Final Project

Fall 2005

Due Wednesday, December 7, 2005 at 5pm

Project Assignment

During the semester, you are required to do a case study of a particular problem. This project will constitute a significant portion of your final grade. My hope is that you will all find projects of campus significance, but you are ot required to do so.

In choosing a case study, you should pick a topic that is relevant to the material in the course, for which data or other analysis is available (or can be inferred in some fashion) and that is of interest to you. Note that the focus should be on creating some model or decision analysis tool that will help frame and understand the problem – it can not simply be a cash flow spreadsheet.

You should consider how much of a problem to choose for a boundary and ensure that the particular problem you choose is sufficiently small that you can make progress on it before the end of the semester. Thus you should not choose to solve the entire campus facilities management department problem, or solve the entire campus energy problem.

Brad and Don visited class and gave some excellent specific and general suggestions on projects. If you need more information, contact them. Otherwise feel free to talk to me. For problems suggested by Brad and Don, I would prefer that there is no group overlap. If you want to do one of their topics, you need to come “Stake your claim” with me after class. Regardless, you must have an identified client for your project (i.e., you can not just arbitrarily look at the problem of Wind Energy – unless you are going to work with a company or community on the problem).

I expect that you will form groups of 3-4 to complete this project. Groups larger or smaller than that will only be allowed in extreme cases (since it will increase the workload of reading/grading the project reports).

Due to the anticipated group size, I will distribute peer evaluations for each group for members to assess mutual effort and performance in completing the task. Each week, one of you will be fired (just kidding).

Project reports should be no more than 15 pages in length, not including Appendices/etc. The “Writing Rubric” will be used to assess writing quality. Please do not take extraordinary measures to make your reports look nice (e.g., report covers or binding).

Immediate Deliverable: By Wednesday, please submit group members, project ideas, and an outline discussing anticipated modeling work and data flows.