Penn State students place second in international systems engineering competition

March 20, 2023

By Sarah Small

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State team placed second in the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE)-Society for Health Systems FlexSim Student Simulation Competition. The competition was part of the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference, held Feb. 15-17 in Louisville, Kentucky.

Three students from the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering — Andrew Chung and Diory Cheng, both seniors, and Yiyang Wang, who graduated in December 2022 — competed in the FlexSim Student Simulation Competition, sponsored by FlexSim, a company that creates simulation modeling software. They were advised by Qiushi Chen, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering.

To compete, the student team first submitted simulation work and a final case study to a committee, which then selected them as one of three finalists invited to present their work at the conference. The three teams each presented solutions to an operating room scheduling problem as part of the competition’s goal of solving “a ‘real-world’ healthcare situational case study using FlexSim’s simulation software,” according to the IISE conference site.