Aeronautics systems technology studies

Data collection and analysis in the areas of air transportation, aircraft manufacturing and sales, airline operations, market projections, internal trade, and energy consumption; legislation and regulations, technology needs; surveys; decision-making; cost analyses; and technology transfer are discussed

Implementation of Stature Risk Management Tool in Company XYZ, ABC Business

The ABC business unit within our corporation has no single, easy to use, risk management software platform. This has caused discrepancies between and within risk assessments and delays in regulatory approvals due to changes being requested by the notified bodies. It also led to numerous document formats existing in our Product Data Management system for the same types of documents. This costs the company time and money and was a burden on those responsible for creating and managing these assessments. The objective of this project was to implement a single risk management tool within the ABC business that would mitigate the majority of the issues with the current paradigm. This report details the tasks undertaken and the process by which a single risk management software platform was implemented in the ABC business. This project resulted in the creation of 2 risk assessment templates, 4 work instructions, 1 Form/Template, 4 Harm and Severity Libraries, and 1 Excel spreadsheet tool being rolled out to the organization. There were also numerous software validation documents involved. Initial feedback on the implementation has been positive

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

A functional architecture for an e-Engineering hub

Many Information Technology (IT) tools now exist to support collaborative working between engineering organisations. These often address operational issues rather than tactical or strategic issues. In particular, there are no effective tools for collaborative project planning between project partners. An electronic engineering hub (e-Hub) is considered useful in this regard. This paper presents the functional architecture of the e- Hub – a major research result of the EU funded e-HUBs project (e-Engineering enabled by Holonomic and Universal Broker Services). The e-HUBs project developed a universal collaboration platform for engineering outsourcing with focus on supporting collaborative project planning process. The e-Hub offers an extended set of functions to engineering service providers (mostly small and medium-sized enterprises) such as application hosting and definition and development of collaborative engineering workflows. The paper discusses the theoretical background and the supporting technologies for the development of the functional architecture and presents the deployment of the engineering e-Hub prototype in a construction scenario

T-Cell Manufacture for Treatment of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Adoptive T-cell therapy is a recent medical development that has shown clinical success in treating relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a common form of cancer with a poor prognosis. Ironically, the treatment’s greatest advantage is at the same time deterring large pharmaceutical companies from commercializing it. Adoptive T-cell therapy is successful in treating ALL largely because it takes a patient’s own cells and engineers them to fight the cancer. While the autologous nature of the treatment helps to incorporate the engineered T-cells into the patient’s body, it also makes each treatment patient-specific. This does not fit into the paradigm of large pharmaceutical companies, who want “off the shelf” drugs. Critics claim that adoptive T-cell therapy is a “boutique” treatment that is too costly and too impractical to commercialize. Our group performed a profitability analysis on a commercial-scale T-cell manufacturing facility based in Philadelphia and found that it could in fact be profitable. Furthermore, we pinpointed a cell separation step in the current procedure that was not optimal. We modeled the separation and determined an optimal operating protocol that would decrease the failure rate from 10% to 1%, increasing profitability in our facility by 25 million dollars

Measuring efficiency of lean six sigma project implementation using data envelopment analysis at NASA

Purpose: This study aims to review the implementation of the Lean Six Sigma project methodology in the Johnson Space Center (JSC) business environment of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with an objective of evaluating performance of individual projects and to develop recommendation for strategies to improve operational efficiencies based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Design/methodology/approach: In this study, authors propose the Lean Six Sigma project performance evaluation model (LSS-PPEM) based on Data DEA where Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Total Team Hours serve as inputs while Process Sigma and Cost avoidance are used as outputs. The CSFs are factors that critically affect the performance of LSS at JSC. Six of those are identified by the Black Belts through Analytical Hierarchical Process, and the values of those are decided by project leaders and Green Belts through survey. Eighteen LSS projects are evaluated, and their results are analyzed. Findings and Originality/value: Eventually, four out of the six CSFs are adopted for this study based upon Pearson correlation analysis, and those four include Project execution and follow up of results; Top management’s commitment and participation; The use of data analysis with easily obtainable data; Attention given to both long and short term targets. Using data between the years 2009 and 2011, seven of the eighteen projects are found to be efficient. The benchmark analysis and slack analysis are conducted to provide further recommendation for JSC managers. Three out of those seven efficient projects are most frequently used as an efficient peer. Practical implications: Traditionally, DEA has been considered as a data-driven approach. In this study, authors incorporate the survey-based CSFs into the DEA frame. Since many organizations may have different CSFs, the framework presented in this study can be easily applied to other organizations. Originality/value: This study provides a DEA-based framework and case study of LSS project evaluation in the government sector, which is very unique application to author’s best knowledge. The framework is unique in terms of its input factor selection and quantification procedures.Peer Reviewe