Team "SAIA. SAIA-ZING UP: Evaluation of Terminal Expansion", a senior design technical competition finalist, was recognized with an Honorable Mention. The team worked with the Industrial Engineering team at Saia LTL Freight to aid in their terminal expansion implication process. Saia has set out an aggressive growth goal of opening 10-15 terminals in the next year. The model simulated a quantification of network changes as a result of additions to Saia’s network, including operational, freight flow, and cost. The system model provides Saia with proactive, data-driven insight to the impacts on their network during their terminal expansion.
 
Team Members: Joey Abi-Sarkis | Abhishek Mattipalli | Maya Menon | Jay Patel | Santhosh Saravanan | Abhinav Sehgal | Pooja Sharma | Yashovarman Singh
Client Contact: Ryan Madura
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Anton Kleywegt
 
Congratulations to both teams, their clients, and their faculty advisors.

“It was wonderful to see the senior design students develop and present their projects in person. They endured another stressful semester, but remarkably balanced quality and rigor with health and wellbeing,” said Director of Professional Practice Dima Nazzal. “Kudos to them for overcoming the challenges and delivering excellent work for a wide range of clients including government agencies, small non-profits, and large corporations. Congratulations to the faculty advisors, who coached the teams and kept them motivated and focused. A special recognition and appreciation to our Director of Technical Communication, Brandy Blake, for teaching the students how to communicate their engineering designs clearly and succinctly”

Senior Design team “Provision with a Vision” won the Capstone Expo award for Best ISyE Project. They worked with the on-board services group at Delta Air Lines to develop a data-driven methodology that determines the optimal amount of beverage items to load on a flight. The project motivation came from unused items adding extra weight to the aircraft resulting in excess fuel costs and carbon emissions. The team delivered an optimization model that takes into consideration passenger demand as well as an impact analysis tool which allows Delta to visualize how small changes in beverage quantities can have significant economic and environmental impact across the system.

The team included Anneliese Conrad, Carolina Howell, Niral Jagtap, Ellie Johnson, Nico Knutzen, Sofia Laval, Brad Peterson, and Libbee Stallone. They were advised by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt.

From among the ISyE teams, three were selected as finalists for the Best of ISyE Senior Design Competition, which was held on December 14, 2021. Team “Shoulda Put A R(INGO)n i(T)” was selected as the first-place winner.

Team “Shoulda Put A R(INGO)n i(T)” partnered with Novelis, an aluminum manufacturing company, to improve ingot availability in its Oswego, NY, facility. The goal of the project was to ensure that when a customer makes an order, Novelis could supply the right ingots at the right time on hand to immediately start production. The team’s solution was to build an ingot “supermarket” that would increase ingot availability from 50% to 90% and reduce overall lead time by up to 40%. To achieve this, the team created an optimization model that recommended the best replenishment strategy for each ingot SKU and used a simulation model to measure the impact of the supermarket on the production process. With this new tool, Novelis can dramatically increase their operational efficiency and save millions of dollars per year.

Team Members included Tobin Abraham, Joseph Abrokwa, Elvin Chirackal, Joseph Cochran, Lorenzo Guerrero, Grace Anne Muller, and Tim Ryan. They were advised by Part-Time Lecturer and Tennenbaum Institute Principal Research Engineer Douglas Bodner.

Finalist team “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Bus Stop” worked with the Atlanta Department of Transportation (ATLDOT), a recently formed government entity tasked with promoting transportation infrastructure. The team worked to provide ATLDOT with a data-driven methodology to allocate funding to bus stop improvements and a platform for closer collaboration with MARTA. Only 7% of bus stops (out of nearly 4,000) in Atlanta have shelters, which provide riders with proper seating, protection from weather, and ADA accessibility. The team’s solution combines process design with an interactive web tool and a greedy heuristic web app. Through the team’s solution, an additional 1.5 million trips per year will now originate at a sheltered stop. The City of Atlanta voted to back the project with a $3.4 million non-fungible funding source, and the team will present their design to the new mayor in January.

Team members included Soobin Baek, Aaron Brown, Ananya Ghose, Sanghwa Lee, Sung Kyu Lee, Alea Legg, Hetu Patel, Tejas Santanam. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Finalist team “Keep it Simply” worked with The Coca-Cola Company to minimize the overall cost of the distribution network of two recently acquired dairy brands: Fairlife and Simply Oat & Almond. The team provided a data-driven method of formulating network expansion plans and determining safety stock levels by building and validating a mathematical optimization model that recommends not only the optimal distribution center (DC) opening location and timeline, but also the capacity expansion and safety stock level at each DC over a given horizon. This provided an annual value of several million dollars across the two dairy brands. To help Coca-Cola design the network expansion of any brand in the future, the team generalized the model to a standardized template wrapped within a user-friendly graphical user interface with three different model options.

Team Members included Joseph Chanin, Yizhi Huang, Minrui Liang, Yufei Liu, Naren Reddy, Xinran Yu, and Emily Zhang. They were advised by Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Alejandro Toriello.

In addition, two teams received honorable mentions and were contenders for the Best of ISyE Senior Design.

Team “Panic! at the Cisco” worked with Cisco on its Printed Circuit Board Assembly Component Allocation. Team Members included Anjana Anandkumar, Udisha Bhattacharyya, Grace Gilpatric, Katie Landers, Kat Pospichel, Briana Sims, Tan Tanthien, and Anna (Tu) Vu. They were advised by William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak.

Team “The Bee’s Knees” worked with Smith + Nephew on its production planning. Team Members included Leon Breaux, Sara Costello, Emma Jones, James McGregor, Georgia Warnock, and Delaney Wastler. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Ethan Lee.

During a typical semester, the teams devote 12 to 15 hours a week making multiple visits to their clients’ headquarters, defining the problem they will address with their industrial engineering skills, gathering data in order to devise a solution, and modeling and testing their solution. Clients frequently implement some or all of their team’s solution, saving considerable time and money as a result.

But in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, with shelter-in-place orders implemented by state and local governments, and businesses and academia moving online, this is hardly a typical semester. So, how have this semester’s 30 ISyE Senior Design teams successfully adapted?

As it turns out, communication and flexibility – two qualities necessary for a successful Senior Design team during a normal semester – are even more crucial in the current situation.

 For Brice Edelman, whose team client is Kinaxis, a Canadian supply chain management software company, the adjustments made by his group have been close to home – literally.

“I live 40 minutes north of Atlanta, so my ‘isolation’ meant a short drive home to be with my family,” he says. “But I have groupmates whose closest family members are thousands of miles away – in India, in Brazil, or scattered across the U.S. – who have had to figure out what to do, where to go, and otherwise handle things that were easy for me. They are in stressful, scary situations, but even so, they've continued to exceed the standard and create excellent results.

“Earlier in the semester, we found that structure was important for our project – now, it’s absolutely critical,” Edelman continues. “Scheduling and adhering to regular check-ins, double-clarifying expectations, and setting deadlines for work are prerequisites to success in this new work environment. Our group is full of hard workers, but this structure and extra communication ensures that we're all doing the right work.”

Katie Neil’s team, which worked with Buffalo Wild Wings, had a similar experience.

“At the beginning of the semester, our team discussed what we wanted to achieve in Senior Design,” Neil explains. “Once we were all safely settled at home, we had an open and honest discussion about the ensuing changes. While it was a tough conversation, I think being candid about the situation and discussing its repercussions was important. Additionally, I think we've become quite creative when it comes to being productive and motivated - whether that's FaceTime calls to silently do work to stay accountable, BlueJeans meetings with our advisor so we all remain on the same page, and even Discord meetings to chat and remind ourselves that social distancing doesn't mean emotional isolation!” 

The team recognized the extremely unusual nature of the current situation, and in response, they built additional flexibility into the product they created for the restaurant chain.

“We have focused on what ‘sustainability’ means in a corporate setting, in other words the longevity of a product or model,” Neil says. “At the end of this project, our product needs to be useable years into the future. Our final deliverable is a demand forecasting and product mix optimization tool, which means the models are trained on historical data. Obviously, there’s a question as to the validity of historical data for the first few months – if not longer – of 2020 and how it could skew forecasts. In response, we built our product to be flexible when it comes to selecting which data to train our models on. That way, if the client chooses to forgo selecting certain time periods of data, they can do so.”

Another Senior Design team was able pivot in a few short days to address their client’s needs that arose specifically because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They worked with Goodr, a food waste management startup that recovers leftover food from food businesses and delivers it to either non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or farms.

Youngjoon Lim, the team leader, says, “Our team helped Goodr with three main deliverables: a logistics routing tool to reduce driving time for food pickups and deliveries, a new pricing strategy to maximize revenue and profit, and a carbon footprint tool to increase the visibility of Goodr's environmental impact.

“In this pandemic situation, Goodr has been delivering groceries to families in need in the Atlanta area. They reached out to our team and asked for a variation of the routing tool that could be used for these deliveries, as they had hundreds of different stops. We were able to shift gears in a couple days and provide a routing tool specifically for this situation. It was great to see one of our tools in action, especially in a way that was able to help the Atlanta community in this time of need.”

ISyE Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design Coordinator Dima Nazzal  says, "The hardships of delivering Senior Design projects during a pandemic equipped our students with a valuable skill; they’re more prepared today to deal with distant collaborations in the workplace, which could very well be a defining feature of future business operations.”

In other words, these Senior Design teams are doing exactly what they’ve been trained for: creating efficiencies and optimizing under constraints -- just what you would expect for students in the No. 1-ranked industrial engineering program in the U.S.

The Kinaxis team includes Nosrat Chowdhury, Brice Edelman, Osman Ghandour, Aniruddh Hari, Yash Lunagaria, Alice Pagoto, and Maria Yagnye.

The Buffalo Wild Wings team includes Diego Granizo, Ashwin Haritsa, Selin Karaoguz, Philip Murray, Katie Neil, Katie Wah, and Wilson Pu.              

The Goodr team includes Efe Birkan, Sarah Hamer, Youngjoon Lim, Ji Won Kim,  Ji Won Kim, Alejandro Sosa, and Da El Um. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has also resulted in the cancellation of the spring Capstone Expo, where Senior Design teams from across the Institute present their projects to the public. ISyE additionally hosts its own Best of Senior Design competition, which will still take place virtually on Tuesday, April 28. Three to five ISyE teams will be chosen to give their project presentation via BlueJeans to faculty and students, with one team selected as the semester’s most outstanding.

“Georgia Tech ISyE students are equipped with the skills and knowledge to tackle opportunities in public service with the same passion and rigor they apply to private companies,” noted ISyE Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design Coordinator Dima Nazzal. “The impact of the data-driven solutions they devise can be measured not only by monetary savings but also -- more importantly -- societal impact.”

One such team, nicknamed “Watt-lanta,” was led by Jordi Sabria (IE 2021). After meeting with a handful of companies, the team chose to work with the Atlanta Department of Transportation (ATLDOT) because they would not only be helping the client but the local community as well. ATLDOT tasked the team with identifying specific neighborhoods and streets that could benefit from streetlights.

“We looked at multiple studies showing that increasing lighting actually reduced crashes and crime by a significant amount, so our client believed there was a big opportunity here,” said Sabria.

Accordingly, team Watt-lanta identified the neighborhoods, most of which were located in the south and west areas of Atlanta, and the streets in most need of lighting.

“This was not just a technical problem; this was also a social problem,” Sabria said. “We had to take into account the city’s people, society, constituents, public safety, and equity.”

Watt-lanta’s work was so impactful that its results garnered local media coverage.

“Our team had the chance to present to the transportation committee of the City of Atlanta,” said Sabria. “Immediately that afternoon, the mayor announced a historic expansion of 10,000 streetlights. This was exciting news for us, because it means that it’s going to get done.”

Another team that made a significant social impact was “Improving the Children’s Condition,” led by Morgan Knowlton (IE 2021).

Having experiences with foster care in their own families, Knowlton and her teammates reached out to the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS). Reducing the burden on caseworkers improves outcomes for both the caseworkers and children under the care of the state, an idea the team used as the basis for their project. 

“One of the main conclusions we reached was that it’s beneficial for neighboring counties to share case managers,” said Manny Jonson (IE 2021). “Not only did we give DFCS specific numbers on how many caseworkers we suggest they hire, but we also targeted smaller counties specifically, where it wouldn’t take much investment for them to dramatically reduce employee workloads.”

From their conclusions, the team created a deliverable that provided explicit information to help DFCS equally distribute caseloads now and in the future.

“The experience itself was encouraging -- it is reassuring to know the future of the world is in the hands of such an impressive group of young men and women,” said DFCS Division Director Tom Rawlings.

Knowlton was inspired by the Institute’s new mission statement to choose this risky and unique project, reflected by her team’s name.

“I saw the new mission statement as a call to action, a challenge, given by Georgia Tech to its students. I felt like this was the direction that Georgia Tech wanted to go, and that gave me the final push of confidence that I needed to pursue this project,” she said. “I had an amazing team, and I hope that our project encourages future teams to prioritize selecting a project with a social good aspect. If we’re going to be engineers who improve the human condition, we’ve got to get into these spaces.”

The entrepreneurial nature of the project made it a great fit for the team to join Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Capstone to complete their Senior Design project. This was the first time students from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial Systems and Engineering (ISyE) participated in CREATE-X Capstone. It also gave them an opportunity to diversify their skill set by adding two computer science majors to the team.*

The creators of Enercast Solutions are the members of team “Helluva Energy-neers” (advised by ISyE Professor Craig Tovey), which includes Abdulhafiz Abdullahi, Ronnie Bian, Jackson Burke, Aarushi Khajuria, Sonakshi Mishra, Junzhe Ruan, Laura Zhang, and Sam Zimmerman from ISyE, as well as computer science students Jordan Rodrigues and Vale Tolpegin.

“We were interested in learning about entrepreneurship, and this seemed like a really good opportunity,” said Zhang about their decision to join CREATE-X Capstone. “With traditional Senior Design, your scope of impact is just one client, but in the CREATE-X entrepreneurship path, we had the potential to influence several hundred convention centers across the United States.”

Led by mechanical engineering Professor Craig Forest, this special capstone design section is dedicated to developing entrepreneurial prototypes and exploring their market demand. The multidisciplinary program has been running for several years now and is open to students from the departments of biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and now ISyE.

The ISyE students assembled during pre-Senior Design, where their high potential for entrepreneurship was identified by Dima Nazzal, ISyE director of professional practice and leader of the Senior Design program. "ISyE students are increasingly interested in entrepreneurship and multi-disciplinary projects, which motivated us to explore this pathway,” said Nazzal. “It turned out to be a successful experiment with excellent potential for expansion and continuity.”

The energy prediction tool they created uses machine-learning techniques to model energy consumption with several input factors: square footage utilized, forecasted attendance, whether special equipment will be used, and the event dates. Based on predicted electricity usage, the tool outputs a baseline cost for the convention center, as well as an upper and lower bound on how much the event will cost. Convention centers can use these estimates to decide the appropriate amount to charge their clients for the increase in electricity use resulting from their events.

Enercast Solutions topped the competition by winning the CREATE-X best project award across 13 teams and were invited to present their prototype pitch at the ISyE Best of Senior Design presentations.

“Despite their lack of experience in the course compared to the other majors, the ISyE students jumped to the fore because they had already explored customer relationships over the preceding semester and had identified a client as their first customer,” said Forest. “They were able to use this as a springboard, meeting dozens or hundreds of more potential customers who had the same problem, enabling them to assess the size of the market.”

Although pre-Senior Design gave the team a head start, choosing CREATE-X Capstone came with many challenges. “CREATE-X is a different mindset than a lot of the other design projects,” said Tolpegin. “You have to find a problem, and people discount the difficulty of that — that's why 95% of startups fail. Early in the semester, we came up with two different project ideas, and it was a very challenging decision to figure out what path to go down.”

Customer discovery was instrumental in finding a relevant problem space, which meant ensuring that their product would be applicable to most, if not all, convention centers. The team leveraged GWCC partners, cold-called event spaces, and messaged convention center personnel through LinkedIn to secure interviews. In total, they consulted 55 event spaces across the United States and globally. By performing market research and analyzing data from GWCC, the team was able to identify electricity consumption as one of the highest expenses convention centers incur.  

In addition to customer discovery, user testing was an important step in prototype creation. “We were able to get user feedback very early on in the process, and that gave us the ability to adapt and grow our solution based on customer needs,” Tolpegin explained.

Throughout the development cycle, the team conducted a series of tests to refine the Enercast Solutions website. User testing involved recording the amount of mouse clicks and time needed to accomplish various tasks on the website. They also interviewed the testers about their experience and had them fill out a system usability scale – a basic questionnaire used to get feedback on a prototype. Employing standard industry metrics for evaluating software products ensured they obtained objective data.

Another crucial hurdle to overcome was coordination; with 10 members, the team was larger than the typical Senior Design team. “Meeting and ensuring everyone is on the same page can be a lot to do, because you want to make sure that everyone feels like their voices are being heard,” said Khajuria. They came up with a framework to split the members into smaller sub-teams for the second half of the semester, which proved successful.

Though team organization was challenging, they cited working in an interdisciplinary team as a very valuable opportunity. “We've had experience building prediction models with other ISyE students, but this time – working with the CS students – we could see the different ways we approach forecasting,” said Abdullahi.

Ultimately, the team’s hard work and dedication paid off, enabling them to deliver a top-notch product solution that gave GWCC access to information they had never been able to collect before. “We appreciate how easy this tool is to use,” said Vince Almoina, national sales manager at GWCC. “It’s a very simplified platform that delivers exactly the information needed with minimal steps.” In addition to GWCC, two other convention centers also expressed interest in Enercast Solutions services, though the team ultimately decided not to continue with their company.

With their commitment to the challenge and impressive win in the CREATE-X Capstone competition, this team sets a high bar for future students. “I was especially impressed by the students’ professionalism, clear communication, and energy throughout the semester,” said Forest. “If this team, which was named best in the entire class, is representative of what ISyE students bring to the table, then I can’t wait to have more in the class in Fall 2021 and beyond.”

*A second Senior Design team primarily comprising ISyE students also participated in the CREATE-X Capstone Course. The team, nicknamed "Big Things Come in Small Parcels," includes Reed Bethune, Bill Doran, William DuPre, Chase Hubbard, Colin McCormick, Mary Claire Solomon, and Emma Taylor. Aaron Lopes, a computer science major, is also a member. They were advised by Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis and did not have a client.

“The spring semester Capstone Senior Design teams worked across several industries, from public service and government agencies to healthcare providers,” said Dima Nazzal, Senior Design coordinator and projects evaluator. “They not only designed solutions that impacted the bottom line for businesses, but also increased social equity, efficiency of tax dollar spending, and battle readiness for the US Air Force.

“We had many outstanding teams, and it was very difficult to select the finalists,” she added. “The three selected were very representative of the depth of excellence in methodology, impact, professionalism, and technical communication.”

Georgia Tech Capstone Expo

Senior Design team “New Homes for Radomes,” the ISyE Capstone winner, worked with the 402 Commodities Maintenance and Electronics Maintenance Groups at Robins Air Force Base to repair and test aircraft radomes, which house radar and other electronics. The project goal was to design a process flow and workstation layout for a new facility to decrease cycle times, increase capacity, and add capability for managing demand variation. The facility layouts and trade-off analysis provide a customizable solution that will meet increasing demands on-time and remain adaptable as Air Force requirements change.

The team included Vishal Hansali, Rahil Manji, Matthew Oswald, Kathryn Otte, Harper Power, and John Raj. They were advised by ISyE Professor Emeritus Gunter Sharp.

The Capstone Expo’s People’s Choice Award went to Senior Design team “Forecasting MoDELL,” who worked with client Dell Technologies to improve the drive return process to decrease overage and shortage costs. The team included Marc Al Haj, Mukram Aljandali, Heewoon Jeong, Juan Redondo Albetos, Joan Saheb, Jiamzhe Xu, and Haolin Ye. They were advised by A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Alexander Shapiro.

ISyE Best of Senior Design

Out of the 26 teams from the Stewart School, three were chosen to participate in the virtual ISyE Best of Senior Design competition on May 4, 2021. The finalists included Team “The Fastest Picker Upper” and their project with National Automotive Parts Association (NAPA); Team “Watt-lanta” and their project with the City of Atlanta Department of Transportation (DOT); and Team “Cold Chain Soul Train” and their project with Amazon Freight. DOT and NAPA were selected as tied winners. Each winning team will receive $1,500 to split among their team members.

The Fastest Picker Upper partnered with NAPA, an aftermarket automotive parts provider, to improve the labor productivity of their newest distribution center (DC) in Nashville, Tennessee. The team’s solution strategies addressed the putaway, picking, and consolidation operations — the three most important areas within this high-volume DC. The team delivered three tools that NAPA can easily integrate into their warehouse management system. Results of a two-week pilot at the DC coupled with extensive backtesting of the proposed solutions demonstrate that NAPA can expect to improve productivity by more than 7%.

Team members included Sofia Carvajal, Ethan Channell, Paulina Cucalon, Jay Lee, Ved Mohan, Isabella Pappaterra, Camila Pozo, and Michael Tang. They were advised by Associate Professor Steve Hackman.

The other winning team, Watt-lanta, worked with the Atlanta DOT, a government entity tasked with managing and promoting transportation infrastructure. Specifically, the team wanted to provide the Atlanta DOT with a data-driven methodology that maximized the impact of investments made into streetlights, with the goal of reducing overall crashes and crime. The team’s approach was centered around building a sociodemographic-conscious priority model of roads and a costing tool to give the Atlanta DOT the ideal level and order of intervention. This will ultimately transform the City’s installation of streetlights from a reactive to proactive system. As a result of this project, the mayor’s office has announced a historic expansion of 10,000 streetlights in the City of Atlanta.

Watt-lanta team members included Monica de Armas, Andres Farach, Willem Hartog, Isaac Hergott, Gabriella Marenco, Jordi Sabria, Alyssa Sullivan, and Esteban Ulloa. They were advised by ISyE Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis.

The third finalist team, Cold Chain Soul Train, worked with Amazon Freight and spent the semester working to create a cold chain design for the company. Despite offering a variety of refrigerated goods to their customers, Amazon does not currently have the capability to transport refrigerated goods without contracting to third parties. The team developed a computational engine that provides recommendations about the strategic acquisition and operational deployment of a cold chain fleet. The proposed solution will reduce both total system cost and reliance on third-party logistics, helping Amazon to continue building a better customer experience.

Team members included John Browning, Thomas Culwell, Charlie Howard, Isabelle Liffiton, Matthew Link, Riley Martin, Viviana Osorio, and Shrey Udhaya. They were advised by Associate Professor Steve Hackman.

ISyE Teams Win IISE National Competition and CREATE-X Capstone

Cold Chain Soul Train and New Homes for Radomes also competed in the IISE Outstanding ISE Capstone Senior Design Project competition with 21 other teams from across North America. This award “recognizes individual students or teams for practical application of ISE knowledge and skills, resulting in significant impact to an organization.” Cold Chain Soul Train was selected as the overall winner, and New Homes for Radomes placed third.

“The fact that Georgia Tech ISyE teams placed first and third in a national capstone competition is another testimony to the strength of our program, the dedication of our faculty advisors, and the excellence of our students. We should be very proud of our graduates who contribute to our No. 1 ranking,” said Nazzal.

In addition, for the first time ever, ISyE students joined the CREATE-X Capstone course to complete their Senior Design project. Team “Helluva Energy-neers,” an ISyE-dominated team that worked with the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC), won the Best Project award across 13 teams. The team worked with the GWCC to predict an event’s electricity usage and cost more accurately, which could lead to an estimated increase in annual profit of 17%.

Team members included Abdulhafiz Abdullahi, Ronnie Bian, Jackson Burke, Aarushi Khajuria, Sonakshi Mishra, Junzhe Ruan, Jordan Rodrigues, Vale Tolpegin, Laura Zhang, and Sam Zimmerman. They were advised by Professor Craig Tovey.

“For the first time ever, ISyE students participated in the CREATE-X Capstone course as an alternative pathway for completing their Senior Design requirement. ISyE students are increasingly interested in entrepreneurship and multi-disciplinary projects, which motivated us to explore this pathway. It turned out to be a successful experiment with excellent potential for expansion and continuity,” said Nazzal. “We’re proud of the 15 students who agreed to be in this inaugural cohort and of how well they represented our program and managed to partner with other disciplines to design original products. We wish them well in their future entrepreneurial endeavors.”

Georgia Tech Capital Planning and Space Management (CPSM) is responsible for working with space users – such as deans and department chairs – to help manage the 3.3 million square feet of 12,000 instructional, research, and office spaces on campus. When a building is temporarily unavailable, CPSM collaborates with the impacted departments and the Registrar to locate “swing space,” which is available space that can be reallocated to accommodate displaced courses.

In the last five years, half of all renovation projects were completed in multiple phases because of swing space concerns. That’s what motivated a Senior Design team from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) to step in. "The Swing Space Champs" – composed of Prerna Balaji, Savannah Chunn, Zach Hess, Chidambaram Kadiresan, Makala Muhammed, Abbey Nannis, Sarah Poff, and Sena Sennaroglu (advised by Steven Hackman, associate professor) – created a tool to help CPSM prioritize and schedule projects, hoping to reduce the number of phases needed for a renovation project and potentially allow multiple buildings to be renovated at the same time. 

“[We] developed a modeling tool that can identify instructional classroom swing space more easily, so that when the decision is made to renovate a building on campus, it's easy to find classrooms for all of the courses that are displaced by that renovation,” Hess explained. Their project won the award for Best ISyE Project at the Capstone Design Expo in December 2020 and was also selected as a finalist for the Fall 2020 ISyE Best of Senior Design Competition.

As part of the Senior Design process, the team interviewed around 20 different companies, ultimately choosing CPSM after talking to Jimmie Hardin, a data scientist at CPSM, who became their client sponsor. “Even from our first meetings, we had amazing communication with him,” said Muhammed. Communication was key throughout the project, as all progress occurred online through video calls, emails, and interviews. 

Part of the project process included learning about what CPSM does and trying to pinpoint an area to target for improvement. The recent renovation of the Howey Physics building, completed in multiple phases, inspired the team to investigate the impact of swing space allocation. They found that $300,000 could have been saved if the renovation had been completed in just one phase. Howey served as a rigorous case study for their project because of its large capacity lecture halls, which create a challenge when trying to relocate classes.

The team wanted to turn a manual search for swing space solutions into an automated, optimized process that would provide the best solution for all departments involved. They developed the Swing Space Analysis Tool, a model with two primary goals: maximizing the number of courses assigned to a physical swing space solution and minimizing the number of courses with reduced enrollment capacity. Many constraints were considered, such as course capacity, room capacity, wheelchair accessibility, the need for lab spaces, and the availability of distance learning equipment for courses moved online. 

Working on the project involved extensive brainstorming of ideas as well as navigating the dynamics of a large team. “We did a really good job of communicating and just really keeping an eye open on the level of work that people could do and their different skill sets,” Muhammed explained. 

The Swing Space Analysis Tool produces a solution that includes a new room for each displaced course, a remote delivery recommendation if an available room cannot be found, and the reduced capacity of a course if deemed necessary. This solution is displayed on a dashboard that allows CPSM to quickly visualize the recommendations. A critical feature of the tool is that it can be used iteratively, meaning that after CPSM discusses the recommendation with affected departments, they can adjust the inputs of the tool and run it again until the best solution is found. 

The team did not expect to win the ISyE award at the Capstone Design Expo, but they recognized the impact their project would have on Georgia Tech. Their tool can save an estimated 3-5% of the project cost for each phase that is eliminated in a renovation, resulting in potentially millions saved across future renovation projects.  

When describing working with the Senior Design team and the success of their project, Hardin said, “I think it’s incredible they were chosen as the ISyE Capstone Design winners, and that [CPSM] was able to utilize the incredible talent we have right here at Tech to create a solution that could have profound effects right at home.”

The Swing Space Analysis Tool is already helping CPSM to analyze space solutions. “Although no new capital building renovations are on the immediate horizon, CPSM has been using the ISyE-developed swing space model extensively for scenario planning,” Hardin said. “With multiple strategic plans being developed to support the President’s new strategic plan and the anticipation of a new campus physical master plan, the student-developed ISyE model will prove invaluable in scenario planning.”

ISyE Communications Assistant Taylor Hunter interviewed the Senior Design team featured in this article; Communications Assistant Grace Oberst wrote the story.

Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis noted, “This was a particularly strong ISyE Senior Design cohort. Kudos to all the students: They overcame a compressed semester, social distancing requirements, technical difficulties in collaboration, and the accumulated stress of this year to do remarkable work for a broad range of clients. Congratulations to the faculty advisors, who overcame similar difficulties to connect, encourage, and inspire these teams. It has been very gratifying to be involved and to be inspired by everyone’s contributions.”

For the first time since 2014, an ISyE team received the Capstone Expo People’s Choice Award. (The Capstone Expo was held virtually.) The “Emission Experts” worked with UPS to help redesign the company’s carbon reporting process and included Wages Carroll, Natalie Lucco, Maggie Monahan, Geneva Rumer, Michael Saia, William Salzano, Joseph Stapf, and Joshua White. They were advised by A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Alexander Shapiro.

The “Swing Space Champs” won the Capstone Expo award for Best ISyE Project. This team was also selected as a finalist for the Fall 2020 ISyE Best of Senior Design Competition. They worked with Georgia Tech’s Capital Planning and Space Management (CPSM) to evaluate how campus spaces are allocated during renovations.

Specifically, when instructional spaces are renovated, courses must be relocated to rooms that have sufficient capacity, time availability, and equipment. The Swing Space Analysis tool uses a CPLEX solver and adjustable constraints to assist Capital Planning and Space Management with balancing the 240 space user needs. This tool recommends swing space solutions that limit course capacity reductions and remote course offerings. Locating sufficient swing space shortens renovation timelines, potentially realizing millions of dollars in savings for the Institute over the next decade.

CPSM Data Scientist Jimmie Hardin, who served as client liaison for the team, praised the students’ work: “It was an absolute pleasure working with these students. We are ecstatic with the results and the dedication displayed by this team to make sure we were receiving an outcome that would be impactful and useful to the future planning of Georgia Tech facilities. This project has raised the bar on what we feel we can accomplish through student project collaborations and proves yet again what an incredible resource we have right here on campus.”

Team members included Prerna Balaji, Savannah Chunn, Zach Hess, Chidambaram Kadiresan, Makala Muhammed, Abbey Nannis, Sarah Poff, and Sena Sennaroglu. They were advised by Associate Professor Steve Hackman.

The other two ISyE Best of Senior Design finalist teams – ultimately selected as joint winners – were “Should It Stay or Should It CIS-GO” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Hartsfield.” 

Team “Should It Stay or Should It CIS-GO” worked with Cisco Systems to evaluate and optimize Cisco’s global supply chain network. The team explored network design alternatives, investigating trade-offs among costs, carbon emissions, and lead time. Cisco was provided comprehensive models and interactive visualizations enabling ongoing exploration along these dimensions, allowing better-informed decisions about future optimizations. The team demonstrated these tools, proposing enhancements to Cisco's current network with projected savings of up to $29 million and a reduction in carbon emissions of 76,000 tons.

ISyE alumna Rachel Zhu (IE 2018, MSSCE 2019) worked with the team as Cisco’s client liaison. She said, “As an ISyE graduate myself, it was really cool to be able to work with the students on the client side. It provided me with a unique experience to lead and give back to the No.1 program in the U.S. The synergy and information flow between the cross-functional internal teams we made were incredible, and we discovered things about Cisco’s network that are now being reviewed at the SVP level. The students provided top-tier deliverables, and we are working on implementing them as soon as possible. A big ‘thank you’ to ISyE and these smart, talented individuals for their dedication and hard work these last seven months. What an unforgettable privilege this has been.”

Team members included Ishita Date, Isabel Jaffoni, Karim Layoun, Karen Loscocco, Amanda Nima, Deep Patel, Jay Patel, and Parth Patel. They were advised by Professor Craig Tovey.

Team “Don’t Go Breaking My Hartsfield” worked with Delta Air Lines to reduce wait times at the domestic TSA Checkpoint of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which is the busiest in the world. The team analyzed the service rate of the TSA Checkpoint to create a scenario-based approach for recommending lanes at the checkpoint by creating a simulation model to represent the security checkpoint process. This approach will reduce the average wait times by 12% and reduce the number of passengers waiting over 15 minutes by 20%.

“I had the pleasure of supporting the Delta Senior Design team this semester. Previously, our lane plan[s] did not account for variability of data (at the security screening process) and had many other flaws. The team always kept a good attitude, was eager to understand the TSA screening process and how it can be improved, and [their work] increased the accuracy of the lane plans to a great extent,” said Maya Lachev, a third-year ISyE student who is currently completing a co-op as part of Delta’s Passenger Facilitation Division. “It will be exciting to see wait times at TSA positively impacted by the team’s work.”

Katlin Burpee, manager for the Passenger Facilitation Division, added, “[Delta] plans to take the team’s deliverable and continue to use it and even expand it in the future.”

Team members included Valentina Betancourt, Zach Connolly, Vinay Dalal, Jose Correia, Yuhe Chen, Ricardo Estrada, and Marcel Mensch. They were advised by Associate Professor Steve Hackman.

Dima Nazzal, ISyE Senior Design projects evaluator and program coordinator, explained, “Both teams were exceptional in different ways, and it was impossible to determine a single standout team. Team Cisco built a comprehensive model of Cisco's complex warehousing and logistics network, and generated solutions that have huge cost and carbon emission savings. They took their well-developed models steps further by analyzing the tradeoffs between the different objectives and integrating the outputs into a data visualization dashboard.

"Team Delta had an exceptionally challenging project,” Nazzal continued. “With no access to the physical system due to the pandemic, but through outstanding engineering work their approach and developed analytical tools transform the current security checkpoint planning and operational processes, and thus impacting all passengers with flights originating from Atlanta. The solution is seamlessly implementable and has been piloted at Hartsfield-Jackson this semester and shows excellent outcomes.”

As a further indication of an extremely strong Senior Design cohort, three additional teams were selected for Honorable Mention in the ISyE Best of Senior Design competition. These teams were as follows:

• “For Fox Sake” – client: Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. Team members included Ali Amirfazli, Libby Ellison, Steffi Harrisson, Jean Young Kim, Allie LaMadrid, Max Rafferty, Charitty Tuttle, and Garrett Witt. They were advised by Associate Professor Enlu Zhou.
   
• “North Ave. Fire Fighters” – client: Kimberly-Clark. Team members included Andrew Floyd, Naman Garg, Michail Liaroutsos, Austin Nash, Kevin Polak, Alex Rafeedie, Austin Redick, and Shea Underwood. They were advised by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Professor Nicoleta Serban.
   
• “Sharing Is Caring” – client: Smith + Nephew. Team members included Natalie Belt, Laura Hancher, Molly Handel, Henry Hart, Josh Rosenblum, Andrea Ruiz, Alexis Thomann, and Kaitlin VanWambeke. They were advised by Professor Craig Tovey.

“We had one of the largest cohorts in ISyE Senior Design history this semester. Despite the disruptions, all 30 teams were able to deliver high-quality solution to their project sponsors," said ISyE Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design Coordinator Dima Nazzal. "My conclusion after evaluating these 30 teams is that we have uncovered untapped ingenuity in our students – their ability to adapt and deliver a product on par (or one that exceeds) previous cohorts. This is a testament to their resilience and training.”

ISyE still held its Best of Senior Design competition – virtually via BlueJeans – on Tuesday, April 28. Over 300 people attended the event, at which three teams presented their projects for Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW), Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC), and Plasmaxis (Kinaxis). Teams GWCC and Kinaxis were selected as tied winners. Each winning team will receive $1,500 to split among their team members.

The GWCC team, whose project was “Waste Diversion System Design,” has created solutions for their client that will have significant environmental impact. They diverted 13% of waste from the landfill in 2019. Standardized processes and incentive-based fee structures can increase diversion to 45%. Using a custom web application, GWCC can predict conference waste hauls, track conference charges, and reward sustainable conferences. The waste operation can improve from a 7% loss to a 20% profit. The 32% increase in waste diversion saves the equivalent of 3,054 CO2 tons and creates a roughly $473,000 impact on the local recycling industry.

“This team from Georgia Tech combined their natural inquisitive natures and their industrial engineering skill sets to generate a straightforward and accessible set of tools even in the face of data availability limitations and constantly variable operating circumstances,” said Dominic Bruno, director of facility operations at GWCC Authority. “They faced their challenges undaunted and were able to generate a multi-pronged real-world approach to solving the challenges.

"Their solutions are easy to understand, but they are also quite clever in that when combined. They will incentivize better action while providing for a lower overall program cost. In this way, they have provided something that can truly change behavior – often the missing element from process improvement projects.”

The team included Erin Abbott, Elena Buter, Benjamin Espy, Kiran Gite, Toral Kadakia, Abhita Moorthy, Sahana Subramanian, and Caleb Tysor. They were advised by ISyE Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies Chen Zhou.

The Kinaxis team, whose project was “Plasmaxis: Plasma Production Planning,” partnered with Kinaxis, a supply chain planning software company, to improve the efficiency of a major biopharmaceutical manufacturer’s global supply chain for plasma-derived therapeutics. The team developed an optimization model that plans plasma fractionation into “pastes,” an intermediate product in the manufacturing system. This model was integrated into a software tool for use by the client’s production planners. The improvements achieved will save the client an estimated $4.5 million dollars annually and allow them to more rapidly deliver life-saving medication to those in need.

“The Senior Design course at Georgia Tech is an excellent platform that fosters collaboration between academia and industry. Through this project we presented a biopharma industry plasma fractionation planning problem that required synchronizing discrete manufacturing plan with process manufacturing. Once we described the goals and objectives of the project to the Plasmaxis team they successfully created a digital twin of the problem and optimized the plan using mixed integer linear programming approach,” said Arif Mohammed, Kinaxis vice president of professional services, North America.

“We were blown away by the quality of the deliverables that exceeded our expectations – truly world-class, boardroom-quality, top-notch. For Kinaxis it was truly a rewarding experience, and it is an honor to be included among such a distinguished list of Senior Design project winners, both past and present,” Mohammed concluded.

Team members included Nosrat Chowdhury, Brice Edelman, Osman Ghandour, Aniruddh Hari, Yash Lunagaria, Alice Pagoto, and Maria Yagnye. They were advised by ISyE Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis.

The Buffalo Wild Wings team, whose project was “Untapped Potential: Product Mix Selection Strategy,” worked to improve BWW’s beer selection strategy. The team implemented demand forecasting and streamlined the product selection process to increase profit and generate the most profitable monthly product mix on a store-by-store basis. The proposed system, which can be utilized at any Buffalo Wild Wings location, observed a $30,000 average annual increase in profit per store and reduced the product selection process time from six months to two weeks.

The team included Diego Granizo, Ashwin Haritsa, Selin Karaoguz, Philip Murray, Katie Neil, Wilson Pu, Katie Wah, and Andrew Yowell. They were advised by ISyE Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Professor Nicoleta Serban.

“All three teams gave terrific presentations of difficult problems with design solutions that have huge potential impact to their clients,” said Nazzal. “Team BWW developed an impressive suite of deliverables with great potential value. Team GWCC faced data availability, process variability, and multi-player challenges but developed an integrated suite of solutions that are immediately implementable and will have a huge environmental and societal impact. Team Kinaxis had a challenging biomedical engineering production problem that crossed disciplinary boundaries and required advanced modeling and optimization technology to obtain solutions.

“Team GWCC and Team Kinaxis were both exceptional in very different ways, which is why we selected them as joint winners this semester,” Nazzal added.

More Reading about Spring 2020's Senior Design Teams

How Senior Design Teams Succeed in the Middle of a Pandemic

How Georgia Tech ISyE Capstone Seniors Rose to the Challenge of COVID-19, and What It Means for Business at Large

The winning team, “Sky’s the Limit,” worked with Delta Airlines In-Flight Services (IFS). The project examined Delta’s distribution network to consolidate warehouse inventory and optimize trucking. The team evaluated how Delta stores and transports in-flight materials that get packed for flights, such as pillows and snacks. They discovered that these items were stored in a range of warehouses and were delivered by partially filled trucks. They found that reducing warehouse operational costs and increasing truck utilization would result in significant yearly savings of 17%.

“It was an absolute pleasure working with the ‘Sky’s the Limit’ ISyE team on their Senior Design project,” said Chris Vanner, senior planner for IFS Transportation at Delta. “The amount of energy, enthusiasm, and professionalism each member of the team demonstrated was truly unsurpassed. Thanks to their hard work and meticulous attention to detail, they identified numerous opportunities to improve operational efficiencies across Delta’s IFS supply chain. Their findings, once implemented, will not only increase efficiency of our supply chain but also result in significant cost savings for Delta. I cannot thank them enough for all their hard work throughout the semester, and we’re looking forward to implementing their findings as soon as possible.”

The team members included Christine Cristobal, Afreen Fahad, Mack Hathaway, Kelsey Keith, Carolina Llerena, Madison Messier, Priya Sharma, and Thomas Suh. They were advised by Associate Professor Enlu Zhou.

Senior Design team “Authority Life,” which worked with the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) Authority, not only took home the Capstone prize for best ISyE project but also won the ISyE Best of Senior Design Competition.

The GWCC hosts around 300 events in Atlanta annually and is transforming their business model to a data-driven assessment of profitability on a per event basis. The Senior Design team developed and implemented three models to achieve this goal: a rooms-to-event assignment optimization model, a cost prediction model, and a profit margin classification. They also designed a web app to integrate the three models. Through this new integrated data-driven approach, GWCC Authority’s annual profits are projected to increase by about $1.1 million.

“Working with this Senior Design team was a delight. They were able to problem-solve and were tenacious enough to dig and get the information needed for their analysis out of our databases (not always the easiest task),” said Mark Koeninger, director of business intelligence and process improvement for GWCC Authority. “We had many meetings and sessions both in-person and on the phone, but our team was also able to get together for a team-building event at Mercedes-Benz Stadium as well as a team lunch, and I was able to see firsthand the teamwork and camaraderie that has developed.

“As for the project’s impact to my building, it is a gamechanger. I have been tasked with putting a focus on expenses, event level P&L’s, and driving profitability. This tool is a great piece of that puzzle, as I get the company culture geared toward managing profitability and expense. With a potential savings of $1.1 million over the next year, I am excited to get the team using this to its full capability.”

The team members included Daniel Alayo-Matos, Hailun Chang, Brandon Kang, Yunsang Kim, Emily Kornegay, Peyton Skinner, Mayke Vercruyssen, and Yihua Xu. They were advised by A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Alexander Shapiro.

Senior Design team “Ocsic,” which worked with Cisco Systems, was a finalist for the ISyE Best of Senior Design Competition. The goal of their project is to maximize recovery value from returned products, achieved through three key steps: (1) introducing a new mathematical model to allocate products to channels based on expected profit; (2) consolidating inventory to facilitate its reallocation between channels; and (3) enabling e-commerce retailers as alternative remarketing channels. Implementing these would increase profit by 40% for FY19, reduce scrapped products by 12.7%, and reduce average inventory by 18.4%, and avoid sending 6,350 pounds of material from to a landfill.

The team members included Kenneth Bassett, Kyle Brown, Jayanth Chintham, Nicholas Franco, Mustafa Gharaibeh, Eleana Padilla, Seong Hwan Park, and Erik Pulido. They were advised by Director of Student Services Dawn Strickland.

Senior Design team PIVOT was also a finalist for the ISyE Best of Senior Design Competition. PIVOT manufactures carts and kiosks for food and beverage vendors. The demand for PIVOT's carts and kiosks has been increasing rapidly, but an essential resource – skilled manufacturing employees – are in short supply. To satisfy increasing demand, the team designed a production system that utilizes lower-skilled employees in the complex assembly process. The team delivered tools for training employees including assembly instructions and drawings, as well as optimization software that determines the optimal assignment and order of tasks for workers with different skills to minimize project completion time. The improvements, already implemented, doubled the throughput of the system and decreased labor costs by 16.7%.

The team members included Walid Abdi, Jacob Carlton, Sunny Chen, Renee Desprez, David Guo, Mara Hayes, Rizwan Khan, and Chloe Kim. They were advised by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt.

As is typical for ISyE’s Senior Design teams, in addition to the projects’ individual client benefits, the projects collectively have generated impressive value.

“The impact and potential value of the Senior Design projects is very compelling,” said Dima Nazzal, ISyE director of professional practice and Senior Design coordinator. “While we have a rigorous method for identifying the ISyE competition finalists, it’s still difficult to choose the top three. This year, we’ve had several teams that took their projects into a higher level by implementing their recommendations and directly testing their impact at the client site. Collectively, the 23 ISyE teams generated more than $20 million in annual potential value for their clients. More importantly, several ISyE projects this semester created positive environmental and societal impact, such as the projects with Shepherd Center’s sustainability committee and the project with the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta.”

Since 1975, fourth-year undergraduates in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) have completed Senior Design as a semester-long capstone course required for graduation. The course presents an opportunity for ISyE students to work on real-world design problems and put their ISyE skills into practice by exploring a client’s problem and designing a deliverable solution.

“One challenge we see students grappling with in Senior Design is framing the problem,” explained Dima Nazzal, ISyE director of professional practice and Senior Design advisor. “What are the client’s motivations and goals for this project, and what are the pain points for the client? Ultimately, the students have to make a case for their projects in terms of value to the client.”

As a result, ISyE has developed a new class, Cornerstone Modeling and Design (ISYE 3803), that enables undergraduates to explore problem-framing prior to their Senior Design experience. The course, taught by Nazzal, was offered for the first time in fall 2018, and it trains students to develop, write, and present proposals to solve problems that require the use of ISyE methodology.

The class uses general case studies drawn from past Senior Design projects — from network optimization for an oil and gas company to guest flow and queues in a sports stadium to efficient patient scheduling for a health care clinic.

The students in the class are divided into small teams, and each team works on the same project for several weeks. Team members request data, conduct research, analyze the system and data in search of opportunities, and present their proposal to the whole class. The variety of teams — coupled with the non-stylized complex projects — leads to a variety of proposed solutions.

“It’s good for the students to see different opportunities identified for the same problem, because it demonstrates that creativity is part of problem-solving,” Nazzal said.

Emma Baubly, a fourth-year ISyE student, took ISYE 3803 the first time it was offered and now serves as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the course. “The teams are given problems that don’t necessarily have a single answer, which can be frustrating for Tech students,” Baubly reflected. “And as a result, while this may be one of the more challenging courses ISyE students will take, I think it’s also a class that will add tremendous value to their Georgia Tech education.”

ISyE fourth-year Kevin Kwon took the Cornerstone class in spring 2019. “This was my favorite class that I’ve taken at Tech,” he said. “We had to repeatedly draft proposals for our ‘client,’ just like Senior Design teams do. Writing the proposals gave us practice framing the problem so as to be as effective as possible for our clients.”

Kwon, who is taking Senior Design this spring, also appreciated that the class structure forced him to focus on important soft skills such as collaboration, giving presentations, and communicating with clients.

“I learned that teamwork is extremely important,” he said. “It’s not just about the intellectual capability of a person, but how you work within a group and if you’re able to compromise. In addition, if an ISyE student wants to go into consulting — or any field that requires client interaction — this class will benefit them.”

Nazzal concurred. “Our students have excellent technical skills in analysis, modeling, and coding. This course challenges them in new ways when they realize that there is not one correct final proposal to solve a complex problem, and that the path to the finish line is not linear. Just as important, this course trains them to function as teams, to experience productive conflict, and to compromise to achieve a common goal. They work extremely hard throughout the semester, and it will pay off in Senior Design and in their job interviews.”

Twenty-three other ISyE teams also completed Capstone projects with real-world impact. In addition to Cisgocean, three finalists teams – working with the Emory Clinic’s Heart & Vascular Center, MARTA, and UPS – were selected for the ISyE Best of Senior Design. “The finalist projects were selected because they stood out in terms of scope/challenge, methodology, and potential impact,” explained Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design coordinator Dima Nazzal.

For their project, Cisgocean worked with Cisco’s Global Logistics and Central Manufacturing teams to reduce transportation costs of shipping products between contract manufacturers in Asia and direct fulfillment centers in the Americas. Their proposed design revolved around increasing ocean utilization while maintaining service level constraints. This was achieved by automating Cisco’s current shipping mode assignment process, building a shipment scheduling tool to provide an optimal mode split (ocean vs. air) for its product portfolio and designing an interactive graphical user interface for project managers and supply chain planners to use to plan intercontinental shipments.

The value of this project to Cisco is estimated at $10 million per year across the highest volume lane and a reduction in global carbon footprint by 16 percent. Cisco has recognized the value and has not only conveyed the mode shift opportunity to over 10 product families but has also decided to set mode split targets for fiscal year 2020 based on the results.

“Using sophisticated optimization theory, including a bin-packing heuristic for palletization of goods and a multi-objective integer programming formulation, Team Cisgocean has given Cisco a user-friendly shipment planning and scheduling tool that can be immediately implemented on its current network and is easily adaptable to any future changes in the network and/or product portfolio,” said Cisgocean’s faculty advisor, ISyE Director of Student Services Dawn Strickland. “Though the team is comprised of extremely talented individuals, together they made a team that is far greater than the sum of its parts. They made each other smarter; they pushed each other to work harder; and they were extremely respectful of each other.”

“The shipment mode optimization project is a leap toward using advanced analytics to automate Cisco’s supply chain,” said Hamin Oh (BSIE 18), Cisco supply chain project manager. “We have already started utilizing the model to suggest optimal mode shift targets to regional teams. This will play a key role in exceeding our annual mode shift goal, reducing our cost and CO2. This was possible thanks to a group of professional industrial engineers who thought outside the box to deliver a practical yet highly sophisticated solution.”

Team members included Karan Agrawal, Shelby Carswell, Weichao Chen, Trishla Chokshi, Shaiv Gandhi, Guergana Ilieva, Kayla Raabe, and Pavlos Sepetas.

Senior Design team “Cardiac Kids” partnered with the Emory Clinic’s Heart & Vascular Center. The team examined provider scheduling, patient scheduling, and exam room assignment as areas of potential improvement to reduce patient wait time and increase clinic throughput. Using their solutions, Emory can expect to achieve a 10 percent wait time reduction per patient. Based on these anticipated time savings, that the team estimates Emory can see nearly 2,000 additional patients per year, which equates to an additional contribution margin (revenue less variable costs) of $10.3 million per year.

Team members included Luke Allegood, Sarah Carpenter, Connor Childers, Emily Kaukol, Morgan McCombs, Noah Rittenberg, and Gregory Wilkes. Their faculty advisor was Professor Dave Goldsman.

The Senior Design team that worked with MARTA aimed to provide greater visibility into how patrons utilize the transit system. First, they designed a trip-chaining algorithm to extract the origin-destination pairs of patrons. Then, they performed a data envelopment analysis to identify relative bus route efficiency, revealing how routes connect riders. Finally, the team designed a machine-learning algorithm to predict ridership with census data and current resource allocation. Combining these capabilities, their Origin-Destination-Transfer (ODX) tool provides MARTA with the power to plan for the More MARTA initiative.

Team members included Karima Alkhalid, Andre Beroukhim, Josh Morgan, Conor Stewart, Adam Valletutti, Nick Williams, and Gideon Yuwono. Their faculty advisor was A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck.

The third ISyE Best of Senior Design finalist team created a comprehensive scheduling tool to help the UPS scheduling unit to configure weekly driver schedules for commercial customer pick-up and delivery. The scheduling tool utilizes advanced optimization techniques to transform UPS’s existing scheduling practice to a streamlined and automated system. The tool enhances drivers’ satisfaction and improves their lifestyle by ensuring consistent start times, designated meal breaks, and limits on work hours, while substantially reducing the business’ annual operating cost by approximately $550,000 for a single hub.

Team members included Nicholas Hoover, Shreya Jain, Andrew Klassen, Radhika Modi, Josh Rubin, Karnavv Shah, Daksh Varyani, and Linxi Xiao. Their faculty advisor was David M. McKenney Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Sebastian Pokutta.

At the Expo, Senior Design team Cox Automotive took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award. From among the 23 teams, three – Grady, Textronomists, and Trash Talk – were selected as finalists in the ISyE Best of Senior Design competition. Grady was chosen as the first-place winner.

“The impact and the breadth of the Senior Design projects are truly remarkable, ranging from developing a strategy for disrupting the transmission of rabies in Haiti, reducing truck dispatch delays for a major 3PL, to creating the system design for mobile ordering services at a major league sports stadium,” said ISyE Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design Coordinator Dima Nazzal. “Through our Senior Design program, ISyE has a very large impact on society, both locally and globally.  We are very proud of our students!”

Senior Design team Grady worked alongside Grady Memorial Hospital staff from the infusion center, pharmacy, and laboratory, seeking ways to increase the number of infusion patients served per week and reduce the appointment lead time. New scheduling practices were identified and evaluated that promise to increase the infusion center throughput by as much as 39 percent and support Grady’s journey toward becoming a nationally ranked hospital.

“I had a wonderful experience working with this dedicated and talented team. Their award is a testament to their intellect and perseverance,” said Dr. Jennifer Brandt, a rheumatologist at Grady Memorial Hospital. “They asked excellent questions and had a unique perspective that fostered important conversations among the various teams involved at the infusion center including pharmacy, laboratory, and nursing. Their suggestions have the potential to make a large impact for throughput at the Grady Memorial Hospital Infusion Center now and in the future.”

The team members included Ayush Agrawal, Vivek Jajoo, Kendall McRae, Nihal Shah, Rohil Shah, Mauricio Taborga, Michael Wang, and Kexin Zhang. They were advised by Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis.

Senior Design team Textronomists’ project goal was to increase the throughput of Textron’s small baggage tractor production line by reducing the number of missing parts in the warehouse. The team created an inventory management model and Kanban system, as well as a redesigned material storage layout. Upon implementation, Textron’s daily tractor production will increase by five percent, enabling them to reduce their backlogged orders and increase annual profit by $1.2 million.

Team members included Raianna Brown, Brenna Fromayan, Frank Johnson, Susannah Jordshaugen, Faiyaz Khimani, Sunmin Kim, and Joshua Wilkerson. They were advised by Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Kamran Paynabar.

Senior Design team Trash Talk worked with Mercedes-Benz Stadium on their Zero Waste Initiative to develop a plan for a Zero Waste Super Bowl in February. To accomplish this, the stadium must divert 90 percent or more of its waste away from landfills through reusing, recycling, and composting. The team focused not only on creating a one-time Zero Waste solution but also on implementing processes and improvements that would allow every event to potentially be Zero Waste. 

Team members included Wilson Harmond, Savannah Harris, Mallory Hu, Ashley Ko, Austin O’Farrell, Sydney Phillips, Jakob Robinson, and Jordan Shollenberger. They were advised by Professor Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Senior Design team Cox Automotive, which took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award at Capstone, worked with Meridian Remarketing, a subsidiary of Cox Automotive, to meet the rise in demand by increasing the scalability of and confidence in their decision process. This team used statistical modeling to support Meridian Remarketing in vehicle valuation and deciding whether to transport or recondition a vehicle. By supplementing their current system with statistically driven decisions, Meridian Remarketing can support the growth of Cox Automotive and a potential increase of $8 million in revenue in 2019.

"The Georgia Tech Senior Design team analyzed a largely informal vehicle remarketing process, and using historical data, was able to identify key decision points and quantify the potential cost savings to Cox Automotive," said Brett Carpenter, senior director of data science at Cox. "The team delivered a solid foundation upon which our data science team can build. A consistent, predictable process that simplifies or automates manual decision-making is critical to our remarketing business as volumes continue to grow in 2019 and beyond."

Team members included Maggie Jennings, Alan Johnson, Kelly Kronenberger, Sidd Meka, Will Olsson, Ashley Paek, Meghan Rathie, and Zoe Stein. They were advised by Associate Professor Yajun Mei.

Patients at Emory Winship have been experiencing long wait times resulting in low patient satisfaction scores. The team focused on improving process flow, communication, and visibility throughout the center. Deliverables consist of a simulation with a user interface, a real-time visibility tool, and a list of recommendations and policy changes, several of which were implemented. Patient wait times were reduced significantly, increasing patient satisfaction and allowing more patients to be treated, bringing in an additional $1.2 million annual profit.

Finalists in the competition were three senior design teams who worked with the CDC, Interface, and UPS.

The CDC Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition for their project titled Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Identification and Allocation of Increased-Risk Encephalitis Organs. Students Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker were guided by their faculty advisor William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak. Since 2002, 13 clusters of infectious encephalitis have been transmitted through solid-state organ transplantation. Currently, there is no standardized screening procedure to differentiate between infectious and non-infectious encephalitis. In this project, they developed two decision-support tools: 

1. An infectious encephalitis risk calculator for physicians to estimate the probability that a donor has infectious encephalitis.

2. A liver transplant decision aid for transplant doctors and patients to evaluate the trade-offs between accepting/rejecting an increased-risk encephalitis liver.

The Interface Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition. Students include Andrew Bedenk, Kaitlyn Castaneira, Margaret Massey, Jonathan Porter, James Tanzy, and Andrew Taylor. Their faculty advisor is Associate Professor Marc Goetschalckx. Their project focused on redesigning Interface's warehousing systems and strategies in order to reduce the excessive pick and stage cycle times, lost inventory, and high inventory levels. They developed a four-step solution to address all of these issues, including investments in more advanced Warehouse Management System software, reevaluation and reduction of inventory levels, racking and forklift upgrades, and internal process improvements. Their solution will save Interface an estimated $1.6 million annually, with an estimated 30% ten-year internal rate of return.

The UPS Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition for their project. Team members are April Ahn, Jessica Dow, Lucas Onsgard, John Rice, Philip Tylman, Song Wang and Jongkwan Woo. Their advisor is Stewart Faculty Fellow and Professor Shabbir Ahmed. United Parcel Service (UPS) is the world’s largest package delivery company. The project focused on optimizing UPS’s hub-to-hub routes for the peak holiday season. The team developed a systematic route planning approach that explicitly addresses uncertainty of load and driver availability during the peak season. The new approach is able to realize a reduction in unnecessary miles by an average of 3.4% with a potential savings of $12.1 M.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

“The spring semester Capstone design teams worked on projects with clients large and small, and across a number of industry segments, from health care to breweries. It was very difficult to select four finalist teams, and the four selected were very representative,” said Leon McGinnis, professor emeritus and Senior Design coordinator. “These teams, and the other 20 Senior Design teams, demonstrate once again the breadth of opportunity and the depth of excellence for our graduates.”

“This semester we had many outstanding teams who brought great value to their clients. ISyE should be proud of its senior undergraduates who contribute to our No. 1 ranking,” added George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair, Institute Professor and Senior Design coordinator.

Senior Design team Textron’s project goal was to increase the throughput of Textron’s TUG tractor manufacturing line. The team used an optimization model to rebalance the manufacturing line, verified this output in a simulation model, and synchronized the workers on the line using Lean tools. If Textron implements this design, the daily tractor throughput will increase by 50 percent. This will enable them to meet demand and capitalize on their backlog to increase yearly sales by $20 million.

“Working with this Senior Design team on improvements for our baggage tractor line was a phenomenal experience from start to finish for the whole Textron GSE team,” said Adam Martin, quality and CI manager of Textron’s TUG technologies. “The team not only worked hard on developing solutions to improve our processes but also considered change management and impact to the assembly team as part of their solution as well.

“I was incredibly impressed at the team’s dedication to ensuring each change was not only good on paper but practical for the assembly team. Their project has provided us the data and tools necessary to tackle large volume increases in the coming months. Each and every team member has a bright future ahead of them,” added Martin.

Textron team members included Lauren Boulger, Jonathan Edwards, Cal Elwer, Erin Gant, Taylor Green, Charlie Lebby, Sam Millson, and Nitin Singh. They were advised by Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed.

Senior Design team Cycle-Ops partnered with Relay Bike Share to reduce the number of understock events. Understock events occur when a user attempts to rent a bike but finds a station is empty. To minimize understock events, the team solved an optimization model using Python code, which was given to Relay as a decision tool. When the team’s solution is implemented, Relay will see an 84 percent reduction in understock events. As a result, Relay can make, on average, $27,300 in additional yearly revenue.

Cycle-Ops team members included Elizabeth Ball, Brianna Honeywell, Harika Kankipati, Suzanne Kastens, Ije Okafor, Heer Patel, Nicole Redder, and Kaitlin Rizk. They were advised by Professor Rentao Monteiro.

The FLEETCOR Senior Design team worked with FLEETCOR to modernize the company’s antiquated sales process of cold-calling customers. They applied data-driven industrial engineering techniques and developed an expected revenue-based lead-prioritization decision support tool employing machine learning models. The team projected the impact of their work would lead to an increase of 71 percent in new customer revenue.

FLEETCOR team members included Cameron Anderson, James Bottoms, Paul Benning Davis IV, Preston Devaney, Langdon Hollingsworth, Yu (Ryan) Hu, Alex McAuliffe, and Nyles McLean. They were advised by Professor Shijie Deng.

Senior Design team Shaw Industries partnered with the company to revamp its reverse logistics process for returns. They redistributed the work from one central facility to 29 regional distribution facilities around the country. These regional facilities equipped them with an extensive desktop application that iterates through possible return decisions and returns both the top five feasible options and the costs associated with them. By rerouting returns to be more cost-effective, as well as standardizing processes and reducing holding time, this team saved the company over $740,000 per year.

Shaw Industries team members included Talia DeBenedictis, Sarah Edwards, John Preston Green, Kara Pendley, Sean Ruff, Nick Shepherd, Katherine Sledjeski, and Jacqueline Weiland. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

Senior Design team FedEx Fleet Mix, which took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award at the Capstone Expo, worked with FedEx to optimize the fleet mix of delivery trailers in order to minimize operational costs while keeping the service quality unchanged. Elements of the problem formulation included enforcing capacity constraints, ensuring service standards were upheld, and transporting cargo via rail at a reduced cost per mile rate. By thoroughly analyzing the cost-factor tradeoffs of alternative trailers and developing an optimization-based scheduling tool, the team proposed a change to the fleet mix that can be obtained by the company within the next trailer acquisition cycle. The team’s project will save the company $200,000 per week in operational costs when implemented.

FedEx Fleet Mix team members included Catherine Burns, Soheil Faghihi, Jackson Fan, Raghav Garg, Grant Herman, Ziwei Miao, and Alex Wandrick. They were advised by Professor Shijie Deng.

“The 31 spring 2017 Senior Design projects involved 234 students and 10 faculty advisors. The projects served a broad range of clients, from manufacturing, operations, logistics, warehousing, energy, financial systems, hospitals, online business, retail, and government. Several teams explored solutions involving new technologies, including crowd-sourcing delivery services, drone delivery of urgent orders, online collaboration services, and blue-tooth tracking of medical staff and patients,” said Leon McGinnis, professor emeritus and Senior Design coordinator.

“Every team provided significant value to their client, and a significant fraction of teams projected benefits valued at six or seven figures,” continued McGinnis. “As always, it was an intense and important learning experience for the students. The difficulty in narrowing down to four finalists for the ISyE Best of Senior Design is a testament to the high expectations, tough standards, and overall outstanding quality of our graduating seniors.”

The 31 teams presented their projects at the spring 2017 Capstone Expo on April 18, 2017. Out of this group, four teams — CDC Contact Tracing, CDC Smoke, Emory Discharge, and MBUSA Drone – were chosen as finalists to compete in the ISyE Best of Senior Design on May 3. Team MBUSA Drone was selected as the first-place winner.

Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA) engaged the MBUSA Drone team to identify how drone delivery could be valuably introduced as the first same-day part ordering option for its dealerships. The team designed a drone delivery solution to reduce part delivery time and loaner car cost and developed a coverage optimization model to determine the optimal locations to hold the drones and parts eligible for drone delivery.

MBUSA will be able to leverage the model's user interface to modify key parameters, including associated costs and drone capabilities, and view updated model results as well as their respective net present value. Implementing such a drone delivery solution will allow MBUSA to gain a first-mover advantage, an increase in customer satisfaction, and cost savings.

According to team leader Vikrant Jain, MBUSA will continue to build on the foundation created by the team’s delivery, with the ultimate goal of implementing drone delivery in the future. “Our project, from an IE perspective, was particularly unique,” Jain noted. “Our objective was not to simply improve a current process but rather to design a specific new process to valuably introduce drone delivery into the MBUSA's current part distribution system.”

The team presented two unique recommendations based on highest returns and highest shipments replaced, respectively.

If MBUSA implements a drone delivery system based on highest returns, they will realize a net present value of $66,414 with a total of 9,887 referral part shipments replaced. If MBUSA implements the alternative recommendation based on replacing the most shipments, they will realize a net present value of $15,729 with a total of 10,172 referral part shipments replaced. Replacing more referral part shipments will translate to greater delivery time savings, resulting in greater customer satisfaction – a factor not included in net present value.

“We could not have partnered with a better Senior Design team for our project,” said Angela Lee, who is a network support specialist for MBSUA Parts Logistics. “The team was professional and determined to exceed expectations on every level. They have set the bar high for all who participate in the Senior Design program going forward. It was exciting to engage in such a successful partnership this semester, and we look forward to continuing this partnership.”

In addition to Jain, team members included Ram Bhutani, Stephen Murphey, Ryan Rodwell, Austin Proctor, Alvin Tight, and Yanyang Zhao. They were advised by Associate Professor Santanu Dey.

Team CDC Contact Tracing developed a decision support tool to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identify infected airline passengers during contact tracing investigations. Taking in pathogen and flight parameters, this novel application returns a transmission-risk model and analyzes alternative protocols. The application's versatility enables comprehensive scenario coverage, and its back-end allows for continuous improvement by health authorities nationwide. If the CDC adopts the revised protocol, the organization could save up to $300,000 per flight.

Team members included Jason Bermudez, Kevin Desprez, Alexander Kehres, Chungjae Lee, Leah Patterson, Suphaphat Petlerkwong, and Yuntong Zhu. They were advised by William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak.

Team CDC Smoke worked with the CDC to support a recent policy by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Effective February 3rd, 2017, all 1.3 million public housing units must go “smoke-free” within 18 months.

The team created a targeted approach to smoking cessation by estimating smoking prevalence within the public units, calculating the return-on-investment (ROI) of each cessation intervention at a granular level, and prioritizing recommendations that yield the highest returns. They also developed a tool, EXTINGUISH, that visualizes relevant data in order to help better utilize resources to connect smokers to cessation resources.

The values of the project include greater efficiency for health departments, better connections between agencies and cessation resources, and increased support of smokers wanting to quit. With this project, the team identified approximately $12 to $582 million dollars in savings (approximately six percent to 20 percent in cost reductions) for the stakeholders for different smoking cessation interventions.

Team members included Aaron Ahn, Kristie Choe, Vishal Mummigatti, Connor Owen, Jose Rodriguez, Diem Tran, Divya Vedula, and Jiali Zhao. They were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

Team Emory Discharge designed process changes and developed a unique tiered discharge procedure precipitating patient departure time from Emory Midtown Hospital. The team also implemented an expedited taxi arrangement, which indicated the viability of solutions with increased patient uptake throughout the pilot.

By facilitating patient flow, solutions are shown to reduce diversion by 2.6 percent, cut boarding times by 30 minutes, and allow Emory to serve 63 more ambulance arrivals per year.

Financially, the project yields a $306,000 increase in annual revenue and a $1.1 million net present value, while also increasing patient quality of care.

Team members included Samuel Curtsinger, Dylan Floyd, Joshua Kulas, Sean Monahan, Derek Nalodka, Emily Smith, Rachel Thorne, and Phillip Vetrano. They were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

During the spring 2017 Capstone Expo, a panel ISyE alumni judges chose two teams as the ISyE winners: Team CDC Contact Tracing (see above) and Team Equifax.

The Equifax Credit Marketing Services (CMS) team creates customer information reports for client marketing efforts. The CMS team had concerns with the lack of standardization in their current staffing and project assignment process. In fact, CMS has delivered 32 percent of projects late, or past the client committed date, over the past two years. 

Team Equifax created a labor allocation tool to help CMS efficiently assign employees to projects. In addition, they conducted a general process improvement to reduce total project completion time by implementing process manuals and training. Their tool and process improvement reduced late project percentage by nine percent, which opens opportunity for $5.5 million in additional revenue for CMS.

Team members included Divya Achtani, Shivum Agrawal, Maria Auslander, Yeji Lee, Jihwan Oh, Srida Saraogi, and Anju Suresh. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

“The decision is never easy,” said John Vande Vate, professor and Senior Design coordinator. “Many teams showed real brilliance in tackling very challenging problems. Congratulations to these remarkable young people, and many thanks to their advisors who helped them accomplish so much so well.”

Team Bacon ‘n’ Eggs partnered with client Waffle House to identify areas in which their maintenance handling system could be improved. The goal of the project was to help Waffle House uphold their commitment to serving customers 24/7/365 by reducing the frequency, duration, and impact of breakdowns inside units. Their work consisted of several deliverables that together can achieve this goal.

First, the team increased the preparedness of technicians in order to expedite time to service and limit breakdown duration. They accomplished this goal by: 1) reassigning technicians geographically to reduce travel time to and from units, and 2) by restructuring the maintenance van inventory model to limit the number of stockout instances upon arrival to units. These two initiatives combined will reduce the duration of breakdowns by seven percent and recapture over 30,000 productive labor hours that can be allocated to increased preventative maintenance.

Next, the team reprioritized preventative maintenance routines to ensure more frequent attention to critical appliances inside of units; this work will reduce the frequency of breakdowns by 11 percent.

Finally, the team partnered with a third-party maintenance application to pilot a digitized version of the current paper maintenance reporting system. With this application, Waffle House will be able to track the frequency and duration of breakdowns across the system to establish a maintenance culture around performance.

“We were very impressed with the high level of professionalism of the Senior Design team throughout the process,” said Louis Todd, vice president of equipment at Waffle House. “They helped us to identify process improvements in several major areas of our equipment maintenance function. These improvements will speed up our response times, shorten equipment down time, and reduce our overall maintenance spend. This team, as we like to say at Waffle House, really scattered, smothered, and covered the challenge we gave them. This was a huge homerun.” 

The Bacon ‘n’ Eggs team included Roshan Balakrishnan, Melina Blasetti, Christopher Bush, Hasit Dewan, Scott Larson, Nicholas Rogstad, Rikhil Shah, and Viral Shah. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Team Emory Quality Metrics created a trusted performance benchmarking system. This solution will allow Emory Healthcare to assess its surgeons’ performances and more easily identify parts of their system where they can add value either by improving quality of care or decreasing excess costs. The team utilized the combination of financial and qualitative data from procedures to create linear and logistic regressions that provide a reliable foundation for benchmarking that physicians can trust. These models allowed for an in-depth look at predictors for four critical procedures: colectomies, ventral hernias, carotid endarterectomies, and hepatectomies, and their effect on dozens of different response variables, including direct variable cost, readmission rates, patient length of stay (days between the procedure and discharge), and return to operating room rates.

The annual opportunity in potential cost savings identified was $1.43 million, and the opportunity for potential length of stay reductions identified was 940 staying days per year. While this information provided analytics tailored to Emory Healthcare’s patient population, the team established an effective way to communicate this information with the Emory Healthcare community of the Project Management Office (PMO), physicians, administrators, and nurse navigators.

 An additional goal of the team was to provide an interface that would allow Emory Healthcare to continue to gain insights by drilling down on risk-adjusted surgeon performance, identifying opportunities for value-add by category, and showing which predictors have the greatest effect on the outcome.

Their work will be implemented into the design phase of future Value Acceleration Projects (VAPs) at Emory Healthcare that aim to improve quality and decrease costs. Next semester, this initiative will be passed off to a Georgia Tech team of masters students.

Team members on the Emory Quality Metrics project included Sarah Both, Matthew Creatore, Madeline Gaffney, Alice Jinks, Thomas Ross, Michael Senoo, Nathan Stefanick, and Brandon Wells. They were advised by Professor Renato Montiero.

Team Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s client was the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, where the NFL Atlanta Falcons and MLS Atlanta United both play. The project focused on the ways the food and beverage process affects the fan experience at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The team developed a standard queue design and an inventory forecasting tool, recommended signage and standard operating procedures, and conducted market research on the use of technology. Their work resulted in a 50 percent reduction in fan wait time throughout the stadium.

The Mercedes-Benz Stadium team members included Kevin Breslin, Lucy Bullen, Rohan Iyer, Valeria Rossi, Ethan Sailers, Elizabeth Swiger, and John Welch. They were also advised by Tokol-Goldsman.

Senior Design team Textron was selected as the ISyE Judges’ Choice at the Capstone Expo.

The group worked alongside Textron – an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technologies industrial conglomerate – to improve the throughput of their 660 Belt-Loader production facility in Kennesaw, Georgia. The team balanced the assembly line, as well as designed a system to minimize delays caused by late parts from support stations. These measures increased the maximum throughput of the assembly line by 0.25 vehicles/day, as well as a reduction of delays due to missing parts.

Textron team members included Scott Berry, Kerui Cui, Andre Evans, Zhejin Liu, Gordon Nail, Saneel Prabhu, Ji Qi, and Conor Tanzman. They were advised by Associate Professor Santanu Dey.

This is exactly the challenge that was being faced by the staff of Georgia Tech’s library in the spring of 2016. Tech’s Crosland Tower and Price Gilbert libraries were scheduled to be closed in December 2015 for renovation to make the libraries’ physical space more user-friendly, rather than centered around housing the library’s material collection. In the last 10 years, visits to the libraries have increased by 50 percent, while check-out of print materials has dropped 75 percent in the same time period. Ninety-five percent of the library’s holdings were moved to the new EmTech Library Service Center (LSC).

The LSC is a high-density storage facility – there are about 40-50 similar high-density library storage facilities around the country – designed to permanently house Tech’s library materials, along with most of Emory University’s. The LSC is located on Emory’s Briarcliff campus, where materials are stored on 32-foot-high shelves at a temperature of 55 degrees with 30 percent humidity to preserve the life of the collected materials for up to 250 years.

Because of scheduling issues, Tech needed to get its materials into the LSC in the span of a few months. This was the   ingest process, part of which included what Kimberly Mull, Director of Security, Facilities, and Logistics for the Tech libraries, called “deduping” — removing duplicated book titles, journal runs, and other materials that Tech shared with Emory’s library.

Ingestion also involved processing each individual piece   of material, vacuuming it prior to storage, and giving everything a barcode so books and materials can be located by order pickers within the LSC.

Because the ingestion and set-up process of the LSC was essentially a warehousing project, Catherine Murray-Rust, Dean of Libraries & Vice Provost for Academic Effectiveness at Georgia Tech, knew that this was an area where industrial engineers could play a role. She thought the LSC ingestion process would make a good ISyE Senior Design project.

“If we had some IEs look at the process, then they could bring some warehousing strategies that the library community doesn’t really understand very well and apply them,” said Murray-Rust. “It seemed a really wonderful opportunity to give back to [the library community] from something on the other side of our lives, which is the engineering perspective.”

So that’s where the Senior Design team — Taylor Cormier, Sagar Govil, Ansley Hobbs, Jung Ha Lee, Trisha Long, Sinan Najm, and Andrea Norris (advised by Andrea Laliberte, Edenfield Executive in Residence and Professor of the Practice) — from ISyE stepped in.

“We were looking for a project we were excited about, and [we liked] the idea of having this project so close to campus and involved with Georgia Tech,” said team member Trisha Long. “It’s a really unique project, and we couldn’t have picked a better one.”

The team worked closely with Mull and Jay Forrest, a reference and subject librarian from Tech who was heavily involved with the ingestion process, on developing a plan to make the move from Tech go as smoothly as possible.

Initially, the team visited several other high-density storage sites, including at the University of Georgia and the research facility shared by Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Then the team came back and looked at EmTech’s LSC. These visits gave the Senior Design team information about the kinds of questions they needed to ask about EmTech’s ingestion process, while considering such constraints such as budget, safety concerns, and how much equipment needed to be purchased for the move.

“Our main constraint was trying to reduce the budget as much as possible within the safety constraints, and [visits  to the other high-density facilities] helped us picture how much equipment the library would want to keep [after the move],” explained Long. “We wouldn’t want to buy lots of equipment and have it not be useful, so we tried to take into consideration what they would use – such as how many carts and how many vacuums would keep the collection alive for the next few years.

“After those trips, we were totally inspired. We were able to create a flow-process model that gave us two different ways to make decisions: Is it the fastest way and is it the cheapest way and go back and forth between the two models, and narrow down what our final recommendations were.”

The team came up with several suggestions that positively impacted the ingestion process. One, said Forrest, involved the use of gravity conveyor belt rollers in the processing   line: “Prior to using gravity rollers, we were probably processing 12,000 books per day per average for about a month. We identified a source for gravity rollers, brought them in, and implemented them. That helped us get to 15,500 books per day on average. So that one change improved our throughput quite a bit.”

Perhaps most importantly, the team’s flow-process model and long-term projections confirmed that the library could hire a moving company at several hundred thousand dollars below the projected budget. “We went from one vendor that was over our initial budget to one vendor that was quite a bit under our initial budget,” explained Forrest. “This resulted in cost-savings to both Emory and Tech.”

Now that Georgia Tech’s library collection is safely moved and stored at the LSC, Mull praised the Senior Design team’s role in the success of the move: “I think it was a good collaboration. We see students all the time in the library, but to actually work with them had a good result. We incorporated around 90 percent of the team’s suggestions, and I would love to do another project with another Senior Design team. It left a really good imprint on the library.”

When asked how it made her feel to hear about the positive results of her team’s hard work, Long said, “From the beginning my team was excited to work with the school. The project let us learn so much about our library, and we walked away feeling even more connected to Tech."

Senior Design Team GTAA Gameday Flow was tasked by the Georgia Tech Athletic Association (GTAA) to redesign game day operations to improve the fan experience at Bobby Dodd Stadium. The team created a new staffing plan at all entry gates, which will reduce average fan waiting time by 78 percent. The team delivered a concept design for a new concession stand in the southeast corridor that integrates the Tapingo mobile ordering platform. The new stand will pay for itself while simultaneously reducing the congestion in the lower east corridor by 64 percent. The team developed a business case for using Tapingo at all stadium concession stands. They additionally proposed a police offer placement plan on Northside Drive that can reduce average traffic commute time on this road by 73 percent. The recommendations will save fans 13,000 hours of wait time over a season.

The Senior Design team designed a queuing strategy for the entry gates and concession stands, which involved converting multiple queues to a single queue that distributes to multiple servers. Fundamentally, a single queue (like at amusement parks) is faster than multiple queues (like at a grocery store). The team worked with the GTAA to implement a pilot of these queues during the October 29 Tech-Duke game at Gate 8 and one of the concession stands in the east concourse of the stadium. The team observed that there was a dramatic reduction in wait time in the queues, and so the GTAA plans to continue this queuing strategy and expand it to the rest of the stadium.

“Georgia Tech Athletics is proud to be able to partner with such a great group of ISyE seniors,” said Doug Allvine (BSIE 92, MBA 11), Georgia Tech Assistant Athletic Director. “The Senior Design team’s ability to assess real game day processes and propose improvements and new ideas that could positively impact our football fan/alumni experience is tremendously valuable.”

Team members included Murtaza Ali, Julia Bodea, Justin Hey, Jamie Morsberger, Jamison Porter, Aditya Raghupathy, Jennifer Sanders, and Kristen Shiflett. They were advised by Associate Professor Steven Hackman.

Senior Design Team CDC HIV Network developed a model that estimates HIV spread over time through a community of injection drug users (IDU) during an outbreak and evaluates the effectiveness of three intervention strategies: syringe exchange programs (SEP), pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and antiretroviral therapy (ART). The interventions were compared by the number of HIV cases averted as a result of their implementation and by the cost per quality adjusted life year gained. Using data from the outbreak in Scott County, IN, SEP was the dominate strategy for most scenarios, although this depended to some extent on the number of days since the start of the outbreak and the budget. The lifetime treatment cost of each HIV case is $433,000, resulting in significant cost savings for each case averted. A user-friendly interface allows state health departments to understand the impact of these various interventions in order to improve HIV outbreak response in the future.

The team successfully presented their project to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their work was recommended by team leads and is now being scheduled for discussion at the division-level senior leadership meeting, as well as the Center-level seminar. The CDC is planning to pilot the project pre-outbreak in selected state health departments, such as Kentucky and West Virginia, to advise them on how to prepare for an outbreak.

Team members included Bingyi Bao, Anmol Chhabria, Mathew Martini, Saeed Siddiqi, Katheryn Stephens, David Wang, Yuanheng Wang, and Yuyu Wang. They were advised by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor Paul Griffin.

Senior Design Team Janssen Plan worked with client Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Johnson & Johnson company and global leader in the pharmaceutical industry. With a variety of experience and backgrounds, the team strived to embody their client’s motto: “There is so much work to be done … patients are waiting.” Working with their client, the team used predictive analytics and machine learning in order to identify and understand elements that cause delays within the drug development process. Specifically, they focused their efforts on building a predictive model, evaluating lead indicators of delay, developing a dashboard design, and providing Janssen with data structure recommendations. Their proof of concept is a step in the right direction that enables Janssen to both increase the number of drugs they can develop internally and release drugs to patients sooner.

The project’s result will help Janssen predict drug development delay and expand the company’s R&D portfolio by using statistical analysis and machine learning, accompanied with comprehensive yet user-friendly dashboard visualization, which highlights the insight from the underlying analysis and model. The proof of concept improves Janssen’s ability to accurately anticipate upcoming delay from the R&D pipeline (86 percent accuracy in delay prediction). Janssen can better allocate resources to either minimize the delays or reallocate the resources for unavoidably delayed projects to a new trial or project.

Team members included Siham Adous, Mou Anzhi, Alex Berry, Ai He, Nidhi Koshy, Christina Leamon, Lichen Jason Shen, and Shen Wang. They were advised by James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh.

Senior Design Team Wrigley's Lifesavers, which took home the Judges’ Choice Award at the Capstone Expo, worked with the Wrigley manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to develop a solution for reducing unmet demand for Lifesavers mints. In evaluating the current system, a bottleneck was identified in the bagging stage of production. The team worked to create an optimization tool with an AMPL back-end and an Excel/VBA front-end, to minimize low-throughput bag combinations, thus increasing overall production for the entire system.

The solution resulted in an eight percent decrease in suboptimal bag combinations and a one percent increase in overall production of Lifesavers mints worldwide. Wrigley has since fully integrated the tool.

Team members included Coleman Alford, Zachary Cote, Young Jae Han, Dongwoo Kim, Robert Pagan, Abhi Malhotra, and Feifan Zheng. They were advised by Professor Renato Monteiro.

“ISyE has a very large impact on society, both locally and around the world, through our Senior Design program,” said Leon McGinnis, Senior Design coordinator. “We can be very proud of our students.”

The 28 teams presented their projects at the spring 2016 Capstone Expo on April 26, 2016. Out of this group, three teams — Interface Prod, reFUEL, and UPS Air Opt —were chosen as finalists to compete in the Best of Senior Design on May 4. Team Interface Prod was selected as the first-place winner.

The Interface Prod team developed a sales and operations planning system for Interface, Inc., the world's largest modular carpet tile manufacturer. The software-based system takes in sales history for demand forecasting and production planning. With customizable inputs, the system generates potential production scenarios to run through a simulator of the entire production process. The simulator outputs production time and cost information on a station-level for each production run. This allows Interface to analyze results, compare trade-offs, and make continuous improvements. With the team’s recommendations, the system predicts production savings of $2.2 million for the first quarter of 2016.

Interface plans to implement the project by the end of the third quarter in 2016. It will build the foundation of a sales and operations planning team, which Interface did not have prior to the Senior Design project.

“The Interface team is proud to have worked with the Georgia Tech ISyE Senior Design team. Their work to develop a sales & operations planning system gives us the ability to quickly evaluate various production and inventory strategies given a certain demand scenario. This system gives us the scenario-planning tool we need to continuously adapt our strategy to changes in the marketplace,”
said Chris Turk, senior vice president for manufacturing and operations at Interface.

Team members included Yaodong Jia, Lisa Liu, Alexandria Schmid, Antong Su, Kattelie Thys, Ziyu (Tino) Zhang, and Jingyu Zhu. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

Team reFUEL developed a random forest classification model using machine learning to detect and prevent fraud for FLEETCOR. The company is a leading independent global provider of specialized payment products and services including fleet cards, food cards, corporate lodging discount cards, and other specialized payment services for businesses throughout the world. FLEETCOR, which is liable for all fraudulent transactions on their cards, can use this model to save upwards of $5 million in fraud payouts each year.

Team members included Saharsh Chordia, Andree Curran, Matthew Faenza, Mary Elizabeth Herndon, Kyung Kim, Haeun Park, Julia Wayne, and Haidan Zhou. They were advised by David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor Sebastian Pokutta.

Team UPS Air Opt has enabled UPS International Air Freight to take full advantage of package consolidation for international shipments by redesigning their routing decision process. This was accomplished through the development of an optimization-based tool that effectively combines dense and volumetric cargo on flights. 

For 15 percent of the system, UPS will see an immediate estimated annual savings of $3.5 million by using the suggested guidelines. Going forward, the team proposed an alternative routing paradigm that could see an annual savings of $5.9 million. 

UPS has already begun to implement the project by using the optimization tool in the UPS International Air Freight business unit. After the tool has been fully vetted using sample data, the optimization tool will be implemented as a stable analytical tool that complements the business unit’s existing toolkit of evaluation software/methods, according to Jack McPherson of UPS Corporate Transportation.

Team members include Abubaker Abubaker, James Alcock, Peter Alcock, Cristian Barron, Emily Dong, Nicole Gottret Murillo, Eduardo Prieto, and Sebastian Salazar. They were advised by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor Paul Griffin.

During the 2016 Capstone Expo, a panel of alumni judges chose Senior Design team Second Self as the ISyE winner. This team worked with local microbrewery Second Self (founded by two Georgia Tech alumni) to implement a project that will enable the brewery's scalable growth, from a local to a regional brewery.

Second Self team members include John Cho, Brian Homans, Yikyung Kim, Gloria Lozano, John Na, Charles Oliva, Sue Pedapudi, and Matthew Zerkus. They were advised by Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor Benoit Montreuil.

Emory’s Department of Radiology performs over 68,000 MRI procedures annually, making it one of the busiest MRI practices in the U.S. In order to improve Emory MRI’s patient flow and patient experience, the Senior Design team designed and evaluated alternative scheduling strategies using a computer simulation model. The recommended strategy is expected to increase throughput by 1.55 patients per day, on average, thus generating an extra $470K in annual profits. Importantly, the recommended strategy is also expected to increase patient satisfaction: it decreases the average waiting time per patient by 2 minutes, primarily by reducing the longest waiting times.

“We at Emory are proud to have worked with the Georgia Tech ISyE Senior Design Emory Radiology MRI team. Their work will enhance our ability to drive forward value for patients and the health system concomitantly in the MRI radiology space,” said Dr. Gregory J. Esper, the director of New Care Models at Emory Healthcare. “The team exhibited a tenacious desire to identify the true problem in MRI flow, and they implemented a test of change that has already shown operational improvement. Experiences with teams like this fuel the desire at Emory to continue our involvement in the Georgia Tech ISyE Capstone projects.”

Team members included Martin Restrepo, Paola Lopez Mantilla, Ayda Sawaf, Emilio Jose Munoz Leone, Armida Mariana Arcaraz Vazquez, Felipe Martinez, and Alberto Nogueira Vazquez. They were advised by Professor Natashia Boland.

The RaceTrac team introduced a new inventory management policy for RaceTrac Petroleum. RaceTrac, one of America’s largest private companies, operates over 650 gas stations across the Southeast. Due to incentive misalignments with their 3PL fuel carriers, RaceTrac carries more inventory than necessary and experiences too many costly express or on-demand deliveries. The Senior Design team proposed the introduction of a new contract type that allows for better inventory management and delivery coordination. Expected benefits include an average inventory reduction of 40 percent and elimination of most on-demand deliveries, resulting in estimated savings of $500,000 per year.

Team members included Anubhav Jain, Matthew Petersen, Xiaoxin Yu, Justin Haffad, Vignesh Ramesh, Anthony Robert Graziano, and Julie Deng. Their advisor was James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh.

The CDC Senior Design team worked with the CDC’s National HIV Epidemic Model and its corresponding calibration process. The model’s purpose is to inform decision-making related to policy, research, and allocation of funding. Using a combination of parameter analysis, optimization formulation, and machine learning algorithms, the team delivered a comprehensive and flexible model calibration solution to the CDC. This implementation, which is packaged in a user-friendly interface, cuts calibration time from three months to as little as one day and saves the CDC at least $70,000 per year.

Team members included Alison Burton, Gregory Miller, Elise Watson, Matthew Farkas, Laura Trube, Madison Rodenstine, Mary Titus, and Daniel Brachey. They were advised by Dean's Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Shabbir Ahmed.

Emory University Hospital is incurring high overtime costs and losing potential revenue due to inefficient surgery length estimation and scheduling. The Emory Surgical Senior Design team utilized linear regression to increase estimation accuracy and developed bin-packing based heuristics to create an improved scheduling policy. The two tools that were delivered will help Emory increase their surgery length estimation accuracy by 27% and reduce overtime by 54%. This translates to a $340,000 savings in overtime costs and $4.8 million in potential increased profits annually.

Team members included Alivia Rumbaugh, Melissa Mondello, Michael Ehmann, Rebecca Bishop, Sarah Kiefer, Mohit Jasani, Nellie Wong, and Logan Moore. They were advised by Dean's Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Shabbir Ahmed.

Monsieur is a technology company that makes artificially intelligent robotic bartenders. The Monsieur Senior Design team designed a drink menu optimization that allows users to create custom menus based on drink demand and profitability, as well as an inventory control model that takes in historical demand data and adjusts that data throughout an event to produce optimal ingredient refill times. These proposed solutions together will provide an expected cost savings and increased revenue totaling $14,067,000 as well as a competitive advantage to Monsieur.

Team members included Elizabeth Lee, Caroline Lee, Clayton Cross, Anqi Wang, Katie Finnegan, and William Gunnar Knight. They were advised by Dean's Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Shabbir Ahmed.

No doubt, working on real-world problems adds value to a student’s education, but when the project is actually implemented, the broader impact of the work is something worth talking about.

In one such case, a team of eight ISyE students, pictured on the next page with faculty advisor Pinar Keskinocak, worked with the Emory Winship Cancer Institute’s Ambulatory Infusion Center (AIC) during the fall semester of 2014. AIC wanted to shorten the amount of time patients waited before being taken to their infusion chair, to help reduce stress and anxiety for their cancer patients. The ISyE team focused on identifying the causes of delays and finding practical ways to curtail them.

After interviewing and shadowing staff and patients, collecting data, and conducting time studies, the ISyE team proposed that improved workflow, increased ability to know where patients were located during the various phases of the treatments, and a better system to notify nurses when chairs were available would shorten patient wait times.

The team then developed a Real-time Visibility Tool, a web- based app that allows the Infusion Center to communicate with and notify each other throughout the steps of the process. They also developed a comprehensive simulation model with a user interface enabling them to modify flow and observe results as well as a list of recommendations to improve AIC’s process flow.

AIC, impressed with the tool and recommendations, implemented the project.

“The impact of this [project] has been huge,” said Catherine Parker RN, MSN, OCN, the unit director at the Infusion Center. “The development and implementation of the visibility tool has helped the triage RNs significantly by providing a technological solution for what was extremely manual and inefficient. The tool has also made it possible on extremely short-staffed days to utilize only one triage RN, which helped the overall staffing for the team by adding the second triage RN back to direct care. This is substantial for the staff and patient flow.”

One of the implemented recommendations involved changes in the check-in process. Previously at check-in, paperwork was placed in a rack until one of the triage RNs could retrieve it. After implementing the ISyE team’s recommendations, the front-desk staff member delivered the paperwork to the triage office immediately after patient check-in.

 AIC patients have reported to AIC that wait times have decreased due to this change.

“The Real-time Visibility Tool created by the Georgia Tech students has been one of the best tools I have ever worked with here at Winship,” said Claudia Giddings, RN. “As a triage nurse, it has cut down on time by more than 30-40 percent.”

The Home Depot Senior Design team developed an optimization tool that will allow The Home Depot to reduce seasonal product import transportation costs by 18%. The tool provides a standardized method for planning the containerization of products such that each container is maximally utilized and shipped on the most cost-effective date. Students include Audrey Shlapak, Mala Morjaria, Alex Hovancik, Sean Moore, Casey Ferguson, Kelly Kujawa, Haley Hahmann, and Wood Alter, advised by Dean's Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Shabbir Ahmed.

In light of the recent Ebola outbreak, the CDC Senior Design team focused on how treatment facilities were critical to stopping the epidemic, but beds were largely unavailable in some areas and went unused in others. Thus, they built a simulation to project the spread of cases within Guinea, overlaid with heuristics to trigger when and where to place treatment facilities. Their results showed that an additional 2,000 lives and $25 million could have been saved if Ebola Treatment Units were set up quickly or if health centers had been built in advance in densely populated areas. The teamincludes students Javeria Javeria, Kimberly Adelaar, Charmaine Chan, Matthew Daniels, Caleb Mbuvi, Chu Qian, Ivan Renaldi, and Jonathon Sutomo and were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

The Energy Dispatch Senior design team focused their project on truck scheduling and fuel inventory management with an emphasis on reducing excessive travel by assigning drivers to handle certain deliveries. The team provided an optimization model to better schedule deliveries and assign trucks to gas stations, as well as a combination of a demand forecasting model and an inventory policy to manage store fuel inventory. By providing a user interface that integrates these models, annual transportation costs and inventory holding costs are drastically reduced to provide savings of an upwards of $5.8 million per year. Students include Rohan Aggarwal, Hye Bae, Jacob Evans, Nathaniel Jones, Zubbia Saeed, and William Seo, and were advised by Director of Student Services, Dima Nazzal

The Phillips 66 Senior Design team focused on making a Los Angeles refinery’s distribution network more efficient. The team chose a location for a new distribution center that will be closer to their customer base, as well as calculating optimal inventory levels for the new DC. Their solution reduces expected inventory costs by 70%, transportation costs by 35%, and increases fill rate by 16%. The team of students includes Connor Zendt, Taylor Fairey, Alex Edson, Jennifer Taylor, Kyle Kenney, and Victoria Jones, and were led by their advisor, Director of Student Services, Dima Nazzal.

The UPS team proposed their project on measuring and incentivizing call quality. The specific call center their project focuses on is in Clark, Philippines. The center, comprised of 750 employees with 30,000 calls handled daily, experienced reduced quality and high costs resulting from the flawed incentives offered to its customer service representatives. Their project redesigned the entire Clark incentive program to drive improvements in employee behavior, call quality, and cost savings. UPS should see improved call quality and increased retention of top performers while streamlining costs by over $100,000. Team members include Katherine Marchand, Samay Jhunjhunwalla, Conrad Rybka, Jeffrey Allen, Angad Chawla, Bianca Palacio, and Maria Samuel, and were advised by Fouts Family Associate Professor Joel Sokol.

The World Food Program (WFP), is the largest humanitarian organization fighting world hunger, has a decentralized decision making process across its supply chain.  In order to centralize commodity, sourcing, and routing decisions, the team created a customizable optimization tool, based on a multi-period multi-commodity minimum cost network flow model.  The tool outputs the most cost-effective solution given optional constraints over a planning horizon.  With this visibility, WFP can potentially save $34 million or 12.91% of the supply chain costs.

Finalists in the competition were two senior design teams who worked with Heidelberg Spares and Manheim SureSell.

The Heidelberg Spares team members include Gian Di Carlo, Benedict Herbst, Christoph Koehler, Lior Koren, Andrea Pava, Mark Vaisberg, and Daniel Zuleta and their faculty advisor is Doug Bodner. Their project was on Predictive Replacement for Spare Parts of Printing Presses. This project improves the service business of Heidelberg USA, a company that manufactures industrial printing presses, by shifting it towards a proactive service model.  Utilizing reliability theory, correlation analysis, optimization, and simulation, the team created a suite of tools that identify economically optimal part replacement times, helping prevent Heidelberg customers from incurring unexpected, expensive machine failures. With this win-win solution, Heidelberg has a potential service revenue increase of up to $49M, and its customers have potential downtime reduction of 40%.

The Manheim SureSell Team members include Hannah Berkhan, Layla Bouzoubaa, Alicia Hess, Claudia Lara, Maryann Remy, and Alexandra Underwood. Their faculty advisor is Sebastian Pokutta. Their project is titled Risk Transfer Mechanism through SureSell. Manheim facilitates more than $50 billion annually by auctioning automobiles for outside sellers but only earns revenue itself when cars sell.  To encourage sellers to accept bids rather than continuously retry at auction, the team developed a risk-transfer mechanism, SureSell, in which Manheim will pay the difference between the highest bid and the market price of cars that have been auctioned four times but have not yet sold.  SureSell returns pricing control to Manheim and increases car conversion rates.

According to ISyE Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis, the three teams collectively created between $40 million and as much as $100 million in potential value for their clients. He also cites that all senior design participants worked on projects with remarkable outcomes. “The breadth of projects and the overall quality of the work is quite impressive, and it may spur us to think about ways to make the undergraduate curriculum even better,” said McGinnis.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

The finalists:
Team members from ISyE's Heidelberg Spare Parts Senior Design Team include Gian Di Carlo, Benedict Herbst, Christoph Koehler, Lior Koren, Andrea Pava, Mark Vaisberg, and Daniel Zuleta. Their faculty advisor is Doug Bodner.

Team members from ISyE's Manheim SureSell Senior Design Team include Hannah Berkhan, Layla Bouzoubaa, Alicia Hess, Claudia Lara, Maryann Remy, and Alexandra Underwood. Their faculty advisor is Sebastian Pokutta.

Team members from ISyE's United Nations World Food Program Senior Design Team include Maria Ayers, Laxmi Gadepalli, Ashfaque (Ash) Kachwala, Tahsin Munir, Cane Punma, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Yuvraj (Yuvi) Singh. Their faculty advisor is Ozlem Ergun.

The first place winners, consisting of six students, won for their paper titled A Stochastic Optimization Approach to Appointment Scheduling in Healthcare. The paper describes an analysis of the work-flow process of the Emory Endocrinology Clinic, which operates under the Emory Healthcare system. The goal of their project is to improve the quality of care provided to patients by decreasing wait times and increasing doctor satisfaction. The team created a scheduling tool that provides custom fixed schedules for the six full-time doctors to be employed by their operations manager. The proposed solution provides a 20.4% reduction in patient wait time and a 23.5% reduction in doctor delay. To achieve the same improvement in these two metrics the clinic would have had to hire three additional doctors at an approximate $540,000 annual cost to the clinic. The team members include Robert Angelucci, Mary Lynn Buchanan, Breona Jenkins, Beau Shinkle, Teckmon Siaw, and Nolan Thomson and was led by ISyE faculty advisor, Dima Nazzal.  The team will now compete in the Undergraduate Technical Paper Competition Global Finals at the IIE Annual Conference & Expo in May 2014 in Montreal, QC, Canada.

The second place team, comprised of four students, won for their paper titled Resource allocation and optimization for advanced voting in Gwinnett County. The objective of their project is to analyze the tradeoff between cost and voter service level for advanced voting in Gwinnett County, which they achieve by optimizing the allocation of resources among the four advanced voting locations. Applying and integrating simulation and optimization techniques, they developed a decision support tool to reduce overstaffing costs as well as to reduce voter waiting times for Gwinnett County voters. The team includes Mehran D’souza, Shi Gan, Andrew Luff, and Peiqi Yang and was led by ISyE faculty advisor Ton Dieker.

The IIE Southeastern Regional conference is an opportunity for industrial engineering students to network and explore the local industry in the Orlando area by touring local companies. Approximately 200 industrial engineering students attended the conference from schools across the Southeast.

The Home Depot is an American retailer of home improvement and construction products and services. The senior design team redefined how The Home Depot should staff and service customers in their paint departments. The team created a customer service simulation analysis tool that the corporate labor team can use to explore for each store when associates should be staffed and how their roles could best be used to meet changing customer needs throughout the day . The team designed easy-to-implement policy changes that will simultaneously lower wait times and lead to a projected annual multi-million incremental profit due to increased sales.

Finalists in the competition were two senior design teams who worked with Coca-Cola Refreshments and United Soft Plastics.

The Coca-Cola Refreshments team includes students Erinn Manby, Drew Downey, Meredith Freeman, Kevin Jamison, Sahil Ramakrishnan, Natalie Souther, and Max Tanski. Their faculty advisor is Ton Dieker. The purpose of their project is to reduce Coca-Cola Refreshments’ total inventory costs at three in-scope plants by developing new inventory replenishment policies. By creating three new policies and customizing policy parameters for each raw material, they have identified a 36% reduction in total annual inventory costs.

The United Soft Plastics team includes students Yash Dabriwal, Po-Hsian Wang, Patrick Koehler, Chang Woong Yoon, Patrick Chen, Dylan Arnold, Cathy Nguyen, and John Kincheloe.  Their faculty advisor is Leon McGinnis.  United Soft Plastics, Inc. (USP), located in Lawrenceville, GA, is a manufacturer of customized thermoplastic elastomers. Experiencing quality complaints, late customer deliveries and excessive managerial time spent on clerical activities, USP asked for a senior design team to investigate potential process improvements. The team analyzed the production process, developed new layouts and new standard operating procedures. In addition, the team developed an Excel-based production scheduling tool, and an Access-based application for inter department communication. USP can expect approximately a 35% reduction in costs from incurred quality complaints, 60% reduction in late orders, and elimination of almost 3 hours per day in clerical work by senior managers.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

From the 24 ISyE teams that were judged at the expo, three teams have placed as finalists: Coca-Cola Refreshments, The Home Depot, and United Soft Plastics. These teams will move on to present their project at the ISyE Senior Design Finalist presentation on Wednesday, December 11 at 6:30pm in Klaus 1443.

The Coca-Cola Refreshments team members include Erinn Manby, Drew Downey, Meredith Freeman, Kevin Jamison, Sahil Ramakrishnan, Natalie Souther, and Max Tanski. Their faculty advisor is Ton Dieker. The team worked with the Coca-Cola Refreshments Procurement Team with a goal of optimizing inventory levels at three bottling plants by implementing new ordering policies for the raw materials.

The Home Depot team members include Lauren Kley, Drew Keller, Michael Gilkenson, Bryce Ferguson, Robert Faulk, Silvana Vivanco, Jing Mei Ho, and Melanie Ostis.  Their faculty advisor is Steve Hackman. They are working to improve labor allocation and process flow at The Home Depot paint desk through a simulation model and labor scheduling tool.

The United Soft Plastics team members include Yash Dabriwal, Po-Hsiang Wang, Patrick Koehler, Chang Woong Yoon, Patrick Chen, Dylan Arnold, Cathy Nguyen, and John Kincheloe.  Their faculty advisor is Leon McGinnis.  Their project focuses on improving the clients Order Fulfillment Process, which includes eliminating quality issues, late shipments, and improving internal processes,

Capstone Design is a series of courses offered to undergraduate students from all disciplines at the Georgia Tech. Students work in teams to design, build, and test prototypes with real world applications.  At the end of each semester students showcase their efforts at the “Capstone Design Expo”, where teams display and pitch their inventions and marketability to a panel of judges, invited guest, media, and their peers. 

Pratt & Whitney, a world leader in aircraft engine manufacturing, requested help optimizing transportation decisions to support assembly of Next Generation Product Family engines.  For their project, the team delivered an optimization model with a customizable interface capable of providing recommendations under varying operational conditions.  The solution represents annual transportation savings of approximately 21%.

Finalists in the competition were the three Senior Design teams who worked with Delta Cargo, Kubota Manufacturing, and UPS Worldport.

Guided by faculty advisor Pinar Keskinocak, students Betsy Calender, Kevin Coe, Jimmy Le, Kyungha (Diana) Lim, Jose Sarmiento, Alyssa Wachs, and Alexey Zarnitsyn made up the Delta Cargo team.  In Atlanta, Delta Cargo is experiencing high overtime costs and a low on-time shipment delivery rate. The deliverables of the team’s project “Workforce Management and Process Improvement” included: estimation of a shipment’s processing rate, a demand forecast, a staffing schedule optimization model, and a decision support tool. These solutions have an expected annual savings of over half a million dollars.

The Kubota Manufacturing team, guided by faculty advisor Shabbir Ahmed, was made up of students Kelly Chen, Jin-Su Kim, Rozina Merchant, David Mun, Abhinav Sawhney, Yumehito Takimoto, Dhruvik Talaviya, and Jason Yeh. Their project, “Domestic Inbound Freight Optimization,” focused on minimizing logistics costs for Kubota Manufacturing. The team developed an optimization-based system to decide the routes and modes for shipping parts from 200 suppliers all over the U.S. to Kubota’s manufacturing plant in Gainesville, GA. The developed system achieves average savings worth 11% per week in transportation costs.

The UPS Worldport team, guided by faculty advisor Doug Bodner, was made up of students Yuelin (Lyn) Chen, Diana Chow, Stefan Ferguson, Sohyun Kim, Jianing (Jessica) Le, Nirmit Shah, Zhixun (Herman) Wu, and Brandon Wykoff.  UPS Worldport is the world’s largest package sorting facility. For their project, “Aircraft Arrival Schedule Optimization for UPS Worldport,” The team developed a flexible optimization model for aircraft arrival scheduling to address the problem of operational delays due to irregular volume inflow. This provided an annual value of approximately $1.7 million in reduced overtime and downstream costs.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol at 404-894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.  Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

Capstone Design is a series of courses offered to undergraduate students from all disciplines at the Georgia Tech. Students work in teams to design, build, and test prototypes with real world applications.  At the end of each semester students showcase their efforts at the “Capstone Design Expo”, where teams display and pitch their inventions and marketability to a panel of judges, invited guest, media, and their peers.

The finalists:

Team members from ISyE's CDC Senior Design team are Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker. Their faculty advisor is William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak.

Team members from ISyE's Emory Winship Senior Design team are Sung Keun Baek, Xiaoyang Li, Allen Liu, James Micali, Ji Su Park, Mengnan Shen, Yunjie Sun, and Emilie Wurmser. Their faculty advisor is William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak..

 Team members from ISyE's Interface Senior Design Team are Andrew Bedenk, Kaitlyn Castaneira, Margaret Massey, Jonathan Porter, James Tanzy, and Andrew Taylor. Their faculty advisor is Associate Professor Marc Goetschalckx.

Team members from ISyE’s UPS (Peak) Senior Design teams are April Ahn, Jessica Dow, Lucas Onsgard, Jake Rice, Philip Tylman, Song Wang and Jongkwan Woo. Their advisor is Dean’s Professor Shabbir Ahmed.

Interface, Inc., is the world’s largest modular carpet manufacturer. As a result of significant growth, their facility in West Point, GA has experienced extended order lead times due to lack of capacity, high overtime expenses, constrained space, and delayed orders. The team delivered process improvement and capacity expansion recommendations based on a simulation, and an order scheduling decision-support tool. Interface can expect approximately 20% increase in capacity, $2 million in annual savings, and up to 85% reduction in delayed orders.

Finalists in the competition were the three Senior Design teams who worked with The Home Depot (Inbound), Volunteer Express, and Walmart.

Students Shashank Bharadwaj, Marybeth Black, Lynn Blau, Nakul Chitalia, Maria Isabel Guzman, Caitlin Hogan, John Miller, and Siddhartha Penakalapati, guided by faculty advisor Xiaoming Huo, made up The Home Depot (Inbound) team.  For their project “Inbound Shipment Coordination,” the team worked with The Home Depot to reduce its inbound transportation cost by building an optimization model that created multi-stop truck routes. These routes were then consolidated to form groups of frequently combined vendors. The developed tool could save the company over $9M/year.

Students Sangho Bae, Nilesh Balakrishnan, Vineet Desai, Ankita Mehrotra, Luke Venable, and Steven Winton, guided by Jye-Chyi Lu, made up the Volunteer Express team. Volunteer Express, a less than truckload logistics provider, traditionally routed all shipments through its hub in Nashville, TN. The routing procedures and capacity constraints adversely affected operational efficiency. For their project “LTL Logistics Network Optimization,” the team developed several optimized routing solutions that were compared using statistical analyses. The best routing strategy generated a potential annual savings of approximately $1.2 million.

The Walmart Senior Design team was comprised of students Anne Boliere, Sheereen Brown, Matthew King, Virginia MacGowan, Jessica Solana, Catherine Thaliath, and Victoria Ulloque, and advised by Damon P. Williams.   The goal of the project was to increase throughput capacity at the Walmart.com distribution center in Carrollton, GA. The team utilized various methodologies to develop tools and pick module designs as deliverables. By applying these recommendations, the DC is projected to increase throughput by 32% with an estimated annual savings of $6.9M.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

GE Energy is a leader in the alternative energy field, installing over 16,000 wind turbines since 2002. For their project, The GE Energy team created tools to forecast the times of arrival of components to wind sites and optimize the allocation of offloading cranes. GE Energy can expect savings of $1.9 million from the implementation of these tools.

Finalists in the competition were the two Senior Design teams who worked with Railcar Management, Inc. (RMI) and Saia, Inc.

Guided by faculty advisor Alexander Shapiro, students Lane Bourgeois, José Rodrigo Espinosa, Ashley Everett, Stephen Fausel, Brandon Hochstetler, Brenton Hochstetler, Katie Kim, and Donna Riggins made up the RMI team.  RMI provides software solutions for railroad companies, and uses RailDOCS, a software suite, that manages the testing of fixed assets along railroads.  For their project, “Schedule Optimization for Asset Inspection,” the team developed an optimization model, which provided an exact testing schedule that will minimize the number of tests performed per year.  On average, the model saved 109 labor hours per maintenance worker - an estimated revenue of $235,000 to RMI.

The Saia, Inc. team was advised by Alan Erera, and included students Mark Gurevich, Leonardo Lacayo, Courtney Lynch, Andres Pavia, Jessica Reichsfeld, Matthew Schrichte, Baris Yildirim, and Zheng Zheng. Saia, Inc. is a super-regional, less-than-truckload (LTL) company. For their project, “Determining System Trailer Fleet Size and Terminal Assignment,” the team developed an approach to optimize the composition of Saia's trailer fleet, and to assign the fleet to appropriate terminals throughout the network.  The approach relies on a large-scale integer program that models the flow of trailers of different types over time using a week-long planning horizon across Saia's network of nearly 150 terminals.  Using the model for a number of planning weeks, the approach is used to determine the right size and composition of the trailer fleet and provides a purchasing strategy given a capital budget for new trailers. It is estimated that Saia will save $1.8 million annually using the fleet proposed by the approach.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

Not only was this an exciting experience for John, itwas also a unique one.  His father, ChangW. Kang, PhD, visiting professor in ISyE, advised a team of Senior Designstudents who were selected as finalists in the fall 2009 competition for aproject sponsored by Manheim Auto Auctions.

“Seeing the Senior Design finalist posters displayedin ISyE depicting my dad and his team motivated me to prove myself through myown Senior Design project. I have to say that winning was somewhat of a surrealmoment, and joy.  As a group, we wanted to be the Senior Design finalists,but to win it all was simply amazing,” said John Kang.

Dr. Kang also shared in his son’s excitement afterlearning John’s team was selected as first place winners.

“When my son sent me the list of winners and I sawhis name, it was a dream come true.  Iknew he would take Senior Design and hoped he would do well,” said Dr. Kang,also a professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Engineering at HanyangUniversity in Korea. 

To be successful in Senior Design, both John and hisfather agree that teamwork and meaningful collaboration among the advisor,students, and client are essential. 

John, who now works as an analyst at PROS RevenueManagement, the world leader in profitability management and optimizationsoftware solutions, feels that Senior Design helped prepare him for his currentposition.  According to him, the coursetaught him the importance of working well with groups, as well as how to managedifficult or challenging problems.

Like John, Dr. Kang also realizes the value thatSenior Design has on an IE student’s future.

“When I see students do well in Senior Design, I knowthey will do well in the real world,” said Dr. Kang.

Dr. Kang has contributed to ISyE over the lastseveral years through his collaborations between Hanyang University in Koreaand ISyE.  In 2011, he co-authored a bookwith Paul Kvam, associate chair for graduate studies and professor in ISyE,titled Basic Statistical Tools forImproving Quality, an introductory book on improving the quality of aprocess or system, primarily through the technique of statistical processcontrol.

To read the article in full, click here.

The conference was made up of students from fifteendifferent schools that all came together to network with their peers and futurecolleagues, and to further their interest in industrial engineering.

Additionally, the team has been invited to attend The 2012Annual IIE Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida May 19-23, where their paperwill compete against the first place papers from other regions.

Senior Design is a unique opportunity for companiesand organizations to partner and interact with these bright, creative, anddedicated students, and is truly a win-win collaboration for both the studentsand industry partners. Student teams select a major design project from acompany or nonprofit organization and use their ISyE knowledge to develop asolution for the project client. These students gain confidence and practicalprofessional experience working as part of a team addressing real-worldproblems. The industry partner gains a team of six to eight exceptionallybright undergraduate students who can provide a variety of innovative andcreative solutions to an existing organizational problem. Many of theseorganizations end up making permanent job offers to students from the projectteam.

Each semester, there are approximately twenty teamswho participate in Senior Design. At the end of the semester, each teamcompetes for first place in a competition that highlights and celebrates theteam that developed the best solution for their project.

The GE Energy project team won first place in thefall 2010 Senior Design competition. Students Manan Bhatt, Saloni Desai, AvadhiDhruv, Mark Herman, Ariz Himani, Mohsin Lakhani, and Swathi Narayanaswamy,guided by faculty advisor Yajun Mei, won for their project, Parts Allocationfor GE Energy. The team designed a parts allocation system that enables sharingof gas turbine parts across GE Energy’s maintenance contracts. By employingsuccessive network flow optimizations and grouping methods, the projectdemonstrated annual savings of $8.7 million, resulting from reduced new partpurchases and increased utilization of contract assets.

The winner of the spring 2011 Senior Designcompetition was the Comcast team, guided by faculty advisor Alexander Shaprio.Students Ian Balmaseda, Thien Huynh, Daniel Kohlsdorf, Sagar Patel, AlejandroSantelises, Holly Thomasson, and Michelle Wang won for their project, ImprovingComcast’s Outage Detection System, which focused on reducing the number ofservice calls and unnecessary maintenance attempts for trucks that Comcastincurs because of inaccurate outage detection. A cost model was developed andvarious algorithms were created aimed at increasing the probability ofdetecting a genuine outage, thus lowering the unnecessary costs associated withresponding to outage reports. A conservative estimate of the project’s valueshows it may save Comcast $1.4 million annually.

For more information or to become an industrypartner, contact Associate Professor and Senior Design Coordinator Joel Sokolat jsokol@isye.gatech.edu or visit www.isye. gatech.edu/seniordesign.

The three finalist teams, listed in alphabetical order byorganization, include:

• Caterpillar, Inc.
• Railcar Management, Inc.
• Whirlpool

The team who worked on a project sponsored by RailcarManagement, Inc. (RMI), a leading software solutions provider for railroadcompanies, received the coveted first place award in the competition. Guided byfaculty advisor, Xiaoming Huo, students Sikander Hajiyani, John Kang, ZacharyLaguna, Sojeong Lee, Camilo Lotero, Clara Moon, and Tina Yu were chosen fortheir project “Private Fleet Optimization.”

“We are ecstatic with the results of our three monthcollaboration with Georgia Tech and these undergraduate students,” said DavidBell, Senior Director of RMI’s ShipperConnect Solutions.  “The team was tasked with analyzing hundredsof rail shipment scenarios and transportation variables to deliver a solutionthat optimizes rail shipments and reduces transportation costs.  The projected savings are quite significantand we are evaluating how we can incorporate their findings into our rail fleetoptimization solution.”

The two other teams (Caterpillar and Whirlpool) were honoredas runners-up in the competition. 

The Caterpillar team included students Katie Davignon,Danielle DeBow, Christine Eldridge, Brad Gay, Young Gul Kim, Heeseung Moon,Courtney Suen, and Daniel Wood, guided by faculty advisor, Pelin Pekgun.Caterpillar purchases packaged products from over 1,000 suppliersglobally.  Suppliers individually selecttheir packaging material vendors, passing costs to Caterpillar.  To reduce costs by consolidating this largevendor base, the team designed and implemented a combinatorial auction in a projecttitled, “Caterpillar, Inc.: Consolidating Packaging Material Vendors to Reduce SupplyChain Costs.” This allows vendors to offer price discounts on product bundlesas well as bid on individual products. The team also developed a vendor selection tool via an integer programincorporating business constraints.  Thesolution provides an estimated annual savings of $700 thousand – $1 million inthe Midwest region, and is scalable for global implementation.

The Whirlpool team was guided by faculty advisor Seong-HeeKim, and included Michele Bertolino, Ana Herbst, Andy Jones, Adam Liem, TravisNemes, Melanie O’Gorman, Samantha Russel, and Eric Sood. For their projecttitled “Batching Outbound Shipments for Whirlpool Corporation,” the teaminvestigated the implementation of batch-picking shipments at a regionaldistribution center for Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s largest appliancemanufacturer.  An Excel-basedoptimization tool was created to strategically batch shipments to moreeffectively utilize carrying capacity of clamping forklifts across thenetwork.  Due to the decrease in laborhours, this could result in an estimated savings of $1.1 million annually.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduateeducational experience with the Senior Design course in order to providefirsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment.Students typically work in teams of five to seven individuals with 15-25 SeniorDesign teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE facultymember, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companiesinterested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact JoelSokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage athttp://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and springsemesters.

The three finalist teams, listed in alphabetical orderby organization, include:

• Comcast
• Gwinnett County Public Schools
• United Parcel Service

The team whoworked on a project sponsored by Comcast garnered first place in thecompetition.  Guided by faculty advisor, Dr. Alexander Shaprio, seven students Ian Balmaseda, Thien Huynh, DanielKohlsdorf, Sagar Patel, Alejandro Santelises, Holly Thomasson, and MichelleWang made up the Comcast team. Theirproject,entitled Improving Comcast’s OutageDetection System, focused on reducing the number of unnecessary trucks andservice calls that Comcast incurs because of inaccurate outage detection.  A cost model was developed and consequentlyvarious algorithms were created aimed at increasing the probability ofdetecting a genuine outage, thus lowering the unnecessary costs associated witheach outage. Additionally, incoming call frequency was analyzed to detect unusualspikes in customer call patterns. A conservative estimated value added based onpart of the deliverables will save Comcast approximately $1.4 million annually.

The two other teams (Gwinnett County Public Schoolsand United Parcel Service) were honored as runners-up in the competition. 

Gwinnett County Public Schools is the second largesttransporter of students in the nation and is facing considerable budget cuts.  Working on a project titled, Gwinnett County Public Schools Bus Logistics,the team members included Morgan Doty,Bryce Dykes, Kathleen Hendrix, Ralph Long, Dana Lupuloff, Douglas Meagh,Jeffrey Phillips, Michael Vallecoccia, along with advisor Dr. Julie Swann. By developingassignment and scheduling heuristics implemented by a user friendly applicationand informed by a regression and forecast, the team was able to significantlyreduce the total number of buses needed for daily transportation. The overallreduction of over 100 buses resulted in an initial savings of $2.9 million andrecurring savings of $2.6 million each year. 

The teamwho worked with United Parcel Service (UPS) to Optimize the Smalls Cut-off included Stephen Cai, Allison Chan, Amy Chan, Se W. Chang, Christine Chuang,David Dongkuen Kim, and Derek von Zweck along with advisor Dr. Anton Kleywegt.  The objective of the project was to analyzethe effects of separating packages into small and large packages, and torecommend cut-off dimensions that minimize total cost.  A 3D bin packing algorithm was developed tosimulate the loading of packages into trailers. A mixed integer program wasused to calculate the optimum number of trailers needed on each route, on eachday.  By selecting the smalls cut-offthat optimizes the trade-off between handling costs andtransportation costs, UPS would realize cost savings of $17,000 daily at aterminal

“I am impressed by the amount of high-quality work ourstudents did to create real, significant value for such a wide range ofcompanies and organizations this semester," said Dr. Joel Sokol, SeniorDesign Coordinator. 

All senior students inISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the SeniorDesign course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real worldproblems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of five toseven individuals with 15-25 Senior Design groups running each semester. Eachgroup is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator managesthe overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for considerationcan either contact Dr. Sokol,at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and springsemesters.

Students comprising the GE Energyproject team, the winning team in the Fall 2010 Senior Design Projectcompetition, credit team work as being a considerable factor that drove theirteam to win the renowned competition and an experience they look forward totransferring as they take on projects in their work environments.

“Being a part of a team is not allabout being competitive and focusing only on the work, “states Saloni Desai, GE Energy team member. “It is about building a family,” she continues, addingthat she hopes that when she starts her first team project at Coca ColaCompany, she will be able to create a similar team synergy like that of hersenior design team.

This is a sentiment shared by other team members, including Avadhi Dhruv, who states that “the success of our project is specially attributed to thetolerance and patience of our team members throughout the process.”

In addition to Desai and Dhruv, students comprising the GEEnergy team included MananBhatt, Mark Herman, Ariz Himani,  Mohsin Lakhani, and Swathi Narayanaswamy.  Yajun Mei, ISyE assistant professor,advised the winning team.

Withtheir project titled, “Parts Allocation for GE Energy,” the GE Energy teamdesigned a parts allocation system that enables sharing of gas turbine partsacross GE Energy’s maintenance contracts. By employing successive network flowoptimizations and grouping methods, the project demonstrated annualsavings of $8.7 million resulting from reduced new part purchases and increasedutilization of contract assets.

The GE Energy team was one ofthree finalists in the Fall 2010 Senior Design competition out of a pool of twentytotal projects for the semester. Teams working with ADEX and Mars Chocolatewere the other finalists.

The ADEX team comprised teammembers David Gagne, Joseph Hsu, Mitchel Martinez, Cory Swanson, Mary AnnaRibock, and Terrance Yarber. Pinar Keskinocak, Nash professor in ISyE,co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics, and associatedirector of Research for the Health Systems Institute, advised the team on itsproject titled, “GATR Strategic Production Planning for ADEX Machining Technologies.”

In 2010, ADEX MachiningTechnologies was selected as a potential supplier for Alliant Techsystem’s new GuidedAdvanced Tactical Rocket (GATR) line. For ADEX, the senior design teamdeveloped a set of decisions support tools for evaluating capacity expansionalternatives and operational decisions, such as raw material inventorypolicies, to minimize production cost and enable a sixty percent lower sellingprice for the nozzle and fin component. Upon signing the contract and reachingthe highest projected demand level, GATR will help ADEX realize substantialsales growth and the creation of over 100 high-wage manufacturing jobs.

Colby Allen, Blaine DeLuca, EmmaElgqvist, Sayeed Mehrjerdian, Amanda Persaud, Jamie Serratelli and William Tangmade up the Mars Chocolate team, which Alan Erera, ISyE associate professor,advised.

The team conducted a two-partproject, titled “Co-pack Supply Chain Design and Production Scheduling,” whichfocused on supply chain and production improvements. The first part of theproject addressed a redesign of the co-pack supply chain to determine where allco-packed products are to be produced. A mixed integer programming optimizationmodel was developed to balance transportation and handling cost savings withnew production line upgrades at co-pack facilities. The resulting redesign planshould yield $4 million in annual savings for Mars. The second part of theproject addressed production scheduling at the Kennesaw, Georgia, co-packfacility. A scheduling optimization model was built to construct an optimalproduction plan given weekly product demands. The model included the capabilityto configure lines with varying staffing levels to increase efficiency. Thescheduling tool is estimated to yield  $700thousand in annual savings.

Thepartnership that is created through Senior Design is truly a win-wincollaboration for both ISyE undergraduate students and Georgia Tech’s industrypartners. The average team is able to use its industrial engineering skills tocreate hundreds of thousands of dollars in value for the company they workwith. For example, these three finalists alone could help their clientcompanies realize more than $13 million in savings and $12 million in increasedsales. And the impact is far reaching: ISyE Senior Design has worked withorganizations ranging from local startups to Fortune 100 companies tointernational humanitarian organizations. The impact of Senior Design projectshas been felt not only in the Atlanta area, but across the country and as faraway as Europe, Africa, and Asia.

ForDesai, making such a substantial impact on a reputable company such as GEEnergy helped her become more self-confident, more appreciative of the GeorgiaTech education, and more optimistic towards her goals. Further, Desai explains,“GE Energy's reaction of amazement toward our work has inspired me to always goabove and beyond of what is expected for any challenge I may come across.” 

Read the full story at the TECHNIQUE.

Associate Professor Steven Hackman, the faculty coordinator for Senior Design stated "Although we had several strong projects completed this semester, these three really stand out in terms of technical challenges as well as the potential value they bring to the sponsor." Finalists engaged in projects sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office Depot, and Whirlpool Corporation.

Of the three finalists, the winning team included Allan Garcia, Jason Hoff, Mary Beth LaHatte, Alejandro Leyva, John Shea, and Ashley Thompson who worked with the CDC on a project entitled "Developing an Effective Production and Distribution Method to Eradicate Mosquitoes in Sudan, Africa." Based on the technical expertise involved in this project and the resulting impact to the client, these students were awarded first prize in the overall competition. The sponsor contact was Dr. Mark Benedict with Professor Craig Tovey serving as faculty advisor.

The CDC has proposed the use of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) to reduce the Anopheline mosquito populations in Sudan, Africa. SIT is a method of biological control that involves the mass rearing of insects in a production facility and the sterilization of males by exposing them to low doses of radiation, or to chemosterilants. Malaria is transmitted exclusively by female mosquitoes. SIT effectively breaks the chain of reproduction when a female mates with sterile males, as female mosquitoes mate once in a lifetime.

The purpose of this project was to establish and provide a set of guidelines and recommendations that will aid in the implementation of SIT to
reduce the Anopheline mosquito populations in Sudan. Team members began by estimating the population densities of adult mosquitoes at the designated release sites in Merowe and determining a location for the production facility. They not only designed the production process, but provided tools for decision making, and performed an analysis of the most significant costs involved in implementation. Their research showed that the most effective means to implement SIT depends on the conditions in Merowe, such as time of year and the river level. As a result of this finding, the group developed a software tool that finds the best strategy based on a set of factors input by a user. This software tool can be used to determine the best SIT strategy in other parts of the world affected by malaria.

Runners-up in the competition included team members Ahmed Bajwa, Alison Kao, Stephanie Lake, Emil Loewy, Santiago Quintero, and Vivian Hernandez. These individuals worked with Office Depot on a project entitled "Depot Materials Handling Model." The sponsor contact was Scott King and the faculty advisor was Associate Professor Seong-Hee Kim.

Office Depot has a 550,000 square foot warehouse in Atlanta that services 156 retail stores in the Southeast. One of the problems Office Depot faces in this facility is that they are unable to determine the optimal number of material handling devices and batteries necessary to maneuver pallets and pick material. Further, it is difficult for the company to determine how many of these devices they should purchase verses how many they should rent. To address the problem, team members developed and implemented simulation and optimization models to 1) minimize the total number of machines required, 2) create an equipment schedule, 3) determine the best number of machines and batteries to purchase and rent, and 4) provide a standardized equipment usage model. As a result, students showed Office Depot a potential savings of more than 33% from current costs, which equates to approximately $550K annually. In addition, the students' model can be applied to other Office Depot facilities with a total potential savings of more than $9M annually.

"This is the third group I have sponsored since participating in the program myself as a student, and I have a fourth group slated for next semester," said Scott D. King, BS IE 2004, project engineer, Office Depot. "It is truly amazing what a group of young minds are able to accomplish in such a short time. It's a testament to the education and training they receive at the institute. Many of my colleagues agree that the particular discipline of engineering a student pursues is not as essential as learning the skills of analytical problem solving (or as we refer to it "thinking like an engineer"). These design project present the students with real-world problems, and are the perfect opportunity to put this into practice."

The third finalist team to present included Brandon Tubandt, Jacob Robinson, Jessie Spencer, Kathryn Oliver, and Timothy Dennis who worked with Whirlpool Corporation on a project entitled "Quality Express Routing." The sponsor contact was Hisham Khaki and Associate Professor Shabbir Ahmed served as the team's faculty advisor.

Whirlpool supplies the Atlanta region with more than 1700 different appliance types, all from a distribution center located in Ellenwood, Georgia. The distribution center receives orders from multiple sources on a daily basis and routes trucks to make the deliveries. The routes produced by the current process are inefficient, resulting in high transportation costs. To address Whirlpool's routing problem, team members developed a software tool, Quality Express Routing, which takes input from Whirlpool's database and mapping software and uses optimization techniques to determine improved routes while reducing overall mileage. Further, the output is in a standardized format, making it easy to understand. Based on comparisons between the current routes and the routes produced by Quality Express Routing, implementation of the tool will reduce transportation costs by more than 22%, resulting in close to $600,000 in annual savings.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of five to six individuals with 15-25 Senior Design groups running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Chen Zhou at 404 894-2326, or they can post a project through the ISyE webpage at www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

 With the top teams all being outstanding,Chen Zhou, associate professor and associate chair of undergraduate programs,stated that the overall quality was amazing and that the selection process wasdifficult.

ISyE Senior Design, which Zhousays has become known for its quality, challenge and rewards, has worked withorganizations ranging from local startups to Fortune 100 companies tointernational humanitarian organizations. The impact of Senior Design projectshas been felt not only in the Atlanta area, but across the country and as faraway as Europe, Africa, and Asia. The average team is able to use its IE skillsto create hundreds of thousands of dollars in value for the company they workwith.

 For UPS, team members, AnishBhatt, Justin Chmielewski, Nupur Patel, Rathin Ramesh, Nik Reddy, Ryan Smith,Zoheb Virani, and Ian Yancey, with faculty advisor Alex Shapiro, redesignedUPS’ warranty policy. Currently UPS spends $330,000 more than it recovers fromits warranty system each year, and the team’s goal was to shift the focus frommaximum dollars recovered to maximum net return. By using sophisticated dataanalysis and model building the team developed a drastically different approachto the warranty policy which, if implemented, could save UPS up to $1.8 millionper year.

 Finalists in the competition were theSenior Design teams who worked with BurgerKing® Restaurant Operations, Radiant Systems, and Norfolk Southern Corporation.

Workingon a project titled "Process Improvement of Burger King® Restaurant Operations",team members Jennifer LaPerre, Matthew Powers, Jared Trammell Sears, StephenSpicher,PatrickSugar, and Kristen Vila, under the guidance of faculty advisor Craig Tovey,addressed three areas of improvement for Burger King®: determining the optimalnumber of point-of-sale units, eliminating excessive labor hours, and reducingwait times in the drive-thru. The team developed the following three projectdeliverables: a stochastic model, a labor scheduling integer program, and aseries of simulations. These resulted in a potential cost savings of over $6 nillion annually.

With guidance from faculty advisor Xiaoming Huo, team members Dillon Blakes, Josh Click, IanCraig, Randy Darnowsky, Joel Feyereisen, Kristina Kaylen, Jesse Kent, andMackenzie Weber developed a redesign project for Radiant Systems FieldServices. The team recommended a facility layout redesign and an inventorymanagement tool for their Radiant Systems’ field services division. Intensivedata collection, a thorough simulation, labor optimization analysis, and robustsensitivity analysis resulted in reduced overtime, transfer/walking time, andlinestock stockouts. Project deliverables will save Radiant Systems, the leadingglobal manufacturer ofpoint-of-saleproducts, $1.28 million over the three- year lifetime of the project.

ShabbirAhmed, associate professor and advisor to the Fall 2009 Senior Design winners,advised David Chen, Susan Curry, Aldren Lobo, Yatong Lu, Tom Minderman, MatthewThornton,and Sheng-Bo Zhu on their projected titled “Optimization of Locomotive FuelingPolicy for Norfolk Southern Corporation.” The team worked with Norfolk SouthernRailway to optimize its locomotive fueling policy. Implementation of asimulation-based optimization model gave an immediate value added of $8 millionannually. The team recommended futurechanges, which will allow Norfolk Southern to increase its potential savings to $29 million.

All three teams gave presentations of their work onWednesday, May 5, 2010, to a room filled with faculty, company sponsors,students and parents.

For more information on the senior design program,or if you are interested in sponsoring a student team, please visit http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.

Rather than use its own fleet for the FTL shipments from warehouses to hubs, UPS subcontracted each lane to an FTL carrier. Carriers would bid for the right to carry shipments on each lane, with UPS awarding lanes to the low bidders or, in some cases, to incumbent carriers with strong performance records. The resulting shipment network used a hodgepodge of almost 50 carriers, including national, local, and niche carriers of different sizes and varying reliability.

In practice, UPS found its Direct Ship network to be unwieldy. Managing and coordinating almost 50 different shippers was difficult, and the on-time service performance on some of the lanes was worse than UPS's 98% target.

In the spring of 2008, UPS desired to re-bid its network and reassign lanes to carriers, and they turned to ISyE Senior Design for assistance. A team of six ISyE undergraduate students comprised of Katie Buckler, Carlanna Cunningham, Jay Hennington, Kevin Kitchens, Patrick Odneal, and Richard Ward worked with UPS to provide not just a new selection of carriers but also a new way of approaching the entire process of choosing a carrier for each lane. While still hoping to minimize the total network cost, UPS had several characteristics they wanted in a new carrier assignment:
(1)Fewer total carriers, preferably 8-10 of the largest and most reliable.
(2)Balanced assignments of lanes to carriers with respect to mileage and revenue.
(3)98% or higher on-time service for the largest 25 Direct Ship customers.

At the same time, the ISyE Senior Design team realized that UPS might pay more than necessary to its carriers by bidding out each lane separately. For example, a carrier bidding on lanes from Atlanta to Chicago and Chicago to Atlanta might run the risk of winning just one of the two and having to deadhead drivers on the return trip. To mitigate that risk, the carrier would need to place a higher bid on each lane. But if the carrier were allowed to place a bid for the pair of lanes together, the risk would be removed and the price UPS pays could be lower. More generally, carriers would mix-and-match combinations of lanes that fit best within their networks, offering UPS lower prices in return for the benefit of getting exactly the set of lanes they want. Called combinatorial (or combinational) bidding, these types of auctions have been used in many areas from transportation lane assignments to cell phone frequency sales, resulting in millions of dollars in benefits.

With this design in mind, the ISyE Senior Design team created a user-friendly tool for UPS to run its auctions. The Java-based tool reads auction and carrier data from UPS's Excel files and gives UPS the opportunity to add custom restrictions, define tolerances for mileage and revenue balance, and create differing total-carrier and service-level scenarios. Then, it creates and solves an optimization problem to find the lowest-cost carrier assignments that satisfy UPS's desired characteristics.

In addition to providing a single solution based on each of UPS's scenario inputs, the tool also does what-if sensitivity analysis to point out which bids would be most valuable for negotiation and on which lanes it might be very valuable for UPS to accept a small niche carrier's bid.

Overall, based on the bids received by UPS in 2007, the ISyE Senior Design team's approach was able to save UPS about $1.3 million per year in carrier costs, while reducing the number of carriers in the Direct Ship network from 46 to 8, balancing mileage and revenue among the carriers, and increasing the service level above the desired 98%.

For questions or to become involved in the Senior Design program, contact Joel Sokol at joel.sokol@isye.gatech.edu or visit www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the alumni magazine for the Stewart School of ISyE.

Joel Sokol, ISyE associate professor and Senior Design coordinator, states that "every semester, our students do some extremely good work, and the competition to be named a finalist or winner is intense." According to Sokol, ***this year's finalists creatively used advanced techniques in operations research, logistics, and statistics to create millions of dollars in value for a diverse set of corporate clients."

ISyE Senior Design has worked with organizations ranging from local startups to Fortune 100 companies to international humanitarian organizations. The impact of Senior Design projects has been felt not only in the Atlanta area, but across the country and as far away as Europe, Africa, and Asia. The average team is able to use their ISyE skills to create hundreds of thousands of dollars in value for the company they work with.

This was certainly true of the GE Energy Senior Design team, which demonstrated savings to the company of $8.6 million per year. Associate Professor Shabbir Ahmed advised the winning team, which included Charles Ballowe, Viviana Gonzalez, Sharece Hall, David Liss, Meghna Mukherjee, and Stefan Solntsev. The goal of the project, titled Procurement Planning for GE Energy, was to determine the minimal cost policy for the procurement of wind turbine towers for GE Energy The team developed software based on forecasting and optimization models that take into account purchasing and transportation costs, government policies, and renewable energy demand.

About his team's project, Professor Ahmed said that "the high volatility in the wind energy market made this project an extremely challenging one. The team developed a rigorous method for forecasting wind turbine demand and integrated it with a sophisticated stochastic optimization model to come up with an economic parts procurement plan. The explicit consideration of the various uncertain factors in the wind energy sector was key to the success of the team's approach."

Runners up in the competition were the Senior Design teams who worked with the American Honda Motor Company, Inc., and Manheim Auto Auctions.

The American Honda Motor Company, Inc., team focused on a project titled, Developing a Stand-Alone Vehicle Routing Tool Utilizing a Tabu Search Heuristic to Create a Set of Vehicle Routes to Minimize Cost and Maximize Service Level. Advised by Associate Professor Ozelm Ergun, the team included Alyssa Gangone, Steven Grimes, Caroline Jones, Max Moriarity, and Alex Paquette. The purpose of the project was to create a stand-alone vehicle routing tool that would allow Honda to create a set of vehicle routes to deliver spare automobile parts to the 240 Honda and Acura dealers located in the southeastern United States. The routing tool the team created takes into account the current operations parameters and metrics including fixed and variable route costs, multiple depot locations and soft-time window constraints. The model then finds the best-known solution in order to lower the operational cost and raise the service level. About the project, the Honda project sponsor stated that he has seen "routing proposals" from very different companies (big and small players) over the last 25 years, and this was one of the best among them.

The project team working with Manheim Auto Auctions learned that in 2009, Manheim's clients missed bidding on 50 percent of the cars in which they were interested. With a project titled Manheim Auto Auction Aggregate Planning and Forecasting, the team comprising Dustin Crance, Raymond Demere, Caroline Ferreira, Terence Norman, Brad Strickland, and Charles Welch used regression analysis and forecasting to create dynamic schedule updating predicted arrival windows for each vehicle at any given auction. Additionally, the team provided Manheim with a decision-making driver staffing tool, which it did not have. In total, this project adds $1.8 million yearly to eleven of Manheim's locations. Chang Kang, visiting professor from Hanyang University , Korea, advised the Manheim team.

All three teams gave presentations of their work on Wednesday, December 8, 2009, to a room filled with faculty, company sponsors, students and parents. Chen Zhou, associate professor and associate chair of undergraduate programs, stated that all the finalists were outstanding.

For more information on the senior design program, or if you are interested in sponsoring a student team, please visit http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.

The AJC project team consisted of Megan Babb, Jonathan Baggett, Corey Barthelemy, Katie Dickenson, Amanda Hughes, and Katie Rogovin, working alongside advisor Anton Kleywegt. The team's project, entitled Creating Software to Compute the Optimal Number of Newspapers to Deliver to Each Sales Outlet, was a complex application of the familiar 'newsvendor' problem. The team developed a software package that calculates the optimal number of newspapers for each of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's 7,500 sales outlets on a daily basis. The team's optimization model accounts for each outlet's distinct sales revenues, printing costs, recycling revenues, advertising revenues, and the possibilities of theft and shrinkage.

"We are extremely thrilled to have won senior design and would especially like to thank our faculty advisor, Dr. Anton Kleywegt for his support and guidance throughout the semester," said Dickenson. "We would also like to thank our client advisor at the AJC, Mike Burlingame, for all of his help and enthusiasm as well."

Three other teams were honored as runners-up in the competition. In alphabetical order by organization, the three finalists honored include:
* Cooper Lighting, advised by Anton Kleywegt;
* GE Energy Airfoils, advised by Shabbir Ahmed; and
* UPS Mail Innovations, advised by Christos Alexopoulos.

The Cooper Lighting team was comprised of Melissa Gegenheimer, Tessa Hilterbrandt, Russell Kohler, Matthew Nelson, Stephanie Robbins, and Matthew Sheffield with advisor Anton Kleywegt. Their project was entitled Cooper Lighting Sales Forecasting. In 2008, Cooper Lighting experienced a 28% error in its sales forecast for one of its most popular models. To remedy this, the student team analyzed historic sales and seasonal trends to develop a sales forecasting model that incorporates both internal company data and external economic factors. The team's forecasting models and inventory management recommendations could save Cooper Lighting over $100,000 each year.

The GE Energy Airfoils team included Michael Chan, Tareq Dowla, Myles Lefkovitz, Tanzil Manawar, Lance Sun, and Brian Tsang with advisor Shabbir Ahmed. Their project, entitled Improving Quality Audits for GE Energy Airfoils, employed correlation studies to reduce inspection times in the company's manufacturing processes. The team also designed an automated database to provide higher visibility for quality levels and performed a linear regression to estimate more accurate in-process tolerance levels. The project found a potential for GE Energy Airfoils to reduce defect, capital, and purchasing costs by $825,000 annually.

The UPS Mail Innovations (UPSMI) team consisted of Patrick Brown, Ricardo Corrales, Kathryn Currier, Ahmet Emre Eser, Helen Reichardt, and Jennifer Smith with advisor Christos Alexopoulos. Their project, titled UPS Mail Innovations Facility Expansion Design, investigated the infrastructure upgrade UPS would need to undergo to extend its Mail Innovations service to parcels that weigh up to 10 pounds. The team used Automod simulation software to design the layouts for manual and automated mail-sorting facilities. The team's recommendations will help UPSMI expand into the small package market and capture a significant market share estimated at $1.7 billion per year.

For more information on the senior design program, or if you are interested in sponsoring a student team, please visit http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.

"Senior Design was simultaneously one of the best and most gut-wrenching experiences I've had at Tech. I had never before been part of such a large collaborative effort; we were continually challenged and pushed to our limits. We learned to use our course work as a base and then go beyond,* said Margaret Reinhard, one of the students on the Manheim Seattle team who came in first place in the finalist presentations.

Reinhard and team (Sanin Fetic, Alejandro Gordillo, Jacques Gouws, Jorge Guzman, Lindsay Mills, and advisor Craig Tovey) worked on a project for Manheim Seattle entitled, Improving Operations at Manheim Seattle.

All projects in senior design must have some design component and provide a value-added change within an organization. For the Manheim Seattle project, the team recommended facility and operational changes for Manheim, the world's largest automobile resale company, at its Seattle site. The team also clarified the impact of short queues during auctions, and performed a pilot study of productivity comparison of 77 auction sites. The methodologies used included innovative data capture, detailed simulations, 3D facility layout models, and optimization-based productivity assessment. Because of the company-wide implications, the group has been invited to reprise the report to company executives.

Three teams were honored as runners-up in the competition. The runners-up are (in alphabetical order by organization): Emory Crawford Long Hospital, advised by Christos Alexopoulos; Platt Electric, advised by Shabbir Ahmed; and the World Food Programme, advised by Ozlem Ergun.

The Emory Crawford Long Hospital Emergency Department team included Mark Braza, Nick Grivas, Junaid Qureshi, Eileen Santo Domingo, Vivian Soler, and Ryan Williams with advisor Christos Alexopoulos. Their project titled, Application of Real-time Simulation to Improve Patient Satisfaction in the Emory Crawford Long Hospital Emergency Department, used a predictive tool for patient wait-times in Emergency Departments. The tool utilizes discrete-event simulation in combination with real-time data to generate predictions. This work will enable low-severity patients to be scheduled in off-peak hours while increasing customer satisfaction and recapturing lost revenue form patients who leave prior to completion.

The Platt Electric team included Sara Cermenaro, Jonthan Duarte, Julio V*squez, Mariana Villegas, Taylor Virgil, and Luis Willis with advisor Shabbir Ahmed. Their project titled, Distribution Center Location and Expansion Plan, provides Platt Electric with different options for the expansion of their business and the addition of 110 branches. Using demand forecasting and robust optimization modeling, the team recommended plans including when and where to locate new distribution centers, the branch opening schedule, and the branch allocation to the distribution centers over time. The team's recommendation could save Platt approximately $3.2 million per year.

The World Food Programme team included Santiago Aviles, Elhadj Bah, Manuel Jimenez, Alvara Morales, Lawrence Li, and James Wade with advisor Ozelm Ergun. Their project titled, World Food Programme Supply Chain Optimization, tackled two problems: lack of smooth operations due to variability in donations, and lack of standardized inventory management methodology. They created an inventory ordering tool ready for immediate implementation and a mathematical model of the supply chain to optimize its operations and study long- term strategic changes. After testing historic and simulated data, the team traveled to Rome, Italy, to present their findings to the World Food Programme, demonstrating significant benefits in increased service levels and decreased costs through the use of their models.

For more on the senior design program, or if you interested in sponsoring a student team, please visit http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/.

This semester's Senior Design course wrapped up with another round of high quality projects that had impressive results. Out of the twenty-six student teams who competed, five teams were selected as finalists to present their projects to a room full of faculty, students, and parents on April 30 in the Best of Senior Design Spring 2008 competition.

Of the five finalists, the winning team included Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu, Arpit Dharia, Akshay Kotak, Jason Dumar, Shyam Mehta, and Ranjini Ragunathan with adviser John Vande Vate who worked on a project with Intel titled, Designing Cost-Effective Distribution Strategies for Intel's Proposed Ultra Low-cost PC Chip Line. The aim of this project was to provide Intel with strategic intuition of the cost-effective distribution of its proposed Ultra Low-cost PC ships. Given the strategic nature of the project the team designed a model that made minimal parametric assumptions, modeling inventory using Brownian motion. The team then developed a set of decision-mailing tools that illustrate the relationships between demand conditions and transportation rates, supply strategies, systems performance and bottom line costs.

Four teams were honored as runners-up in the competition. The runners up are (in alphabetical order by organization): Next Wave, advised by Ozlem Ergun; UPS Direct Ship, advised by Joel Sokol; UPS NAAFN, advised by Alan Erera; and World Health Organization, advised by Julie Swann.

The Next Wave team members included Juan Araya, Steven Butts, Owen Carroll, Emily Sarver, Justin Stowe, and Jan Zhang with adviser Ozlem Ergun. This group worked on a project entitled, Ocean Carrier Bid Optimization for the Next Wave Agency. The team designed an analytical tool to help ocean carriers determine the best bid prices to win contracts in a program where the United States Government sends food aid to impoverished countries through the Food for Peace program. This tool uses forecasting techniques, an optimization model to simulate the contract awarding process, and analysis tools to aid Next Wave Agency in selecting the best bid price. The tool is being implemented during the May 2008 round of bidding.

The UPS Direct Ship team members included Katie Buckler, Carlanna Cunningham, Jay Hennington, Kevin Kitchens, Patrick Odneal, and Richard Ward with adviser Joel Sokol. In their project titled, Design and Implementation of Auctions for Constrained Third-Party Carrier Networks at UPS, the team recommended constrained combinatorial auctions to determine which third-party carrier should service each land of UPS's Direct Ship network. The team's computer application awards lanes to carriers while meeting UPS's need to increase on-time performance, use fewer carriers, and balance carrier assignments. It also lets UPS compare multiple scenarios, add custom constraints, and identify bids where negotiation is most valuable. The project should save UPS approximately $1.3 million/year and improve customer and carrier satisfaction.

The UPS NAAFN team members included Jessel Dhabliwala, Megan Patrick, Tom Pelling, Nathan Petty, Vikas Venugopal, and Selin Yilmaz with adviser Alan Erera. In their project titled, Truck Scheduling for the North American Air Freight Network (NAAFN) Division of United Parcel Service (UPS), the team developed new methods for scheduling truck capacity for the NAAFN, minimizing total weekly scheduled and unscheduled trucking costs. Currently, truckload schedules are derived from average weekly demand. In this project, methodology was first developed to estimate day-of-week truckload demand distributions for all lanes. Stochastic scheduling models were then developed to determine truck schedules minimizing expected weekly costs. Results indicate that the new truck schedules may yield cost savings of 10%, or $6M annually.

The World Health Organization team members included Michele Cataldi, Christina Cho, Cesar Gutierrez, Jeff Hull, Phillip Kim, and Andrew Park with adviser Julie Swann. In their project titled, Resource Allocation for Malaria Prevention, the group developed a process for allocation and deployment of resources used for malaria prevention in Africa. Using Swaziland as a pilot, the team quantified at-risk populations and times for malaria and intervention costs for spraying or bed nets. They developed recommendations for number and placement of facilities with scheduled deployment for labor, chemicals, and trucks. The team designed an interface to test and visualize Swaziland results and to evaluate benefits of adapting the methodologies throughout Africa.

The event concluded with Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Chen Zhou recognizing outgoing Senior Design Coordinator Steve Hackman for his significant contribution to the program. Associate Professor Joel Sokol will serve as the new Senior Design Coordinator.

Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact the Senior Design Coordinator Joel Sokol at 404 894-6484, or they can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

Associate Professor Steven Hackman, the faculty coordinator for Senior Design stated "Although we had several strong projects completed this semester, these three really stand out in terms of technical challenges as well as the potential value they bring to the sponsor.* Finalists engaged in projects sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office Depot, and Whirlpool Corporation.

Of the three finalists, the winning team included Allan Garcia, Jason Hoff, Mary Beth LaHatte, Alejandro Leyva, John Shea, and Ashley Thompson who worked with the CDC on a project entitled "Developing an Effective Production and Distribution Method to Eradicate Mosquitoes in Sudan, Africa.* Based on the technical expertise involved in this project and the resulting impact to the client, these students were awarded first prize in the overall competition. The sponsor contact was Dr. Mark Benedict with Professor Craig Tovey serving as faculty advisor.

The CDC has proposed the use of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) to reduce the Anopheline mosquito populations in Sudan, Africa. SIT is a method of biological control that involves the mass rearing of insects in a production facility and the sterilization of males by exposing them to low doses of radiation, or to chemosterilants. Malaria is transmitted exclusively by female mosquitoes. SIT effectively breaks the chain of reproduction when a female mates with sterile males, as female mosquitoes mate once in a lifetime.

The purpose of this project was to establish and provide a set of guidelines and recommendations that will aid in the implementation of SIT to
reduce the Anopheline mosquito populations in Sudan. Team members began by estimating the population densities of adult mosquitoes at the designated release sites in Merowe and determining a location for the production facility. They not only designed the production process, but provided tools for decision making, and performed an analysis of the most significant costs involved in implementation. Their research showed that the most effective means to implement SIT depends on the conditions in Merowe, such as time of year and the river level. As a result of this finding, the group developed a software tool that finds the best strategy based on a set of factors input by a user. This software tool can be used to determine the best SIT strategy in other parts of the world affected by malaria.

Runners-up in the competition included team members Ahmed Bajwa, Alison Kao, Stephanie Lake, Emil Loewy, Santiago Quintero, and Vivian Hernandez. These individuals worked with Office Depot on a project entitled "Depot Materials Handling Model.* The sponsor contact was Scott King and the faculty advisor was Associate Professor Seong-Hee Kim.

Office Depot has a 550,000 square foot warehouse in Atlanta that services 156 retail stores in the Southeast. One of the problems Office Depot faces in this facility is that they are unable to determine the optimal number of material handling devices and batteries necessary to maneuver pallets and pick material. Further, it is difficult for the company to determine how many of these devices they should purchase verses how many they should rent. To address the problem, team members developed and implemented simulation and optimization models to 1) minimize the total number of machines required, 2) create an equipment schedule, 3) determine the best number of machines and batteries to purchase and rent, and 4) provide a standardized equipment usage model. As a result, students showed Office Depot a potential savings of more than 33% from current costs, which equates to approximately $550K annually. In addition, the students' model can be applied to other Office Depot facilities with a total potential savings of more than $9M annually.

"This is the third group I have sponsored since participating in the program myself as a student, and I have a fourth group slated for next semester," said Scott D. King, BS IE 2004, project engineer, Office Depot. "It is truly amazing what a group of young minds are able to accomplish in such a short time. It's a testament to the education and training they receive at the institute. Many of my colleagues agree that the particular discipline of engineering a student pursues is not as essential as learning the skills of analytical problem solving (or as we refer to it "thinking like an engineer*). These design project present the students with real-world problems, and are the perfect opportunity to put this into practice."

The third finalist team to present included Brandon Tubandt, Jacob Robinson, Jessie Spencer, Kathryn Oliver, and Timothy Dennis who worked with Whirlpool Corporation on a project entitled "Quality Express Routing.* The sponsor contact was Hisham Khaki and Associate Professor Shabbir Ahmed served as the team's faculty advisor.

Whirlpool supplies the Atlanta region with more than 1700 different appliance types, all from a distribution center located in Ellenwood, Georgia. The distribution center receives orders from multiple sources on a daily basis and routes trucks to make the deliveries. The routes produced by the current process are inefficient, resulting in high transportation costs. To address Whirlpool's routing problem, team members developed a software tool, Quality Express Routing, which takes input from Whirlpool's database and mapping software and uses optimization techniques to determine improved routes while reducing overall mileage. Further, the output is in a standardized format, making it easy to understand. Based on comparisons between the current routes and the routes produced by Quality Express Routing, implementation of the tool will reduce transportation costs by more than 22%, resulting in close to $600,000 in annual savings.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of five to six individuals with 15-25 Senior Design groups running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Chen Zhou at 404 894-2326, or they can post a project through the ISyE webpage at www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

The team consists of ISyE undergraduate students Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker, and their advisor Professor Pinar Keskinocak, who is the William W. George Chair and Professor at ISyE.

Their paper discusses two decision-support tools they developed to help reduce transplant transmission of infectious encephalitis organs. The tools developed include

1. An infectious encephalitis risk calculator for physicians to estimate the probability that a donor has infectious encephalitis.
2. A liver transplant decision aid for transplant doctors and patients to evaluate the trade-offs between accepting or rejecting an increased-risk encephalitis liver.

As first place winners in the regional competition, their paper now goes to the Undergraduate Technical Paper Competition Global Finals with winners announced at the IIE Annual Conference & Expo in Nashville in May 2015.