Twenty-three teams from the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) participated in the Fall 2016 Senior Design Capstone Expo on Dec. 6, 2016. At the Expo, Team Wrigley’s Lifesavers took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award. Out of the 23 teams, three – GTAA Gameday Flow, Janssen Plan, and CDC HIV Network – were selected as finalists to compete in Best of Senior Design on Dec. 14. Senior Design team GTAA Gameday Flow was chosen as the first-place winner.

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.