Out of 27 teams of undergraduate students in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), the Pratt & Whitney team has been selected to receive the coveted first place award in the Spring 2013 Senior Design Competition.  Guided by faculty advisor Shabbir Ahmed, students Daniel Forrest, Andrew Frazelle, Dustin Hsu, Leanne Measroch, Megan Sweeney, and Christopher Taylor were chosen for their project “Material Flow & Deployment for Next Generation Product Family Engines.”

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.