After months of hard work, 31 groups capped their undergraduate journeys through the H. Stewart Milton School of Industrial Engineering (ISyE) by presenting their Senior Design Project at Capstone Design Expo. The expo featured teams from 12 different schools at the Institute, displaying innovative ways to solve problems and challenge the norm.
ISyE brought the most teams of any school to the expo, where the senior design teams had the opportunity, for the first time, to present their problems and solutions to the public for the first time. In the packed McCamish Pavilion, teams erected their poster boards and demos, ready to explain their work to other interested students, donors, parents, and leaders from other schools at the Institute.
The ISyE teams covered a wide range of industrial engineering applications; some worked to improve their clients’ inventory management, while others designed new processes to reduce patient wait times, allocate staffing resources, and shorten travel times.
One team, “Shift Happens,” showed how they improved dispatcher scheduling for American Airlines. Their solution takes employees’ preferences, flight schedules, the dispatcher’s flexible day use, and training days into account to produce an improved schedule that minimizes the number of understaffed and overstaffed shifts.
The scale of their solution was enormous.
“When we combine that all into our one model, we have three shifts to account for: morning, evening, and midnight. We have eight regions to account for with American Airlines. It’s a massive model: 21 million variables, 35 million constraints,.” explained “Shift Happens” team member Colin Fravel.
With their improved schedule, they expected a 73% reduction in unmet demand where there is no dispatch to work a flight. By better distributing dispatchers, they also estimate that their solution will save American Airlines $1.3 million dollars in reduced staffing costs over the course of a year.
Another team, “Buzz on the Beach,” worked with company VayKLife — a guest engagement and beach gear rental platform — to optimize transportation resource usage by reducing the number of trucks required, total miles traveled, labor hours, fuel consumption, and reliance on rental equipment during peak seasons. The team developed a routing model that accounts for inventory availability and vehicle capacity constraints, enabling the company to maintain its current level of service while operating more efficiently with fewer resources.
“In peak season, we were able to see the savings of nine, almost ten thousand dollars in Charleston alone. And then in the off-season, we’re able to save almost $13.7 thousand dollars, just in Charleston,” said Rohan Prabhuram, a team member for Buzz on the Beach.
At the end of the expo, the judges gave team Contact Point the award for best ISyE Senior Design Team. Team members Skyler Malmberg, Visakhi Miriyapalli, Nick Nist, Hannah Mathew, Justin Collins, Pardha Kanchiraju, Esha Pentakota, and Saba Ansari developed a work-process solution for Elevate Solutions Group.
Their new process improves the way Elevate Solutions Group for loads trays with contact lenses, as specified their client. The old process involved four to six workers loading individual trays, manual sorting, and long travel times between steps. Contact Point’s solution included constructing a new workstation for loading trays, a handheld scanner, custom software, and a tray attachment to make loading easier. They also counterintuitively decreased the number of workers at a time to just one.
“We were able to note an almost uh up to 50% decrease in time usage per tray,” Collins explained. “We estimated this will save them over $126,000 over the first year on just this one product line that we're working with.”
Most of that cost savings came in the from labor, which they reduced by an average of nine hours per client order. The team’s impact, their client’s satisfaction, and the rapid adoption of their solution were decisive factors in awarding this team the top prize.
In addition to the one thousand dollars in prize money, “Contact Point” will now have the opportunity to present its project at the Best of ISyE Competition Finalist Presentations on Tuesday, May 5, along with other ISyE finalists yet to be announced.
For most of the 237 students in the ISyE senior design groups, the expo marks the end of their journey at Tech in the most visible way. They presented to the public not just the project they worked on over the past semester, but also the hours years of study, dedication, and determination it took to get there. This final event was the culmination of all the steps it took for each one of them to become a Georgia Tech industrial engineer
For most team membersof the 237 students in the ISyE senior design groups, the expo marks the end of their journey at Tech in the most visible way. They presented to the public not just the project they worked on over the past semester, but also the years of study, dedication, and determination it took to get there. This final event was the culmination of all the steps it took for each one of them to become a Georgia Tech industrial engineer.
ISyE Monodisciplinary Winner - Team Contact Point (Spring 2026 Capstone Design Expo)
For More Information Contact
Parker Avery, Student Writing Assistant
Tiffany Ng, Senior Design Student Assistant