Senior design project featured (click to view)
NBC Channel 5 news story: Southern Methodist University students focus their project on making the intersection of Fitzhugh and Travis streets in Dallas safer for pedestrians. Senior Design team Andrew Brunts, Hailey Phelps, and David Smith built a simulation of Fitzhugh Avenue traffic to evaluate configuration alternatives for a neighborhood improvement organization.
Client: Sabre Airline Solutions
Team: Hunter Ross, Mary Liz Tuttle, Ramon Trespalacios
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2014
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video
Sabre Airline Solutions offers data solutions and software to aid airlines sell products, market themselves, and operate efficiently. The company would like to provide traveler segmentation services for their customer reservation system to support various marketing programs. (Segmentation involves classifying prospective buyers into groups, or segments, to create products specifically for each segment.) This project required creating segmentation rules that classify ticket purchase data in this manner.
The senior design team replicated the data to create pre-booking and post-booking results. Pre-booking segmentation will show clusters that do not include variables such as fare and travel time, because these can’t be known until after booking. On the other hand, post‐booking data will provide segments that include purchases made. Pre-booking clusters could be used to make promotions for customers while booking, and post-booking clusters could be used to make promotions after booking.
The team used k-means clustering method and the R software to find the optimal number of clusters in the data and assist Sabre with the design of good fare products. For example, if an airline has created a ticket fare product for a specific market like business‐travelers, the team’s segmentation rules can confirm whether the product is well‐defined and well-targeted.
Client: Frito Lay
Team: Matt Alfano, Brittany Masi
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2010
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video
The project is to design and create an out-of-stock inventory tool that is user-friendly and able to historically scan data while predicting inventory shortfall at the club/SKU level. More features of this project include determining what Inventory is needed by club/SKU and determine delivery frequency by club. We decided that only these opportunities fell into the scope of our project.
After consolidating all of the available information into one database we removed unnecessary tables to increase the processing speed of analyzing the product “Spy Reports” generated by their current database queries. We analyzed two of the highest-demand product lines that Frito Lay stocks at Sam’s Clubs nationwide. These two products are Smart Mix and Variety Mix. Read more…
Categories: Final report, Forecasting, Inventory management, Manufacturing, Operations, Planning, Presentation, Statistical Methods, Transportation, Uncategorized, United States, Video Tags:
Client: Frito Lay
Team: Javier Gonzalez, Fernando Sada, Marcelo Sada
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
In order to satisfy the large Hispanic market in the United States, Frito Lay imports products manufactured in Mexico by Gamesa, a sister company to Frito Lay due to the fact that they are both owned by PepsiCo. Gamesa has plants all across Mexico, having the main ones located in Celaya, Vallejo, Obregon and Monterrey. In the past, all products being imported into the U.S were produced in Obregon, a city in Northwestern Mexico. As of today, the Hispanic population has dispersed all across the country, increasing Gamesa’s market to a large portion of it. Gamesa’s products are now being distributed all the way from California, to Texas, and onto the East Coast and Midwest. Imports have increased so much that in order to satisfy the demand, Gamesa has started producing all across Mexico for exports. Read more…
The stories of three Senior Design projects from the clients’ point of view, including North Texas Food Bank, Texas Department of Transportation, and Southwest Airlines:
Client: Texas Plaza, Prof. Peiser
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 1982
Documents: Final report (PDF)
Appeared in different form as a journal cover article. R. Peiser and Scot Andrus, Phasing of Income-Producing Real Estate, Interfaces 13:5 (1983) 1-9.
Integer programming techniques were used to determine the order in which to build office buildings and when to put the space on the market for a seven-building, 90-acre, mixed-use real estate project in Texas. The output of the optimization provided development managers with the schedule for opening each building, the amount of space to be leased each year in each building, and the annual cash flows to the owner.
Client: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Team: Alex Grosjean, Brianna Bauer
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Every month, the Treasury sends out roughly ten million physical checks for Social Security payments and other benefits. On average, it costs them about $1 apiece to send these checks via surface mail. As a cost saving method, the Treasury is now requiring these recipients to use direct-deposit methods, and will eventually cease to send out physical checks.
This is where the Federal Reserve’s GoDirect program comes in. GoDirect is both a call center and a website which helps the recipients switch over to direct deposits, which only cost about 9 cents per person. The return on investment for this project is expected to be ten years. The Call Center wishes to optimize the schedule of employees to handle these incoming calls; thus our goal is to design a model to minimize the cost associated with the call center. Read more…
Client: Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control
Team: Stephen Beckert, Brandon Joslin, Pierce, Meier
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2010
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Lockheed Martin presented us with a project more exciting than we could ever imagine: aiding the research into ways to model the effects of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). EMP is extremely devastating and can be caused by both natural and man-made events. EMP primarily affects electronic devices, rendering them useless or destroyed. Since the United States is heavily dependent on electronic interfaces, we are extremely vulnerable to this effect. In addition to this vulnerability to the EMP effect, the United States has a complex system of connected critical infrastructures that have not been studied as interrelated systems. This presents a major problem, how can one forecast the possible failures of such a massive complex system? Read more…
Categories: Computational probability, Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, Defense, Energy, Final report, Forecasting, Government, Integer programming, Nonlinear programming, Operations, Planning, Presentation, Reliability analysis, Scheduling, Simulation, United States, Video Tags:
Client: Capstone Asset Management Co.
Team: Mallory Harrison, Natalie Jaroski
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2010
Documents: Final report (PDF), Presentation (PDF)
Capstone is a privately owned investment advisory firm in Houston, TX that offers privately managed accounts to achieve client’s financial objectives. They currently manage over $3.8 billion in assets for about 3,000 different clients. They provide products and services through three distribution channels: brokers/advisors, institutions/corporations, and high-net-worth individuals. Revenues are generated by marginal product fees associated with assets under management allocated by product.
Capstone has in place a detailed budgeting process but desires to expand the process to include financial modeling to measure profitability by product. Our goal for this project is to develop a model that would calculate existing profitability on assets under management by product. Our second goal is to develop an optimization model that takes into account the revenues and expenses associated with sales of existing products versus the revenues and expenses associated with the development of new products. The final output of the optimization model is to identify the most profitable mix for new product sales. Read more…
Categories: Final report, Finance, Forecasting, Houston, Marketing, Optimization, Planning, Presentation, Scheduling, Simulation, Texas, United States, Video Tags:
Client: Arlington Texas Police Department
Team: Ron Andrews, Blake Robinson
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
The Arlington Police Department is responsible for policing the city of Arlington to achieve a safer community. The policing of the city is divided roughly into four main areas (north, south, east, and west) with each respective area possessing its own police station. The Arlington Police Department requested insight into the placement of the police stations to see if they were effectively located to process the level one crimes that originate from each main area. If a main area was not adequately covered, areas could be hypothetically redrawn to accommodate effective policing.
Our method of analysis included the use of in-depth data analysis and a pure network model that had the potential to take into consideration Euclidean distances, time schedules, crime severity and political issues. Our findings indicated that the placement of police stations given current population levels were placed reasonably close to where our model suggested they should be placed. It was also discovered that complex issues such as political issues and crime severity are hard to quantify within a model given due to the ambiguous nature of the data.
