The Or Times Vol 1 Issue 1 Fall 2007

Message from the IMSE chair...

INFORMS President’s Desk

Dear Students, It is a great pleasure to give you a very warm welcome to the fall 2007 semester at IMSE-USF. The INFORMS student chapter continues to expand its initiatives with the “The OR Times” newsletter. I encourage you to support your student chapter; participate in this newsletter and other planned INFORMS activities. The semester begins with a very healthy program of about 30 active doctoral students and more than 150 masters students, including Engineering Management and IE. The student body represents a diverse global population. Faculty and students continue to work in very exciting research endeavors. These extend from modeling complex systems in healthcare, transportation, manufacturing environments to analyses, modeling and design in various aspects of nanotechnology. During this academic year we plan to conduct additional enhancements that support both, graduate and undergraduate education. In October 2007, the College of Engineering and Department of IMSE will have a visit from ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering & Technology) Evaluating team, to conduct the accreditation exercise for the BS in IE. The faculty continues to expand on a series of initiatives that extend nationally and internationally. During this semester we have three guest scholars visiting the department; two from the Peoples Republic of China and one from Indonesia. The departmental staffs, Ms. Jackie Stephens and Ms. Gloria Hanshaw-Latter, continue to work in seeking ways to better serve the students. I encourage you to meet them. During the last semester our former engineer/technician Mr. Chris Paulus moved to another job and we are currently in the process of filling the position. We hope to complete that process in the upcoming weeks.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to all students (both new and continuing) to a brand new Fall semester at the Department of Industrial & Management Systems Engineering. It gives me immense pleasure to write this welcome note for, “The OR Times”, our inaugural Newsletter of the INFORMS student chapter at IMSE, USF. The objective of “The OR Times” is to increase enthusiasm and vigor about Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, and Management Sciences, and also to stimulate increased camaraderie among our colleagues at IMSE. The OR Times aims to serve as a platform for disseminating information/articles/news on: 

OR topics that affect our everyday life



Current research in the IMSE department



Research of our fellow Ph.D. & MS. students



Solicited articles from Faculty members about emerging research areas



IMSE News/Placements/Job Opportunities



Alumni Information



Upcoming OR Conferences and related information

We hope that you will find the newsletter both interesting and enriching. Once again, welcome to IMSE and INFORMS student chapter at USF. If you would like to become a member of INFORMS student chapter and/or contribute to the forthcoming issues of “The OR Times”, send an email to:[email protected] Sincerely,

Vishnu Nanduri

During the past few months the extended IMSE family President-INFORMS Student Chapter @ USF grew. Prof. and Mrs. Kingsley Reeves had a new daughter Volume 1, I and Prof. Grisselle Centeno and her husband had a boy. ssue 1 Fall 2007 We encourage you to find out what students and faculty are doing and network within and outside the Department. On behalf of the IMSE team, welcome back and our best wishes for a great semester. Sincerely, José L. Zayas-Castro Professor & IMSE Chairperson

e: u s s i s i h Inside etd flight connectiyoonus? Some-

se miss to help Hate tho O.R. is there vities m 007 acti 2 6 0 0 body fro 2 nto the Nano A peek i r Micro/ o f t n e m Improve Process In Situ uring Manufact

A Bi-monthly Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

News feature

Hate those missed flight connections?

Somebody from O.R. is there to help you

Moreover, official statistics do not track the waiting time on runways or when flights are diverted to other cities. Dr. Barnhart believes data should be compiled more accurately so as to give passengers a clearer picture of what really happens and more importantly to change airline and airport policies regarding connection times. Nobody enjoys waiting a complete day for another flight or sleeping in terminals due to a missed connection.

Roughly a month ago I was reminded of a New York Times (NYT) article I read in July while I was seated in one of the gates at Reagan Airport in DC. The circumstances were not the best, actually they were pretty bad. My flight to Tampa was scheduled to take off at 8:30 am, so I got to the airport at around 7:15 am (I admit it was a little late for my standards but not for the majority of other passengers). The US Airways queues were so crowded that my first thought was: “Better start forgetting about being in Tampa at noon”. Half hour in the queue and it was clear that I was going to miss my flight. At 11:00 am, when I finally got to the front of the queue, I was given a seat in the 3:30 pm flight, which in turn was delayed until 4:00 pm the first time and then until 4:45pm. In total my waiting time was approximately 10 hours!

Some of the papers Dr. Barnhart has published on this topic include “Flight operations recovery: (1) “New approaches considering passenger recovery” (2006)

(http://www.springerlink.com/content/c659xl63w7263012/) where several days of operation are simulated in an Airline The NYT article described how M.I.T. researchers some Operations Control Simulator and decision models are deyears ago found that when missed connections and flight can- scribed to be used in real-time managing to reduce passenger arrival delays, without increasing costs. cellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistics and also that as planes be(2) “Applications of operations research in the air transport come more crowded the delays are much longer because it industry” (2003) becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight. Indeed, this lat- (http://transci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/4/368) ter finding has motivated them to update the study (domestic which presents an overview of several important areas of opflights are running 85 to 90 percent full nowadays). erations research applications in the air transport industry. Dr. Cynthia Barnhart, from the Center for Transportation (3) “Planning for Robust Airline Operations: Optimizing Airand Logistics at M.I.T. craft Routings and Flight Departure Times to Minimize Pas(http://esd.mit.edu/Faculty_Pages/barnhart/barnhart.htm), be- senger Disruptions” (2005) lieves the new results will present severe increases in delays. (http://transci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/1/15) The facts are evident: in the first five months of 2007 more where an approach is presented to reduce delay propagation than a quarter of domestic flights arrived at least 15 minutes by intelligently routing aircraft. later and the delays were on average 39 percent longer than 2006. By Patricio Rocha

A peek into the 2006-2007 activities Raymond James Fundrais-

Get together - Fall 2006

Other activities:  Get together - Spring 2007 

INFORMS lecture series- Fall 2006 2

Research corner In Situ Process Improvement for Micro/Nano Manufacturing The study--on process control was motivated by the challenges of monitoring and diagnosis in micro/nano manufacturing, where many mechanical/electronic/chemical variables interact with each other to affect the product quality. For example, in nanowire synthesis for the production of ultra small electronic circuits, where silicon wafer with embedded nanoclusters is placed in a horizontal furnace tube to produce nanowires through vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism, furnace temperatures, density of nanoclusters in wafer, and pressure will jointly affect the morphology of nanowires. The pattern of interaction among the corresponding process variables (temperature fluctuation and pressure change etc.) reflects the state of the nanowire growth. In Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP) for wafer polishing in semiconductor manufacturing, mechanical abrasive and chemical reaction jointly affect the polishing on wafer surface. Coefficient of friction (COF) and temperature on the wafer surface will reflect the status of the polishing process. Increasing tendency in temperature along with cyclic COF or relatively constant temperature along with increasing tendency in COF implies different anomalies in CMP. Furthermore, to depict the complex nanostructure features, many correlated mechanical/electronic/chemical variables must be in functional form (functions of other variables) and thus increase the complexity of process modeling and monitoring. For instance, in nanowire synthesis, the nanowire morphologies and temperature in the furnace tube are functions of heating time. Studying interaction among multiple process variables must be carried out for each time interval. Current research typically focuses on discovering new phenomena and new morphologies. Meanwhile, conventional quality control methods are not capable of monitoring the complex features of nanostructure and morphology variation over time. Research on interaction among the correlated functional variables for the purpose of process quality improvement in micro/nano manufacturing is very limited. Our research group, directed by Dr. Qiang Huang, is currently working on modeling the interactions among functional variables and developing in situ process monitoring to increase the process repeatability for micro/nano manufacturing systems. In collaboration with nanotechnology researchers, our current research focuses on interaction modeling for Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP) and nanowire synthesis. We have been working towards the following problems: 

Developing new designed experiment method to study the impact of interaction among multiple functional variables on functional experimental responses at different evolving stages of processes. In the meantime, computer experiments will be used to explore the impact of a huge amount of process variable combinations.



Developing online monitoring scheme to detect unexpected process change based on statistical quality control methods.



Developing process adjustment methods to offset the process drift from target.

From these three topics we have obtained promising results on the online detection scheme that will soon be published. This research has been funded by two grants from NSF-MES and Nanomanufacturing programs in CMMI division. By Hui Wang (Ph.D.) & Qiang Huang (Ph.D.)

Solutions to puzzles on page 4 No.2: Slide aside 20 coins, selecting randomly, to from a group. Flip each of these twenty coins. This will give us the same number of heads in the 20 coin group as that in the group that contains the rest of the 80 coins. No.1: Sum of factorials is always odd, while factorial of a number is always even. So maximum possible value for m and n is 1. 3

puzzles… No.1: 1! + 2! + 3! +...+ m! = n! Find the maximum possible value of n and m. No.2: There are 100 coins of different sizes on a table out of which 20 coins are placed head up and the rest tail up. You are aware of this but since you are blind folded you cannot see what coins are head up. You are asked to divide these coins into 2 groups, such that the number of heads in each of these groups is equal. You are allowed to flip the coins as many times as you wish. The two groups need not have equal number of coins and the coins can be of any size. How will you achieve this? (See bottom of Page 3 for solutions) Contributed by Chaitra Gopalappa

Volume 1, Issue 1

 

.. Job s g tin s o P ing m o Upc ts... n eve

 

Asst Prof of Engineering at Smith College Junior Faculty Position – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Senior Faculty Position - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Postdoctoral and Senior Research Awards (National Academies)

(for details about the jobs above visit http://informs.eng.usf.edu/jobs.htm)

INFORMS Combined Colloquium in Seattle, WA (Nov 3, 2007)

INFORMS Annual Meeting at Seattle, WA (Nov 4-Nov 7, 2007) http://meetings.informs.org/Seattle07/

Fall 2007

Vishnu Nanduri: Sunday Nov 04, 08:00 - 09:30, A Reinforcement Modeling and Its Application to Machining Process Control Learning Approach to Finding Nash Equilibrium of Multi-player Chaitra Gopalappa: Tuesday Nov 06, 08:00 - 09:30, Hybridization Matrix Games Noise Removal from cDNA Microarrays Abhik Bhattacharya: Sunday Nov 04, 16:30 - 18:00, Improving Cihan Babyigit: Tuesday Nov 06, 16:30 - 18:00, A Matrix Game Operational Quality of Care in Healthcare Inpatient Processes Approach for FTR Allocation in Electric Power Networks Alcides Santander: Monday Nov 05, 08:00 - 09:30, Interpreting Arka Bhattacharya: Wednesday Nov 07, 10:00 - 11:30, CompariLaboratory Test Results as a Dynamic Model son of Procurement Options in the Healthcare Industry and DeWilkistar Otieno: Monday Nov 05, 12:30-13:30, Failure Charactermining the Degree of Innovation terization, and Intensity Function Estimates of Nanosystems Swati Verma: Wednesday Nov 07, 10:00 - 11:30, Defining Service Hui Wang: Tuesday Nov 06, 08:00 - 09:30, Error Cancellation Quality in an Outpatient Clinic with Complex Constituency

Vishnuteja Nanduri President

Diana Prieto Laila Cure Publicity

Patricio Rocha Vice President Wilkistar Otieno Ozan Ozcan Treasurers Athina Brintaki Secretary Chaitra Gopalappa Dayna Martinez Logistics

Andres Uribe Webmaster

IMSE 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118 Tampa FL, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-5591 Fax: (813) 974-5953 [email protected] 4

Alcides Santander Shaoqiang Chen Yang Tan Social activities Wilkistar Otieno Laila Cure Editors