Quality and clarity of writing. Utility or success of the work in one or more real world practice applications. Satisfactory oral presentation in public, at the scheduled time and place. Winners will be announced at the meeting, after the finalist presentations. Selection of semifinalists, finalists, and winning entry are at the sole discretion of the respective committees.
All decisions are final.
CAPS can find the volume mix of products to maximize profit, constrained by the existing tool capacity, or it can identify the total tool capacity required to manufacture a specified mix of products. The major mathematical challenges were formulating the linear program to accurately reflect the available manufacturing capacity, in particular to deal with parallel, unrelated tool groups which may process the same operations at widely varying rates, to capture the preference for the order in which such tool groups are used to accommodate the workload, and to identify which tool group is the truly gating one. The typical users are capacity planners who are responsible for both reconciling product demand forecasts with the available or planned manufacturing capacity and for generating the strategic capital investment requests. CAPS is credited with identifying tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue opportunities and with avoiding unnecessary capital expenditures for new manufacturing equipment. Once the bidlines are prepared, they are awarded to the pilots in a bidding process.