Two ISyE Senior design teams took first and second place at the IIE Southeastern regional conference for their student technical papers on March 2014.

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.