A. James Clark School of Engineering

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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    PLANT PRODUCTIVITY AND COMPETITIVE RESPONSE TO PRESCRIBED FIRE IN MID-ATLANTIC BRACKISH MARSHES
    (2011) Bickford, Wesley Alan; Needelman, Brian A; Weil, Raymond R; Bioengineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Prescribed fire may increase productivity of some brackish marsh species. An understanding of the mechanisms behind this stimulatory effect is important for land managers to maximize the benefits to the ecosystem. I found that canopy removal is the dominant mechanism through which fire stimulates biomass production in the marshes at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County, Maryland. The stimulatory effect of canopy removal was stronger in sedge-dominated systems than grass-dominated systems. Faster sprouting sedge species may be able to take fuller advantage of light and soil temperature increases following canopy removal than later-sprouting grass species. Results of a greenhouse study indicated that canopy removal gives sedges a competitive advantage over grasses. These studies have numerous implications for land managers using anthropogenic disturbances as a management technique. Canopy-level disturbances, such as fire may increase productivity in sedge-dominated marshes and may suppress grass species in mixed compositions.
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    SEPARATING PRODUCT FAMILY DESIGN OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS
    (2010) Karimian Sichani, Peyman; Herrmann, Jeffrey W.; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In order to improve productivity and reduce costs, manufacturing firms use product families to provide variety while maintaining economies of scale. In a competitive marketplace, designing a successful product family requires considering both customer preferences and the actions of other firms. This dissertation will conduct fundamental research on how to design products and product families in the presence of competition. We consider both single product and product family design problems. We use game theory to construct a model that includes the competition's product design decisions. We use separation, a problem decomposition approach, to replace complex optimization problems with simpler problems and find good solutions more efficiently. We study the well-known universal electric motor problem to demonstrate our approaches. This dissertation introduces the separation approach, optimizes product design with competition, models product family design under competition as a two-player zero-sum game, and models product family design with design and price competition as a two-player mixed-motive game. This dissertation formulates novel product design optimization problems and provides a new approach to solve these problems.