Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Containership Load Planning with Crane Operations(2011) Hamedi, Masoud; Haghani, Ali; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the start of the containerization revolution in 1950's, not only the TEU capacity of the vessels has been increasing constantly, but also the number of fully cellular container ships has expanded substantially. Because of the tense competition among ports in recent years, improving the operational efficiency of ports has become an important issue in containership operations. Arrangement of containers both within the container terminal and on the containership play an important role in determining the berthing time. The berthing time of a containership is mainly composed of the unloading and loading time of containers. Containers in a containership are stored in stacks, making a container directly accessible only if it is on the top of one stack. The task of determining a good container arrangement to minimize the number of re-handlings while maintaining the ship's stability over several ports is called stowage planning, which is an everyday problem solved by ship planners. The horizontal distribution of the containers over the bays affects crane utilization and overall ship berthing time. In order to increase the terminal productivity and reduce the turnaround time, the stowage planning must conform to the berth design. Given the configuration of berths and cranes at each visiting port, the stowage planning must take into account the utilization of quay cranes as well as the reduction of unnecessary shifts to minimize the total time at all ports over the voyage. This dissertation introduces an optimization model to solve the stowage planning problem with crane utilization considerations. The optimization model covers a wide range of operational and structural constraints for containership load planning. In order to solve real-size problems, a meta-heuristic approach based on genetic algorithms is designed and implemented which embeds a crane split approximation routine. The genetic encoding is ultra-compact and represents grouping, sorting and assignment strategies that might be applied to form the stowage pattern. The evaluation procedure accounts for technical specification of the cranes as well as the crane split. Numerical results show that timely solution for ultra large size containerships can be obtained under different scenarios.Item The Body Made Visible: Scientific Practices of Seeing and Literary Naturalism(2004-11-29) Solomon, Jennifer Welch; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how ideas about the body in the late 19th century--how to see them better and how best to represent them--are circulating in discussions among physiologists and sociologists, and how naturalist writers engage these discussions with their own representational strategies. Often, what their works create is a strong tension between methods of corporeal control--immobilizing bodies, abstracting bodies, establishing distance from bodies--and the fact that many bodies refuse to submit to any normative power. I argue that scientists develop visual strategies as a way of learning more about bodies, and ultimately this knowledge can be used for purposes of social reform and regulation. Likewise, naturalist writers focus their narrative upon the body as a way of demonstrating lack of agency and problems with developing identity. In using some of the strategies for bodily representation that physiologists and sociologists do, naturalist writers also point to social problems that warrant change. In Chapter One, I trace the desire for bodily penetration on the part of physiologists and naturalist writers such as Émile Zola and Frank Norris. I argue that the bodily interior is conceived of as mechanistic and that naturalist writers use visual methods of magnification and immobilizationsuccessful in the physiological fieldto elicit a sense of the interior. In Chapter Two, I discuss how physiologists and sociologists use abstraction to reduce bodies to an essence as a way of ordering excessive detail for measuring purposes. I argue that naturalist writers like Norris and Stephen Crane also engage in abstraction, producing familiar types on the one hand and surreal figures on the other. Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine the multitude of bodiesthe crowds. Again, I examine the relationship between social science and visual strategies of order. I juxtapose the early actualities of Edison and the Lumière Brothers with naturalist texts by Edith Wharton, Norris, and Crane, examining ways that visual strategies of ordering crowdschiefly by establishing distance and perspectiveare used and subverted in literary texts so as to highlight the disruptive power of the crowd.