Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2021, Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology MS

Four interfaces were developed to factorially apply two principles of ecological interface design (EID; direct perception and direct manipulation) to a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The theoretical foundation and concepts employed during their development, with findings related to more significant issues regarding interface design for complex socio-technical systems, are discussed. Key aspects of cognitive systems engineering (CSE) and EID are also discussed. An FMS synthetic task environment was developed, and an experiment was conducted to evaluate real-time decision support during supervisory operations. Participants used all four interfaces to supervise and maintain daily part production at systematically varied levels of difficulty across sessions. Significant results provide evidence that the incorporation of direct perception and direct manipulation in interface design produced an additive effect, allowing for greater support for the supervisory agents.

Committee: Kevin B. Bennett Ph.D. (Advisor); Scott Watamaniuk Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Flach Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Experimental Psychology; Psychology; Systems Design

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2013, Computer Science (Engineering and Technology)

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) was developed to deliver network communications to so-called "challenged environments." These include space, military, and other networks that can be described as having extremely long link delay and frequent disconnections. The DTN paradigm implements a store-and-forward network of nodes to overcome these limited environments as well as delivering "bundles" of data instead of packets. The bundles nominally contain enough data to constitute an entire atomic unit of communication. DTN introduces the Endpoint Identifier (EID) to identify bundle Agents or groups. The EID can imply naming, addressing, routing and network topology, but these features and flexibility come at the cost of verbosity and a per-packet overhead introduced by large and descriptive EIDs. In this document, we apply lossless text compression to EIDs using Zlib's DEFLATE algorithm. We develop a novel method for generating a large sample of verbose EIDs based upon Apache access logs, allowing testing over a larger, more varied, and more realistic data set than would be possible with the current DTN testing networks. Analysis of the processing overhead and compression ratio lead us to the conclusion that Zlib reduces the overhead of EIDs substantially. By compressing the dictionary, more featureful EIDs can be used without increasing overhead in the form of larger bundle dictionaries due to syntactical verbosity.

Committee: Shawn Ostermann (Advisor) Subjects: Computer Science