and management criteria. The hypothesis proposed is that Information Measurement Theory (IMT) along with the Kashiwagi Solution Model (KSM) is a methodology than can differentiate between accurate and inaccurate principles the initial part of the study about authors in these areas show how information is conflictive, and also served to establish an initial baseline of recommended practices aligned with IMT. The one author that excels in comparison to the rest suits the "Initial Baseline Matrix from Deming" which composes the first model. The second model is denominated the "Full Extended KSM-Matrix" composed of all the LS characteristics found among all authors and IMT. Both models were tested-out for accuracy. The second part of the study was directed to evaluate the perception of individuals on these principles. Two different groups were evaluated, one group of people that had prior training and knowledge of IMT; another group of people without any knowledge of IMT. The results of the survey showed more confusion in the group of people without knowledge to IMT and improved consistency and less variation in the group of people with knowledge in IMT. The third part of the study, the analysis of case studies of success and failure, identified principles as contributors, and categorized them into LS/type "A" characteristics and RS/type "C" characteristics, by applying the KSM. The results validated the initial proposal and led to the conclusion that practices that fall into the LS side of the KSM will lead to success, while practices that fall into the RS of the KSM will lead to failure. The comparison and testing of both models indicated a dominant support of the IMT concepts as contributors to success; while the KSM model has a higher accuracy of prediction.
ContributorsReynolds, Harry (Author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis advisor) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Single cell analysis has become increasingly important in understanding disease onset, progression, treatment and prognosis, especially when applied to cancer where cellular responses are highly heterogeneous. Through the advent of single cell computerized tomography (Cell-CT), researchers and clinicians now have the ability to obtain high resolution three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of single cells. Yet to date, no live-cell compatible version of the technology exists. In this thesis, a microfluidic chip with the ability to rotate live single cells in hydrodynamic microvortices about an axis parallel to the optical focal plane has been demonstrated. The chip utilizes a novel 3D microchamber design arranged beneath a main channel creating flow detachment into the chamber, producing recirculating flow conditions. Single cells are flowed through the main channel, held in the center of the microvortex by an optical trap, and rotated by the forces induced by the recirculating fluid flow. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was employed to optimize the geometry of the microchamber. Two methods for the fabrication of the 3D microchamber were devised: anisotropic etching of silicon and backside diffuser photolithography (BDPL). First, the optimization of the silicon etching conditions was demonstrated through design of experiment (DOE). In addition, a non-conventional method of soft-lithography was demonstrated which incorporates the use of two positive molds, one of the main channel and the other of the microchambers, compressed together during replication to produce a single ultra-thin (<200 µm) negative used for device assembly. Second, methods for using thick negative photoresists such as SU-8 with BDPL have been developed which include a new simple and effective method for promoting the adhesion of SU-8 to glass. An assembly method that bonds two individual ultra-thin (<100 µm) replications of the channel and the microfeatures has also been demonstrated. Finally, a pressure driven pumping system with nanoliter per minute flow rate regulation, sub-second response times, and < 3% flow variability has been designed and characterized. The fabrication and assembly of this device is inexpensive and utilizes simple variants of conventional microfluidic fabrication techniques, making it easily accessible to the single cell analysis community.
ContributorsMyers, Jakrey R (Author) / Meldrum, Deirdre (Thesis advisor) / Johnson, Roger (Committee member) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012