The focus of this praxis was on Diminished Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS) type technology obsolescence of military systems. Military’s inability to predict the procurement lifetime of their electronic units leads to reactive obsolescence management, and ultimately increased...
With the advent of knowledge-based economies, knowledge transfer within online forums has become increasingly important to the work of IT teams. Stack Overflow, for example, is an online community in which computer programmers can interact and consult with one another to achieve information flow...
With the rapid rise in software sizes and complexity, analyzing and fixing bugs in large scale applications is becoming increasingly critical, securing such application has become very challenging due to the growing software complexity. Traditionally, there are two lines of code analysis...
As early as 1984, researchers viewed IT program selection as a significant issue. Melone and Wharton (1984) were prescient when they expressed the necessity of having an “agreed-upon set of factors used to evaluate IS [Information Systems] projects…[that] ...allows for an objective comparison of...
Immune and cell therapies have started to play important roles in cancer treatment. Among different cell therapy methods, Chimeric Antigen Receptors T-cell (CAR-T cell) therapy is the first and only autologous cell therapy that the FDA has approved for cancer treatment so far. CAR-T therapy is a...
The availability of large-scale online services (also known as cloud services) is becoming more important as more private and public infrastructure systems take dependencies on these services. The time it takes to detect that a failure has occurred, and the time taken to determine where the fault...
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) has become an important capability for the 5th generation fighter aircrafts such as F-35 Lightning II or F-22 Raptor to ensure the safety of flight and reduce the life cycle costs. The on-board PHM System of a 5th generation aircraft uses sensors, software...
The Boeing 767 Tanker is a military variant of a commercial aircraft launched in 1981. Military requirements increase the amount of wiring in the aircraft, and these complex wiring layouts lead to longer times to perform wire installation jobs. The planned times for wiring jobs on the tanker were...
The idea of predicting software defects for projects with little or insufficient historical defect data using other projects' software metrics and defect data has attracted great interest from both researchers and practitioners. However, the primary challenge in cross-project defect prediction...
Cybersecurity incidents and data breaches continue to be costly events, with global prevalence. Incidents are compromise events which impact business operations or information security. When sensitive data is accessed, the incident becomes a breach. The more time available to an adversary to...
As Underground Residential Development (URD) cable systems approach the end of expected service life, electric utilities face millions of dollars in operational and maintenance costs and lower reliability performance. Early URD cable systems installed prior to the mid-1980s typically incorporated...
Due to a lack of actual data-based research, industry-wide implementation of agile methodologies on heavy-civil construction projects is lacking, leading to management and performance issues that cause inefficient project delivery. As acknowledged by F. Ribeiro (2010), “Despite the amount of...
Software testing is the most expensive and time-consuming aspect of software development. It is estimated that as much as 50% of development time and money is devoted to various forms of testing (Ramler, 2006). Therefore, it is crucial that all testing conducted must be performed efficiently,...
The lack of Knowledge Management (KM) during a transition of a Service Request (SR) statement of work (SOW) responsibility between organizations negatively impacts the on-time response performance to customer service requests, contributing to budget overrun. The utilization of Knowledge Capture...
The National Security Strategy through the National Defense Strategy highlights the need for the United States Air Force to provide an aircraft fleet that is ready to respond to the Nation’s needs. The KC-135R Stratotanker is a multifunction slim body aircraft that provides air refueling and...
Organizations continually seek to leverage new and innovative ways to increase the likelihood of software project success. The meaning of project success varies widely across literature, yet most definitions declare a project successful if it delivers within budget, on time, with acceptable...
According to Parasuraman et al. (2000), automation is achieved when “a device or system accomplishes (partially or fully) a function that was previously, or that conceivably could be, carried out (partially or fully) by a human operator.” Thus, an increase in production rate, a reduction in flow...
The FDA, the MHRA, and other regulatory authorities recommend that during the development process of a device, manufacturers should aim to understand the use errors of comparable devices to the ones of interest. Knowing the probability and severity of use errors for similar products, they can be...
Online social networks (OSN) are among the most popular web-based services. As the nature of OSN requires sharing of information, users are encouraged to upload their data to OSN in order to build up their profiles, which in turn enhances the functionality of OSN itself. Many OSN applications use...
The most expensive project in human history is the International Space Station (ISS); it has reached $160+ billions in total expenses. Currently, the lifespan of the ISS has been exceeded, and the spacecraft operations is projected for a minimum of 10 years. However, due to its aging technology,...
Despite having risk management instructions and an official guidebook, risk assessments and analysis still lack the sufficient technical rigor when applying these processes to research and development projects within the Department of Defense (DoD). The risk analysis phase often suffers from...
The common objective of Incubation or Entrepreneurship Programs (IEPs) is to facilitate the entrepreneurial process by meeting the needs of client enterprises and supporting their development. Organizations sponsoring and managing IEPs include a variety of entities that may be public or private,...
Although corporations collect project information such as performance indicators, they tend to use this information only to estimate the cost of future projects rather than as a way of predicting potential project failures. By not using performance indicators from prior projects to predict future...
Health systems and regulatory bodies continuously attempt to reduce costs and eliminate waste to improve the way healthcare is delivered. Quality of care has become the key principle driving change and healthcare outcomes. As the healthcare industry transitions to value-based reimbursement models...
Data-intensive jobs, e.g., financial analysis and log mining, need to process huge amount of data, and those jobs are suitable to run on the cloud environment, which provides computing and storage resources by connecting thousands of servers. A job splits a dataset into multiple data chunks, and...
Billions of dollars are spent by government organizations to accomplish their mission. Organizations are faced with the increased growth of complex software systems to handle higher velocity, volume, and variety of data captured at higher speeds to achieve mission goals. Software and hardware...
Rare events in healthcare can pose a challenging issue for quality practitioners, particularly in deciding how to monitor them with control charts. There are many examples of rare events data in healthcare settings including medication errors, patient falls, birth traumas, surgical site...
Over the last two decades, assessments of major defense acquisition systems consistently cite program management office (PMO) effectiveness as a key factor for successfully producing weapon systems. Studies conducted across government, industry, and academia attribute PMO effectiveness to ideal...
The ease with which members of a community can access health care services is a key factor in determining the general health status of their bigger community as a whole. According to the 2018 National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), healthy equity is achieved...
The Systems Engineering community spends considerable effort developingsystem specifications during the design phase. Yet during the operational and supportphase, there is a potential degradation of those specifications in the form of delayed,missed, or insufficient maintenance (i.e., maintenance...
Some of the U.S. Stock Market trading firms (Firms) have Day Traders (Traders) that use several proprietary strategies that are based on passive - aggressive trading styles. The Traders are classified/grouped, based on their most recent trading profit results, to utilize the proprietary trading...
An Easy-to-Implement Model to Determine the Percentage of Wake Energy from a Vessel Reaching the Shoreline Across the country, cities are considering implementing or have implemented ferry service as a method of transportation. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there were...
The timely adoption of technology for organizations in making the right investment or divestment can be achieved by using multicriteria decision making approach with integrated views of established innovation theories, industry best practices in technology acquisition lifecycle, statistical...
The majority of steel manufacturers within the United States have employed electric arc furnaces (EAFs), which melt raw materials, for the production of steel. The raw material used in EAFs is referred to as steel, or ferrous, scrap. There are many different grades of ferrous scrap, which are...
Forecasting of resource utilization in large cloud computing systems is essential to maintain high-quality service and fulfill service level agreements to ensure cost-effectiveness and profitability. Accurately forecasting long-term resource utilization can be challenging, as it is dynamic and...
This research study presents the concept of DevOps (or development and operations) performance clusters to measure DevOps teams performance, based on three metrics, two agility metrics (delivery lead time and deployment frequency) and a stability metric (mean time to recover). It uses a...
In the package delivery industry, competitive advantage is changing with the evolution of customer expectation. The United States Postal Service (USPS) started with the delivery of letters, but had to restructure its company when the mailing of letters began to decrease, while simultaneously the...
Abstract of PraxisGeneral Aviation Accident Modeling and Causal Determination: Pilot Loss of Aircraft Control General Aviation (GA), a subset of the aviation industry, is currently facing a crisis of pilots losing control aircraft while inflight. The crisis is significant enough to warrant a...
The US Air Force (USAF)’s goal is to achieve aircraft availability (AA) rates similar to those of the commercial airline industry. Improving AA rates while reducing operations and maintenance (O&M;) costs is a major challenge for the USAF. This Praxis research identifies field-level components...
The information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) framework is widely used to manage the strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual improvement of IT services. While the ITIL framework itself has undergone numerous revisions and refinements, successfully managing ITIL...
In e-retail industry, online Word-of-Mouth (e-WOM) includes vast amounts of text-reviews and star-ratings of products. Such valuable information does not only help consumers, by enabling informed purchasing decisions, but also benefits businesses and engineering professionals, who are involved in...
For decades, the United States (U.S.) Department of Defense (DoD) has developed, deployed, and operated hundreds of different types of systems as components of systems-of-systems. Achieving and maintaining joint systems-of-systems interoperability as new systems are added is a constant problem....
An engineering change (EC) is an alteration made to a system that has beenreleased following a system design process. EC propagation is a series of ECs occurringdue to dependencies among components of a product. ECs can consume up to 50% of theoverall engineering efforts during development of a...
Determining a top performing model to identify factors to assess technical efficiency within Metropolitan Service Area’s (MSAs) is the focus of this research study. A Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Index has been created and recently used within analysis of 100 large MSAs within the United...
The African continent holds 17% of the population in the world and maintains several infrastructures and investments with average returns of 18% to 22% yet, the low Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as the 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) across the African countries continue to...
When it comes to decision making, traditional methods point towards analyzing data and facts and assembling conclusions based on them. However, with the increasing abundance of information, there are challenges and restrictions for time commitment, determining the relevance of obtained...
Uncertainty arising from immature technology is a major cause of programmatic risk. Programs continue to have poor results in terms of cost and schedule performance. This research seeks to improve program performance during the system development phase by better understanding the risks of...
Current management and technical structures of the electric power system in Togo have shown their limits. Togo continues to suffer from limited access to electric power and endemic electric power shortages resulting in the slow-down of the country’s socio-economic development. For over 43 years,...
The problem of forecasting emerging technologies (FET) has attracted the attention of researchers in the patent-analysis community because it provides a starting point for organizations to introduce radical technology change or a new product or engage in a merger and acquisition. Many FET methods...
If you were to ask any software development manager if quality is an essential attribute for delivering a project on time and within budget, they would emphatically answer "yes". If you were to ask these same managers if they incorporated existing quality metrics into their baselining and...
Many federal government agencies and commercial industries are utilizing multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), Analytic Network Process (ANP), and The Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal...
Cybersecurity is the foundation of technology that determines the resilience and protections of operations throughout the world. With the increase of innovation, the requirements for cybersecurity authorization and governance increases to mitigate the potential threats for malicious activities....
Oil and Gas Exploration and Production (E&P;) projects routinely experience cost overruns and delays, with about 64% of new projects exceeding their budgets and almost 75% completed behind schedule partly as a result of non-optimal project designs1. Owing to the highly complex and heterogeneous...
Ambulance response time is a paramount factor contributing to patient outcomes of critical medical emergencies, particularly cardiac emergencies. In Ventura County, California, we established that over an 11-year period there was no significant difference in ambulance response time between...
Agile Software Development methods such as Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, and Large Scale Agile (LeSS) promise substantial benefits in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, quality project management overhead, and time to market. As Agile methods have become widespread in the...
Until 2018, there were no guidelines for the sequencing of operations in common heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In that year, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) published Guideline 36, which provides a uniform set of...
Project Managers (PMs) have the responsibility to propose a resource management plan that adequately reflects the staff and budget required to complete the adjudication phase of the public comment review process. From prior experience, PMs have found that resource planning is difficult due to the...
This praxis develops a comprehensive performance measuring model to help government policy makers in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries identify and evaluate their performance in online outsourcing (OO). After assessing different efficiency measurement methods, data envelopment analysis (DEA)...
The last thirty years have seen multiple DoD acquisition programs with significant cost and schedule overruns. This paper posits that the primary driver of schedule overruns is the difficulty of “inventing on a schedule” by undertaking risky technology development efforts within a Major Defense...
Electronic waste (e-waste) is a growing economic opportunity for informal recycling operations in developing countries, while it is a major health and environmental concern for the developed world. Currently, only 25% of gold in e- waste is recovered successfully through informal recycling...
The federal government currently collects information for the Information Technology (IT) Projects in which it invests, but it does not apply this information to more accurately predict the performance of these projects. As a result, project managers within the federal government are not...
Contract chemical manufacturers spend resources on development trials that have errors due to incomplete knowledge transfer from the customer. These errors waste engineering resources and can result in lost business. A technology transfer program was proposed as a solution to reduce the number of...
Many commercial and defense product development programs are large-scale, complex, and contain significant innovation. Such programs often suffer cost and schedule over-runs. The goal of this work is to increase the production rate of well-ordered precedence networks for complex, large-scale...
Valve Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the United States are facing increasing pressure to offer products capable of competing with other local and low-cost country industry players, forcing them to continuously lower prices and shorten delivery dates. At the same time, operations and...
Electricity has become an invaluable commodity for the rest of humanity such that nations irrespective of their classification in the world economy will find it difficult to function without it’s reliable supply. For nations such as the United States and the rest of the developed world,...
In the U.S. medical sector, software failures in safety-critical systems in healthcare have led to serious adverse health problems, including patient deaths and recalls of medical systems. Despite the efforts in developing techniques to build resilient systems, there is a lack of consensus...
Agile methodology has been widely adopted by both commercial and government software development projects since 2001. Agile methodology promotes product delivery by executing multiple small iterations that are also known as sprints. Each sprint is a small software development project with own...
Although the traditional intrusion detection problem has been well studied with the release of the KDD’99 and NSL-KDD datasets, recent intrusion detection has expanded to include wireless 802.11 networks and Industrial Control Systems & Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (ICS/SCADA)...
This praxis studies the effects on organizations of replacing US knowledge workers with artificial intelligence software (automation) and enhancing US knowledge workers with artificial intelligence software (augmentation). The effects on organizational innovation, resistance, and return on...
Typical defense acquisition programs take nearly eight years to go from program start to an initial operating capability. Such long schedule durations risk having a future situation where operational forces are composed largely of aged or obsolete systems when not enough new operational systems...
Resilience theory plays a vital role in the practical design of modern engineered resilient systems composed of cyber-physical systems and components having interdependencies intended to make the entire system robust. In this paper, the percolation-based metric is applied to measure the...
Given the increasing complexity of systems and the cost associated with test and evaluation of aerospace systems, more efficient methods are sought. Randomized test designs for aviation developmental test activities and other complex systems may not enable safe test conduct and may be...
During exploratory research, solution concept approaches are considered with the intention of closing capability gaps between stakeholder business or mission needs and the available solutions portfolio. Increasingly, solution concept alternatives and capability requirements are advanced for...
The growth of battery powered devices, starting with laptops and cell phones in the 1990s,to tablet PCs and electrical vehicles in the 21st century, has given rise to the ever presentneed of charging infrastructure. This infrastructure, relying on the same conducted powertransfer technology which...
Renewable energy generation, including solar photovoltaics, will be an increasing part of the power supply to the utility grid. Due to the intermittent and variable nature of the power supply from photovoltaics, energy storage systems will need to be applied to the utility service grid to allow...
Over the last decade, healthcare supply chain (SC) costs have increased by 40 percent in the United States. A typical hospital’s SC costs account for 38 percent of the total, compared to less than 10 percent for most industries. Supply chain costs are the healthcare organizations’ second biggest...
An Industrial Automation and Control System design function is to provide a level of autonomy that allows manufacturers the capability to produce goods at a lower overhead cost, provide real-time data capability for KPI’s and provide the capability for monitoring and controlling critical...
Systems engineering rigor has been used successfully in the aerospace and defense industries where the development cycles tend to be rather long. However, the practice of using a traditional waterfall, spiral or V-model systems engineering life cycle framework, in other industries brings into...
Applying Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods to the Department of Defense Cloud Service Offering Security Authorization Process Cloud computing offers the potential for the Department of Defense (DoD) to lower its computing costs while making information resources more widely available....
Abstract of PraxisA Predictive Analytical Model for Predicting Munitions Surface Clearance Decontamination Activities Unexploded ordnance contamination in the United States and its Territories has emerged as one of the nation's most significant environmental problems in 2001 and remains a serious...
Capital funding models for start-ups are rare, yet they are needed to enable engineers to calculate their capital funding amount needed to complete their equity crowdfunding forms, loan application, or pursue other sources of funding. Funding decisions are frequently performed on an ad-hoc basis...
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was established in 1982 in response to a decline in United States (U.S.) research and development (R&D;) productivity. The SBIR program aims to provide small businesses an avenue to commercialize products and services. The SBIR program is...
Current building standards for protective design focus on a “fortress” approach that does not effectively protect against contemporary attack vectors such as active shooters. Furthermore, these standards provide little guidance to private building owners whose facilities are increasingly targeted...
Project Managers in the Department of Defense and private industry are interested in utilizing effective and accurate methods to monitor and track projects with useful Earned Value Management project indicators. This praxis research addresses the problem of non-effective means of detecting a...
Small businesses do not have a simple viable approach to understand and predict the causes of cybersecurity data breaches due to error and misuse actions. These error and misuse actions lead to small businesses experiencing cybersecurity data breaches. These actions are preventable. Mitigations...
Improperly monitored disease surveillance system produce unreliable system status, leading to public health and safety risks. The disease surveillance system collects, analyzes and interprets disease data from several sources to implement the disease spread prevention controls. Detecting an...
Healthcare costs are at an all-time high and there is no sign of ever relinquishing its upward trend or being controlled at the current level. The high cost of healthcare is partly attributed to the high cost of medicine. Research and development (R&D;) costs have been identified as a contributor...
The island of Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States of America, has a population of 3,725,789 according to the 2010 census, and generates 11,100 tons daily of waste. In the Island, landfilling is the dominant form of waste disposal. Most municipal solid waste landfills (MSWLF) in...
Too long have engineering and construction managers overestimated their costs and durations to create a contingency buffer that ensures construction projects meet a tight plus-or-minus 10% target range for both cost and schedule performance –a range intended to assess estimating accuracy, not...
In an effort to control cost and schedule growth, the US Department of Defense mandates that defense acquisition programs perform Technology Readiness Acquisitions (TRAs) during the acquisition cycle. Technology maturity is widely believed to correlate with cost and schedule risk in complex...
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) is a transportation enterprise servicing Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland. Commuting challenges and overall population growth has increased the overcrowding on the Metrorail, especially in the downtown...
Despite the efforts in developing frameworks to analyze and measure resilience, there is lack of consensus on the development and definition of metrics and limited quantitative analysis approaches. The resilience of buildings’ critical systems has not been assessed quantitatively, thus impacting...
The intention of a products distribution business enterprise is to invest in products or inventory, create value through service (or product availability), and in return capture revenue. This activity is naturally accompanied by varying levels of investment risk due to product demand uncertainty....
The following research was performed to establish an engineering knowledge management strategy for improving knowledge sharing concerning risk prediction models for hospital readmissions. The health care industry has been met with numerous approaches toward reducing preventable hospital...
Launches of satellites require years of advance planning leading to lower national and economic security posture. A new construct is required for rapidly enabling access to space for global urgent mission needs. A new construct is required for effectively enabling a launch of a satellite to orbit...
There has been a notable rise in the availability of non-experimental observational data sets. Observational data sets include government survey data and “big data” from continuous monitoring. To date, most of this data has spurred correlational studies and there is interest in being able to draw...
The United States economic and national security sectors remain vulnerable to shortages of critical materials due to the risks posed by disruptions in globally-dispersed supply networks. Numerous methods over the past 10 years have been proposed to identify, assess, and evaluate risks in critical...
This praxis demonstrates through case study, the utility of a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) technique that exploits the features of the one-sided tolerance interval (OSTI) for the analysis of response data resulting from design of experiments (DOE) planned testing. Information distilled...
The resource mix for the U.S. electrical power grid is undergoing rapid change with increased levels of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine electricity generating capacity. There are potential negative impacts to grid resilience resulting from hurricane damage to wind and solar power...
The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) is widely used to gauge investor fear and measures the “insurance premiums” of the stock market. Traditionally, VIX prediction was done using time-series analysis models (e.g., GARCH), and some attempt was made to predict it using...