Asee peer logo

An Optimization Routine for Assigning Students to Capstone Project Groups

Download Paper |

Conference

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Vancouver, BC

Publication Date

June 26, 2011

Start Date

June 26, 2011

End Date

June 29, 2011

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Capstone Design I

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education

Page Count

61

Page Numbers

22.198.1 - 22.198.61

DOI

10.18260/1-2--17479

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/17479

Download Count

377

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Peter L Schmidt University of North Carolina, Charlotte

visit author page

Peter L. Schmidt received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Louisville, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and his doctorate degree in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has served as a research associate and as an instructor at Vanderbilt University. He has also worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana; at Precision Rubber, now part of Parker Hannifin in Lebanon, Tennessee; for CDAI in Atlanta, Georgia and at UTC / Carrier in Lewisburg, Tennessee. Dr. Schmidt is a member of the ASEE and a licensed professional engineer in Tennessee and Georgia. He is also a member of ASME, ASHRAE, ASA and INCE. Dr. Schmidt’s research interests include aeroacoustics and ultrasonics, and has authored several journal and conference papers on these subjects.

visit author page

author page

Daniel Hoch University of North Carolina, Charlotte

biography

Nabila A. Bousaba University of North Carolina, Charlotte

visit author page

Nabila (Nan) BouSaba, University of North Carolina, Charlotte Nabila (Nan) BouSaba is a faculty associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Nan Earned her BS in Electrical Engineering (1982), and a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering (1986) from North Carolina A&T State University. Prior to her current position at UNC- Charlotte, Nan worked for IBM (15 years) and Solectron (eight years) in the area of test development and management. She teaches the senior design course for the Electrical and computer sections and Basic Electrical Circuit course.

visit author page

biography

William F. Heybruck University of North Carolina, Charlotte

visit author page

Bill received is BSEE degree from Merrimack College in North Andover MA, a Masters in Computer Science from Union College in Schenectady NY and more recently his Ph.D. in EE from UNC Charlotte in 2001.
He was with IBM for 32 years when he retired as a Hard Disk Drive Consultant when Hitachi bought his division. Prior to that, he was a consulting engineer for test technology, a wireless consultant and a Product Development Manager in Printer Development. He worked for Hitachi Global Storage Technology for 5 years as an expert on Micro hard disk drives before coming to UNC Charlotte as Director of the Industrial Solutions Lab.

visit author page

author page

Deborah L Sharer University of North Carolina, Charlotte

biography

Valentina Cecchi University of North Carolina at Charlotte

visit author page

Valentina Cecchi is originally from Rome, Italy. She attended Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, where she completed B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 2005, 2007, and 2010, respectively. She joined UNC Charlotte in 2010 as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and researcher in the Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC).

visit author page

biography

Gary Teng University of North Carolina at Charlotte

visit author page

Dr. S. Gary Teng is Professor and Director of Systems Engineering & Engineering Management Program and Center for Lean Logistics & Engineered Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering. Dr. Teng is a Professional Engineer in the State of Wisconsin and an ASQ-certified Quality Engineer and Reliability Engineer. His research interests are in engineering system design and analysis, Lean systems design & implementation, Lean logistics and transportation systems, supply chain management, healthcare system enhancement, and quality and reliability engineering. Dr. Teng has been appointed by North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue to serve on Governor’s Logistics Task Force. He is also serving as an advisor on the ad hoc Logistics Advisory Group for Charlotte Regional Logistics Network and on the board of Logistics Alliance of the Carolinas.

visit author page

author page

Elizabeth Sharer Francis Marion University

Download Paper |

Abstract

An Optimization Routine for Assigning Students to Capstone Project GroupsThe University of XXX includes a multidepartment, multidisciplinary capstone projectexperience in the curriculum. Projects in this course include those sponsored by industry, campusresearch laboratories, departmental administrators and governmental entities, as well as thosebenefiting service or charitable organizations. Students from mechanical, electrical and civilengineering and engineering technology programs, as well as systems engineering majors, arepooled to staff these projects. Student teams are selected by indicated student preference andrequired expertise as defined by the project description. For a small number of students, this taskis tractable using standard sorting routines available in typical spreadsheet software. When thenumber of students becomes large (n > 200), typical sorting tools struggle to provide a workablesolution. This work details a methodology for automating the staffing process for a large numberof students, using some common optimization tools.The optimization toolkit will be designed to run on open source spreadsheet software, with codeavailable as an appendix. Output from the optimization tool will also be compared an contrastedwith output generated by faculty using existing tools, with incorporation of experience withstudents who did not receive one of their top 3 project “picks”.

Schmidt, P. L., & Hoch, D., & Bousaba, N. A., & Heybruck, W. F., & Sharer, D. L., & Cecchi, V., & Teng, G., & Sharer, E. (2011, June), An Optimization Routine for Assigning Students to Capstone Project Groups Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC. 10.18260/1-2--17479

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015