2024 Management Engineering Capstone Designs

The ongoing surge in price inflation has caused grocery and food delivery bills to skyrocket. To assist those grappling with this challenge, existing applications offer solutions for planning home-cooked meals, aiming to save money. While the existing saturation of meal-planning apps focuses on ease and enjoyment, there's a clear absence of options for budget-conscious individuals. Addressing this gap, we've created SimpleMeal to empower users in budget-friendly meal planning. Our solution leverages optimization techniques to generate personalized recipe plans within budget, effectively reducing food expenses.

Check out simplemeal.live

Electric planes offer a promising alternative to traditional gas-powered aircraft. However, e-planes bring on new challenges including limited battery capacity and scarce knowledge of their performance in Canadian weather. Our team is working with Pipistrel Velis Electro, the world's first fully operational electric plane. Our platform enables researchers to analyze flight data and create a battery management system for the optimal operation of the electric plane. Leveraging machine learning, ElectriFly optimizes flight schedules based on weather forecasts and improves flight planning by predicting battery consumption.

https://electrifly.uwaterloo.ca/

ScheduleAbility is a non-profit health service provider aimed to empower children through therapeutic services. Their Speech and Language Pathology Early Years program has the highest demand of all their programs, with a waiting time of up to 2 years. This has created a backlog that makes up just a portion of the roughly 27,600+ children waiting for similar care province-wide. With such long waiting times, we turn to operations research and industrial engineering methods to decrease this wait time and improve clinical staff's experiences.

In an era where philanthropy is often seen as exclusive to the wealthy, donations from the regular working class have declined. Recognizing the hesitation to donate due to challenges in identifying aligned charities, GiveBuddy emerges as a platform to encourage contributions. It simplifies the search for trustworthy and highly-rated charities, empowering individuals to overcome donation barriers. GiveBuddy aims to reignite philanthropic engagement, making it accessible for everyone to make a positive impact on causes they genuinely care about, regardless of their socioeconomic background.

Introducing WaterlooWorks Compass, our Chrome extension designed to revolutionize your job search experience. Say goodbye to wasted time and hello to efficiency with instant compatibility scores, key information from job postings, and skill recommendations. Effortlessly navigate through WaterlooWorks' job postings, pinpoint essential skills, and receive personalized suggestions to enhance your resume. WaterlooWorks Compass becomes your indispensable career companion, empowering your job search journey. Get started today with WaterlooWorks Compass - your ultimate guide to success:

https://github.com/prithikah23/fydp-analytics-tool/

The disparity in high-speed internet access within First Nations communities remains largely overlooked, with only 34.8% of indigenous homes having access compared to the national average of 93.5% in Canada. ComConnect emerges as a dedicated online platform committed to addressing this digital gap among Indigenous communities. Our portal offers detailed mapping of internet availability within First Nations reserves and lands, accompanied by a suite of resources aimed at facilitating access to high-speed connectivity for these communities.

Engineering students at the University of Waterloo who are pursuing the Management Sciences (MSCI) option face challenges in designing their academic plans to fulfill their program and the MSCI option requirements. MSCIte is a website that centralizes resources and helps streamline the degree planning process. It offers interactive course planning, comprehensive information on the option and its benefits, and program-specific course recommendations based on historical data. MSCIte simplifies the degree planning process, reduces redundant communication between students and the undergraduate advisors, and improves overall efficiency.

On social media, we are bombarded with information at every turn. This constant deluge causes people to shut down and turn away from traditional, reliable news media. In response, we developed Newtral, a one-stop shop for a comprehensive view of the news in a readable format. Users search for subjects relevant to them and Newtral scans the internet for the most popular articles related to their query. A summary is then generated and presented to the user highlighting the key topics of their search. Newtral offers users a reliable and neutral source for navigating today's overwhelming media landscape.

Making purchasing decisions is hard. Juxtapose is a web application designed to help online shoppers tackle the difficulty of making well-informed and confident decisions when they encounter endless products, details, and reviews. The application aggregates specifications, peer reviews, and expert reviews from Best Buy, Walmart, Consumer Reports, and YouTube to provide tailored recommendations and succinct details for each product. Overall, Juxtapose alleviates decision paralysis and information overload by ensuring shoppers feel less overwhelmed by the number of product options and volume of information available.

The rapid transition to Electronic Vehicles has created a need for improved charging infrastructure. In collaboration with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, we have built VoltPath: a tool to enable optimal location of EV charging stations. VoltPath provides a simple visual interface, allowing non-technical decision makers to leverage and interpret complex modeling and simulation. Through an iterative process, the user visualizes the trade-offs between different candidate solutions. They simulate the effects of station placements and use the model to optimize to their custom constraints.

Inefficient palletization contributes to millions of dollars in losses across Canadian distribution centres annually. Improving outbound pallet stability reduces product damages during order picking, palletization, and transit. With the help of data from a major Canadian grocery chain, OptiSlot leverages mathematical modelling and data analytics to optimize layout, inventory slotting and palletization in distribution centres. It considers item characteristics, mainly weight and height, to determine ideal order pick sequences and item slotting locations. OptiSlot recommends distribution centre layouts for improved order fulfillment and delivery.

MyFund addresses a crucial gap in financial markets, enabling direct interaction between retail traders and fund managers. Unlike traditional trading or purchasing financial products, which demand significant time, knowledge, and access, our solution simplifies investment in managed funds. By offering a platform where users can easily buy and sell shares in professionally managed funds, we democratize access to sophisticated investment strategies, catering to non-institutional investors who seek to participate in financial markets without the complexities of direct stock trading or navigating financial institutions.

SPEAKERvised is an interactive, user-friendly application that is catered to unexperienced interviewees. Through the power of ML, the platform offers personalized, real-time feedback, giving individuals the opportunity to be better prepared for their interviews. Feedback could include verbal issues, such as overuse of filler words, repetitive words, or an overly quick tempo.

"Engineering Decoded" addresses the overwhelming information burden faced by high school students when researching University of Waterloo Engineering programs. This leads to prospective students struggling to find the right program fit. Leveraging gamification, our platform offers a unique 'choose your own adventure' journey, guiding students to the engineering program best suited to their interests. Targeting students who are interested in the University of Waterloo for Engineering, our design revolutionizes the decision-making process.

The fashion industry grapples with pressing environmental and ethical challenges, yet a lack of transparency in the supply chain leaves consumers uninformed. Prominent brands such as Nike, H&M, and Zara are not exempt from these systemic problems and yet awareness remains surprisingly low. GreenerThreads is a Chrome extension that addresses this issue by enhancing awareness and transparency. GreenerThreads enables users to access real-time product and company level insights while shopping online, empowering consumers to make informed choices and avoid products linked to unethical and environmentally harmful practices.

In Waterloo, finding compatible roommates from an overwhelming pool of applicants is time-consuming and not guaranteed. For the majority of students, selecting a sublettor involves posting a listing to social media and receiving dozens, often hundreds, of applications. To gather the necessary information to make a decision, students must message each applicant individually, often conducting interviews to understand applicants on a more personal level. Using ApartMate, users can conveniently receive and manage the necessary applicant information to choose their sublet.

You can use ApartMate at https://apartmate.pythonanywhere.com/apartmate/home/

Textbooks are filled with dense technical wording that can be difficult to focus on and comprehend but the value of the expert information contained within remains. The LearnScape web-app that aims to change the way students and teachers navigate digital textbooks by using a multifaceted approach delivering bite-sized chunks of information, simplifying content, and tying concepts together from throughout a document.

Due to its unique co-op program, students at the University of Waterloo face a unique problem, finding housing at a rate faster than others. Finding high-quality information about buildings in Waterloo is challenging, riddled with biased reviews and segregated information sources. UW Nest aims to change this by integrating reviews of various buildings into one platform while using an algorithm to determine the validation and relevance of reviews to multiple individuals.