Research

Dissertation

The Readiness–Utilization Trade Space in U.S. Army Aviation: Policy, Decision Behavior, and Information Quality

This dissertation challenges the US Army’s reliance on a single readiness metric to manage its aviation fleet. Using daily operational data from AH-64 Apache helicopters, it develops a framework that interprets readiness and utilization as joint outcomes of a coupled system rather than independent objectives. Three studies characterize how units actually make flying decisions, identify peer-based pathways toward more efficient operations, and determine when investment in predictive maintenance technology stops yielding meaningful returns.

Available in the NC State University Libraries repository.

Publications

Semmel AD, Heese HS, McConnell BM. “Evaluating the implementation of operational readiness and maintenance policies in US Army aviation.” Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, 2025. doi:10.1177/15485129251328044

Software

grassr: Context-Conditioned Reporting for Binary Rater Reliability — R package on CRAN, version 0.7.4, published July 2026. With Rachel Gidaro. Generates a report card for rater reliability on binary outcomes, positioning each agreement coefficient on a reference surface calibrated to the study’s rater count, sample size, and prevalence. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.grassr · Documentation · GitHub

Conference Presentations

  • 94th Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, June 2026. “Predictive Maintenance Under Prognostic Uncertainty: The Marginal Value of RUL [Remaining Useful Life] Accuracy in Fleet Operations.” Working Group 17: Logistics, Reliability, and Maintainability.
  • 93rd Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, June 2025. “A Framework for Analyzing Operational Efficiency in US Army Aviation: Self-Organizing Map-based Clustering of Flight Dispatch Decisions.” Selected Best in Working Group: Readiness.
  • INFORMS Annual Meeting, October 2023. “Tradeoffs in Army Aviation Training and Maintenance.”
  • 61st Army Operations Research Symposium (AORS), September 2023. “Tradeoffs in Army Aviation Training and Maintenance.”

Cadet Research Advising

  • Cadet Ian Smith ‘28, NORAD Data Visualization (MA289)
  • Cadet Kristian Nordby, LLMs for Querying Tabular Data (MA389)
  • Cadet Ethan Collins, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (MA489)
  • Cadet Jackson McCray, Linear Programming for Aircraft Mission Scheduling (MA389)
  • Cadet Mark Amori, Explainability of Computer Vision Algorithms for Riot Detection from Satellite Imagery (MA489)