A recent article in The Shorthorn cited a study from Georgetown University which claimed that degrees in healthcare were among the top college degrees to have due to the low unemployment rates in that field. It’s no wonder that healthcare is a growing field. With our aging society and the Affordable Care Act in place, more Americans will be seeking medical care in the near future.

So, what does a job in healthcare have to do with a blog about industrial engineering? As an industrial engineer, you can seek employment in a variety of industries, businesses, or institutions, including areas such as manufacturing, retail, banking, government, and healthcare. As the healthcare field grows, hospitals and other healthcare-related businesses will be seeking ways to optimize the efficiency of their workplaces. As an industrial engineer, your skills can be utilized to design systems that will merge people, information, materials, and equipment to provide the most efficient, productive, and safest methods. Industrial engineering has been called the people-oriented engineering profession. What better way is there than to apply your skills to the healthcare industry to better the lives of the doctors, nurses, staff, and patients?

In fact, the IMSE department’s Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) is currently working on several projects in the healthcare field such as nurse planning, nurse triage services, adaptive pain management, and biomaterial fabrication. The healthcare industry is just one of the many areas that utilize the versatile skills of industrial engineers.

My name is Nadia Martinez and I am an international student at the University of Texas at Arlington. I came to the United States on January 2007 to enrich my education by accomplishing a master’s degree and pursuing a doctorate degree program. I obtained my master’s degree in fall 2008 and am currently working on my Ph.D. at the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department.

I belong to the Center On Stochastic, Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) where the main objective is to design and model complex real-world systems. My research is focused on developing a deterministic global optimization method based on mixed integer linear programming to solve a piecewise linear function generated by a flexible statistical model subject to constraints that include both linear regression models and piecewise linear models. One of the main applications of this method is on the safety system design of automotive vehicles, with a special interest in crash-worthiness. This type of systems is considered computationally complex. I have also worked as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) at TMAC, which is a research center of the College of Engineering at UTA, where I have participated in different projects related to my Industrial Engineering career. The opportunity I have had of being a GRA has definitely increased my vision about how to deal with real-life problems.

Through my experiences at UTA, I have learned and realized that I was not only fulfilling a dream but I was also becoming part of a big and great family. Although being away from your beloved ones is not an easy thing, being around with such an amazing people like students, professors, co-workers and friends have made of this experience an amazing journey. Sharing cultures, beliefs and ways of life is an incredible opportunity to mature and expand your horizons.

Written By Nadia Martinez, IMSE Doctoral Student
Email: nadia.martinezcepeda@mavs.uta.edu
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nadia-martinez/4a/243/670

On November 16th, COSMOS Ph.D. student Bancha Ariyajunya successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “Adaptive Dynamic Programming for High-Dimensional, Multicollinear State Spaces.” His dissertation committee included COSMOS faculty Dr. Victoria Chen, Dr. Jay Rosenberger, and Dr. Li Zeng. His dissertation addressed the problem of correlated variables in a dynamic programming state space. His methodology was originally motivated by airport deicing activities and was tested on an ozone pollution control optimization. In airport deicing, the state of the system considers the environmental impact of deicing, and the environmental variables are highly correlated. In ozone pollution, the state of the system considers ozone concentrations in the air, and these are highly correlated over time and space. Bancha’s research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. His current research interest is in the area of statistical modeling and data mining.

The IMSE Department at UT Arlington offers degrees in Industrial Engineering at the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. levels plus Masters degrees in Logistics, Engineering Management, and Systems Engineering. Since we only offer a doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering, students can focus their degree in areas of expertise such as Systems Engineering. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on one of those students and how she plans to apply her research to real-world needs.

Misagh Faezipour is a Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Engineering department with a focus in Systems Engineering. She is also affiliated with the System Engineering Research Center (SERC). She has worked as a graduate research assistant on multiple projects in the SERC and is currently a graduate teaching assistant at the IE department. Her research interests lie in the areas of engineering complex systems, healthcare, sustainability, simulation, systems thinking & systems dynamics. The focus of her current research is in Systems Engineering with an emphasis on sustainability related to Systems Engineering and applied to the healthcare domain. Her dissertation is related to addressing water sustainability in hospitals. System dynamics is applied as a modeling approach to provide a better understanding of the water sustainability considerations & model key factors and interrelationships involved in hospitals. A simulator is being developed that simulates the interactions of the key factors from the model. The simulator will help decision makers realize the impacts of their decisions made related to some key factors and also help then make informed decisions. The hospitals are the main stakeholder in this research, and the goal is to help them with their water management process and support them to make informed decisions.

On October 18, COSMOS Ph.D. student Poovich Phaladiganon successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Data Mining Based Threshold Development for Novelty Detection.” His dissertation committee included COSMOS faculty Victoria Chen, Li Zeng, Bill Corley, and Korea University Professor Seoung Bum Kim, who made a special trip to UTA for Poovich’s defense. In addition to Poovich’s Ph.D., he has an M.S. degree also in Industrial Engineering from UTA and has worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. His current research interests are multivariate statistical process control and novelty detection. Upon defending his dissertation, Poovich said, “It is a great experience to be a part of the COSMOS society. I have learned about both academics and life along my road to a doctorate.”

UT Arlington’s Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) focuses on addressing complex and multi-faceted challenges that are rapidly evolving at the frontiers at world needs.

Clement Smartt is pursuing a PhD at UTA, with a focus in systems engineering, and is contributing to this SERC research goal. Clement is a Research Scientist with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and was previously a Principal Systems Engineer with L-3 Communications. Clement is also a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP). Clement Smartt has recently been selected to receive the 2012 INCOSE Foundation Stevens Doctoral Award. This important international award recognizes innovative doctoral research related to the field of Systems Engineering and is only given to one student per year. Criteria to be considered for this award includes an advancement of both the state-of-the knowledge as well as state-of-the-practice in systems engineering. Clement Smartt’s research seeks to determine an optimal use of systems engineering in proposal management by assessing the impact of systems engineering factors on contract award. The ability to capture contracts is key to survival for organizations that perform contract work. Systems engineering often plays a central role in proposal management by coordinating the technical effort. A decision support system (DSS) will be developed to generate empirically-based, quantitative recommendations that will help decision makers best allocate systems engineering resources on proposals.

As a result of this research, organizations that engineer systems will be able to more effectively use systems engineering in proposal management and provide better value to their customers.

Additional information about UTA’s SERC can be found at http://www.uta.edu/serc/.

Future blog entries will present more information about the SERC including research and researchers.

Here’s some exciting news that’s going on in our RFID lab!

The Radio Frequency and Auto Identification (RAID) Labs is currently training new researchers for the coming semester. The lab intends to train all new researchers and have everyone working in RAID Labs capable of performing RFID Feasibility Audits for outside companies. The RFID Feasibility Audits will determine the best RFID system an experimented company should implement to reduce inventory holding costs as well as improve efficiency in terms of ease of access of products and better maintenance of stock levels.

In addition to the aforementioned Feasibility Audits, RAID Labs has a newly established partnership with UT Southwestern. RAID Labs will use this unique opportunity to gain a better understanding of the uses of RFID and AID in a health care setting. RAID Labs is also looking to host an RFID Student Generated Conference in the coming months which will bring students, faculty, and professionals together to discuss findings in RFID and the direction RFID is heading as an up and coming technology.

You can find out more information about RAID Labs at http://www.uta.edu/rfid/

We’re pleased to announce that our Center of Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) will be well represented at this year’s annual conference of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Phoenix this month. The theme of the conference is “Informatics Rising.” Several of our Ph.D. students, including Piampoom Sarikprueck, Asama Kulvanitchaiyanunt, Piyush Kumar, Diana Martinez, Nadia Martinez, John Dickson, Aera LeBoulluec, and Poovich Phaladiganon will be presenting their research. In addition, Dr. Bill Corley will present his research on Nash Equilibrium, and Dr. Li Zeng will make two presentations, one on Low-E glass manufacturing and another on Tissue-engineered Scaffold fabrication. In total, COSMOS researchers are lead authors or co-authors on 15 presentations!

More information on COSMOS’ exciting work can be found at http://www.uta.edu/cosmos/.

More information on this year’s INFORMS conference can be found at http://meetings2.informs.org/phoenix2012/.