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 SystemsEngineering. It gives me immense pleasure to write thiswelcome note for, “The OR Times”, our inaugural Newsletter of the INFORMS student chapter at IMSE,USF. The objective of “The OR Times” is to increaseenthusiasm and vigor about Industrial Engineering, Op-erations Research, and Management Sciences, and alsoto stimulate increased camaraderie among our col-leagues at IMSE. The OR Times aims to serve as a plat-form for disseminating information/articles/news on:

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OR topics that affect our everyday life

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Current research in the IMSE department

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

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Solicited articles from Faculty members aboutemerging research areas

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IMSE News/Placements/Job Opportunities

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Alumni Information

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Upcoming OR Conferences and related informationWe hope that you will find the newsletter both interest-ing and enriching. Once again, welcome to IMSE andINFORMS 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:informs@eng.usf.eduSincerely,

Vishnu Nanduri

President-INFORMS Student Chapter @ USF

Dear Students,It is a great pleasure to give you a very warm welcome tothe fall 2007 semester at IMSE-USF. The INFORMSstudent 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 about30 active doctoral students and more than 150 masters stu-dents, including Engineering Management and IE. The stu-dent body represents a diverse global population. Faculty andstudents continue to work in very exciting research endeav-ors. These extend from modeling complex systems in health-care, transportation, manufacturing environments to analyses,modeling and design in various aspects of nanotechnology.During this academic year we plan to conduct additionalenhancements that support both, graduate and undergraduateeducation. In October 2007, the College of Engineering andDepartment of IMSE will have a visit from ABET(Accreditation Board for Engineering & Technology)Evaluating team, to conduct the accreditation exercise for theBS in IE.The faculty continues to expand on a series of initiativesthat extend nationally and internationally. During this semes-ter we have three guest scholars visiting the department; twofrom the Peoples Republic of China and one from Indonesia.The departmental staffs, Ms. Jackie Stephens and Ms. GloriaHanshaw-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/technicianMr. Chris Paulus moved to another job and we are currentlyin the process of filling the position. We hope to completethat process in the upcoming weeks.During the past few months the extended IMSE familygrew. Prof. and Mrs. Kingsley Reeves had a new daughter and Prof. Grisselle Centeno and her husband had a boy.We encourage you to find out what students and facultyare doing and network within and outside the Department.On behalf of the IMSE team, welcome back and our bestwishes for a great semester.Sincerely,José L. Zayas-Castro

Professor & IMSE Chairperson

V olu m e 1, Issue 1 F all 2

007

I nsid e t his iss ue:

Hate t hose m issed flig ht co n nectio ns? So m e- bod y fro m O. R . is t here to hel p yo u A pee k i nto t he 2006-2007 acti vities I n Sit u Process I m pro ve m e nt for M icro/ Na no M a n ufact uri ng

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

Message from the IMSE chair...INFORMS President’s Desk

Roughly a month ago I was reminded of a New York Times (NYT) article I read in July while I was seated in oneof the gates at Reagan Airport in DC. The circumstances werenot the best, actually they were pretty bad. My flight to Tampawas scheduled to take off at 8:30 am, so I got to the airport ataround 7:15 am (I admit it was a little late for my standards but not for the majority of other passengers). The US Airwaysqueues were so crowded that my first thought was: “Better start forgetting about being in Tampa at noon”. Half hour inthe 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, Iwas given a seat in the 3:30 pm flight, which in turn was de-layed until 4:00 pm the first time and then until 4:45pm. Intotal my waiting time was approximately 10 hours!The NYT article described how M.I.T. researchers someyears ago found that when missed connections and flight can-cellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirdslonger than the official statistics and also that as planes be-come more crowded the delays are much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight. Indeed, this lat-ter finding has motivated them to update the study (domesticflights are running 85 to 90 percent full nowadays).Dr. Cynthia Barnhart, from the Center for Transportationand Logistics at M.I.T.(http://esd.mit.edu/Faculty_Pages/barnhart/barnhart.htm), be-lieves the new results will present severe increases in delays.The facts are evident: in the first five months of 2007 morethan a quarter of domestic flights arrived at least 15 minuteslater and the delays were on average 39 percent longer than2006.Moreover, official statistics do not track the waiting time onrunways or when flights are diverted to other cities.Dr. Barnhart believes data should be compiled more accu-rately so as to give passengers a clearer picture of what reallyhappens and more importantly to change airline and airport policies regarding connection times. Nobody enjoys waiting acomplete day for another flight or sleeping in terminals due toa missed connection.Some of the papers Dr. Barnhart has published on thistopic 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 AirlineOperations Control Simulator and decision models are de-scribed to be used in real-time managing to reduce passenger arrival delays, without increasing costs.(2) “Applications of operations research in the air transportindustry” (2003)(http://transci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/4/368)which presents an overview of several important areas of op-erations research applications in the air transport industry.(3) “Planning for Robust Airline Operations: Optimizing Air-craft Routings and Flight Departure Times to Minimize Pas-senger Disruptions” (2005)(http://transci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/1/15)where an approach is presented to reduce delay propagation by intelligently routing aircraft.

By Patricio Rocha

News feature

A peek into the 2006-2007 activities

Hate those missed flight connections?

Somebody from O.R. is there to help you

Get together - Fall 2006Raymond James Fundrais-

Other activities:

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Get together - Spring 2007

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INFORMS lecture series- Fall 2006

Research corner

The study--on process control was motivated by the challenges of monitoring and diagnosis in mi-cro/nano manufacturing, where many mechanical/electronic/chemical variables interact with each other toaffect the product quality. For example, in nanowire synthesis for the production of ultra small electronic cir-cuits, where silicon wafer with embedded nanoclusters is placed in a horizontal furnace tube to producenanowires through vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism, furnace temperatures, density of nanoclusters inwafer, and pressure will jointly affect the morphology of nanowires. The pattern of interaction among thecorresponding process variables (temperature fluctuation and pressure change etc.) reflects the state of thenanowire growth. In Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP) for wafer polishing in semiconductor manu-facturing, mechanical abrasive and chemical reaction jointly affect the polishing on wafer surface. Coeffi-cient 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 in-creasing tendency in COF implies different anomalies in CMP.Furthermore, to depict the complex nanostructure features, many correlated mechani-cal/electronic/chemical variables must be in functional form (functions of other variables) and thus increasethe 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 mul-tiple process variables must be carried out for each time interval.Current research typically focuses on discovering new phenomena and new morphologies. Mean-while, conventional quality control methods are not capable of monitoring the complex features of nanostruc-ture and morphology variation over time. Research on interaction among the correlated functional variablesfor 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 interactionsamong 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 researchfocuses on interaction modeling for Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP) and nanowire synthesis. Wehave been working towards the following problems:

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Developing new designed experiment method to study the impact of interaction among multiple functionalvariables 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 combina-tions.

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Developing online monitoring scheme to detect unexpected process change based on statistical quality con-trol methods.

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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 willsoon 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.)

In Situ

Process Improvement for Micro/Nano Manufacturing

Solutions to puzzles on page 4

N o . 1 : S u m o f f a c t o r i a l s i s a l w a y s o d d , w h i l e f a c t o r i a l o f a n u m b e r i s a l w a y s e v e n . S o m a x i m u m p o s s i b l e v a l u e f o r m a n d n i s 1 . N o . 2 : S l i d e a s i d e 2 0 c o i n s , s e l e c t i n g r a n d o m l y , t o f r o m a g r o u p . F l i p e a c h o f t h e s e t w e n t y c o i n s . T h i s w i l l g i v e u s t h e s a m e n u m b e r o f h e a d s i n t h e 2 0 c o i n g r o u p a s t h a t i n t h e g r o u p t h a t c o n t a i n s t h e r e s t o f t h e 8 0 c o i n s .