SENIOR DESIGN
WELCOME TO ISYE SENIOR DESIGN
All senior students in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the senior design course. ISyE Senior Design is a vital part of our industrial and systems engineering program that provides students with firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Projects challenge and enhance students' problem-solving skills while training participants to exploit all available resources, such as academic and commercial literature, consultants, experienced engineers, etc. to develop a solution for the client. Interpretation of specific aspects of the design problem and potential solutions will depend on each group's diverse range of skills, experiences and imagination. A variety of innovative and creative solutions to "the problem" can always be expected.
Students usually work in teams of five to six individuals with 15-20 senior design groups running each semester. Student groups work as unpaid outside consultants satisfying their interest in a real world design experience. They work on well-defined, specific design activities. Each team picks its project, but senior design faculty reserve the right to veto projects that do not appear to comply with the course objectives. Senior Design groups are required to submit reports throughout the project term and a presentation is made at the conclusion of the project. During the project term, students frequently meet with their professors and with the sponsor representative. Each group spends approximately 900 hours on the project over the course of the semester. This effort is focused on resolving a specific problem or completing a specific project and is not intended for carrying out day-to-day operations. Details of the schedule, reports, and grading are provided by each professor who mentors each senior design group.
Typical of a program of this type, senior design offers a wide range of design projects that are generated from local companies and institutions. This accessibility provides students the opportunity to assess each project in detail and to be able ask questions and perform site visits. Under normal circumstances, project sites are within an hour’s drive of the Georgia Tech campus. Teams have worked on projects far from the Tech campus, but only under exceptional circumstances. Many enterprises in the Atlanta area have cases that can be successfully studied and solved by a small group of industrial engineering students working for experience and academic credit instead of money. Our hundreds of "satisfied customers" include a majority of the well-known businesses in the Atlanta area, and other enterprises such as hospitals and various local city and county government departments.
What the Sponsor Does
The first step is for the sponsor to identify a need or opportunity. For example, one year Rich's felt their delivery truck fleet could have better maintenance scheduling; the downtown Marriott felt the need for a more consistent, fair and profitable parking policy; Selig Chemical saw the need to organize their warehouse more efficiently; the Atlanta Journal and Constitution felt its wastage of newsprint could be reduced by a few tons per year; the Bairstow Distributing Company realized they needed to computerize their inventory system; and Rollins Security found their service people could travel a lot less if their trips were better scheduled. When students contacted these enterprises, they found enthusiastic potential sponsors. ISyE students are well prepared to design maintenance schedules, routing and delivery systems, warehouse layouts and materials handling systems, waste control programs, and requirements and specifications for information systems. They can apply operations research, simulation, statistics, and other technical tools to a wide variety of problems, and they can back up their design choices with thorough economic analysis.
The steps in participating are:
- Meet with the student group to explore possibilities, and determine, loosely, what kind of beneficial project could reasonably be performed by a neophyte consulting group of industrial and systems engineers -- usually six students working for about 130 to 160 hours, each, over four months.
- Assign a responsible technical or managerial person to give the group guidance, operations and economic information, and plant access. During the semester, this person will probably spend two to four hours a week interacting with group members.
- Arrange for an appropriate management level to receive and consider the group's formal proposal interim report, tentative results and conclusions and final design.
- Participate in evaluating the students' work.
Senior design teams look for projects before the start of each semester. Students select their own projects. You may submit a potential project via this website. You may also wish to follow up by contacting your faculty contact.
Please choose from the following:
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For Potential Clients
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For ISyE Students
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