I think finally after almost a year as an engineering science student I am just starting to understand what engineering science actually is.
Semester two has been such a mission for me not gonna lie, but through some of my recent papers and their assignments I feel like the dots are finally starting to connect, and I’m realising that engineering science actually really is just glorified ‘problem solving’.
ENGSCI 263, one of the engineering science specific papers, has been this final piece in the puzzle for me, and so I’m gonna kind of describe my recent project from this class to give an immediate example of the types of things we would do in the real world as engineering science engineers.
I feel like the Woolworths trucking logistics problem is somewhat of a ‘known’ assignment before becoming an engsci, as I think it’s somewhat recycled most years. Obviously we are not actually employed by Woolworths to organise their trucking logistics plan, but either way the fake data we use for this gives us our first taste of what engsci really is. The principles and strategic approach we develop are the same as what we would use for such a problem given a real dataset (this was a group project btwwww).
What we were given …
Initially we were given only the locations of all the stores (in terms of latitude and longitude), a sample of the travel durations between all stores/distribution centres on a given day, and the daily demand of product for each store across a few weeks. It sounds like a lot of information to be given, but considering our approach was unguided and pretty much up to each group’s different interpretations of the problem and what was necessary, it was a very vague starting point. I didn’t like this at the start, but given the freedom in our different groups to each come up with our own version of an optimal solution we learnt a lot.
What we had to do with it …
The whole aim of this project was to optimise the trucking logistics plan financially between all the Woolworths stores to meet their product demands, while also taking into account the restrictions of the delivery truck shift times and truck capacity. To add another challenge to the mix, the data we were given wasn’t a definitive version of the same demands/store-to-store-durations we would see in the future, and instead was only a guide that we could use to help us estimate what might happen in the future.
Because of this we had to make realistic assumptions and calls in our trucking system design, not just based on whats the cheapest option when considering the given data, but also taking into account the uncertainty of what our design could need to handle in the future. This was done in terms of the uncertainty in demand and travel durations due to traffic day by day, which we had to manage by having allowances and back up plans so that our plan could withstand this variation.
The map shown above is a map outlining some of our formulated routes we came up with!!
My thoughts …
Honestly I hope I haven’t bored everyone with that explanation, but whether it’s properly conveyed or not I really did enjoy this whole process, and it cemented in my mind that I actually did choose the right spec. It really gave us a chance to put our skills into practice, in a problem that actually is a ‘real-world-problem’ and one that has a very engsci vibe.
So apart from this specific trucking problem, what other sorts of problems will we be asked to solve?
- Modelling pandemics and their expected spread: I know no one wants to be thinking about covid, but modelling epidemics is such a useful engineering science specific skill.
- Designing vehicles based on things such as airflow: Optimising the design of things like planes, or boats.
- Modelling and managing water/waste water systems of cities.
- Designing/optimising geothermal power stations.
- Optimising staffing schedules, for example airline crew schedules.
- Fluid dynamics sort of problems: my next assignment for this class goes into thinking about aquifers and their relative pressures, and how to model/manage these.
There’s so much variation in what can be done and answered, and this ‘problem solving’ ability showcased in this assignment is a skill wanted by so many companies. Some companies that look for engineering science students specifically, or have hired them in the past is Air New Zealand, Fisher and Paykel Healthcare and Emirates Team New Zealand, to name a few.
Hope you guys found this blog interesting!!
Ava 🧚♀️🧸🍓