Two Industrial Engineering Teams Selected as Semi-Finalists for National Capstone Award

College of Engineering

Industrial engineering students from two teams included, top from left: Chase Daril, Irina Britten, Lexxy Gentile and Karlton Haney; bottom: Wesley Nimmo, Trevor Perry, Jack West, and Bryan Withers.

Two teams of industrial engineering students have been chosen as national semi-finalists for their work on senior design projects.

The projects were selected as semi-finalists for the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering Capstone Senior Design Award. National winners will be chosen in October.

The award recognizes outstanding application of industrial and systems engineering knowledge during a capstone senior design course resulting in a significant impact on an organization.

The two teams are:

"Reducing Operational Costs of Fleet Allocation using a Simulation-Based Greedy Approach." Project supported by ArcBest (Kirby Clark, BSIE, MBA; primary industry partner), team members: Chase Daril, Karlton Haney, Trevor Perry, Jack West, and Bryan Withers.

"Intermodal Dray Driver Scheduling under Daily Freight Imbalance using Forecasting and Stochastic Optimization." Project supported by J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. (Alex Wong, BA, BSIE, MSIE; industry partner), team members: Irina Britten, Lexxy Gentile, and Wesley Nimmo.

Richard Cassady, university professor of industrial engineering, said the teams learned valuable skills while forging partnerships with local companies.

"Both teams are most deserving of this recognition," Cassady said. "During the 2019-2020 Industrial Engineering Capstone Experience, these teams worked closely with their industry partner to develop a detailed understanding of a complex system, analyze the current performance of the system, use their industrial engineering skills to make and evaluate recommendations for improving system performance, and create deliverables to facilitate implementation of their recommendations. In addition to applying the skills they developed in their prior coursework, these teams learned and applied state-of-the-art industrial engineering techniques beyond what it is a part of our prescribed curriculum."

During the summer, the 20 semi-finalists will be trimmed to three finalists. The three finalists will present their work at the IISE Annual Meeting in the fall, and winners will be recognized at the meeting's Honors and Awards Banquet.

"Based on the quality of these teams' work, I am confident that at least one of our teams will be a finalist," Cassady said.

The contest is sponsored by the Council on Industrial and Systems Engineering (CISE), Virginia Tech Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University and The Ohio State University Department of Integrated Systems Engineering (Scott and Beatrice Sink Giving Accounts).