Poster
Client Context
Neighborhood Meals on Wheels was founded in 1979 and services areas across Gwinnett County. Their mission remains the same: “To establish a community in which our home-bound, elderly, and disabled citizens can live their lives with independence and dignity.” Five days a week, kitchen staff and volunteers arrive at NMOW’s warehouse and kitchen facility to begin meal preparation. From 8am to 10am, meals are prepared, packaged, and sealed, then organized into bags according to their respective routes. Each meal bag is distributed to a volunteer driver, and from 10 am to 12 pm, drivers deliver meals to the meal recipients on their routes. Our client contact, Mrs. Jenny Allen, is the Executive Director of NMOW and the person in charge of the entire process from inventory and meal prep to route creation.
Project Objective
Georgia’s senior population is predicted to grow substantially between now and 2050, driven primarily by the Baby Boomer generation. In 2021, NMOW served 7,044 meals, an 181% increase over the prior year. NMOW’s 2024 goal of 31,000 meals is more than triple the number of meals served just 3 years earlier. With that growth in mind, the nonprofit has identified two current systems with the greatest opportunity for improvement:
- warehouse/kitchen operation
- meal delivery routing process
NMOW operates at near full capacity in their current 800-square-foot facility, and as a result they are struggling to meet the growing demand for recipients in the Gwinnett area. To meet the growing demand, they are building a new 5,700-square-foot facility in early 2025. The team designed a layout for the new facility that merges new and existing equipment while preserving their daily process. The goal for the design was to address significant challenges with limited space, which constrained their growth, volunteer workspace, and storage capacity for essential equipment and supplies.
Secondly, with a growth rate of about 10 new clients each month, Mrs. Allen struggles to organize delivery routes, ensuring each route is under 60 minutes, while minimizing the number of volunteer drivers. Incorporating new addresses into the existing routes is a lengthy process, which currently takes up to four hours due to manual trial and error. As the primary resource for all NMOW operations, Mrs. Allen will be unable to dedicate the necessary time to the route planning process in the coming years given the anticipated growth of the organization. The team designed a scalable solution that will reduce her planning time and accommodate the anticipated customer influx in the upcoming years.
Design Strategy
To develop NMOW's new warehouse layout, the team researched the Facility Layout Problem (FLP) and identified multiple strategies for facility design. Based on the research, the CORELAP construction algorithm was the best fit since it would prioritize relationships between equipment according to the meal preparation process. Following the CORELAP design, the BLOCPLAN algorithm refined the layout to focus on minimizing travel distances for volunteers based on the frequency of visits to each equipment station.
To address long route planning times, the team has developed software capable of handling all the core management functions necessary to create and update routes. The most challenging aspect of developing the software was generating routes from scratch with a reasonable runtime. The team decided to formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Program and split the problem up into smaller clusters that could run quickly. The final program can generate routes from scratch in under five minutes for all 160 current meal recipients. In addition to quickly generating routes, the program can add and remove meal recipients, add and remove depots, and visualize the resulting routes for the client in an interactive map.
Deliverables
The final deliverable for the facility opportunity is a 2-D AutoCAD drawing, rendered to scale and includes all necessary equipment for the new facility. This drawing was produced after the 4 iterations of the improvement algorithm and has been approved by both the general contractor and primary client contacts.
The final deliverable for the routing opportunity is the routing tool itself, which is an executable file compiled from a Python script that relies on the inputs of the meal recipient information in excel as well as Gurobi and Google Maps API to run. The client received a manual on how to use the tool as well as a developer’s guide, which can be used to make future improvements to the tool. Two members of our team have agreed to continue working with NMOW over the course of the next year, as stewards of the software. They will continue adding features for our client and ensuring the program has the necessary longevity.
Value and Impact
The overall motivation for both opportunities stems from the increase in demand NMOW is facing in the years ahead, and the value the facility design deliverable brings to the client comes from its’ usability and overall feasibility to implement once the building is built in 2025. To ensure our design is physically feasible, we had the General Contractor, Chuck Allen, evaluate and approve the layout. From his evaluation, he confirmed that our design meets the physical constraints of the building and follows Gwinnett County code regulations. To quantitatively evaluate the value of the final design, we generated 20 alternative BLOCPLAN layouts to compare the overall walking distance from our final design layout using Python. Our layout ends up reducing travel distance by 2,742 ft compared to the average simulated layout.
With increasing meal recipient demand, time spent on route planning is expected grow to over 8 hours per week by 2030, which is unmanageable for Mrs. Allen. Under the same growth projection from now until 2030, time spent on route planning using the routing tool is expected to reduce planning time by 98%, or an average of 300 hours per year. Assuming the average salary of a nonprofit Executive Director, this can save NMOW an estimated average of $9,500 per year. The volunteers will also benefit from the routing system redesign, as the new routes created by the tool reduce total drive time by 6.7%, resulting in almost $400 of gas costs saved annually.
Project Information
Student Team
Lucy Boswell, Anna Holloway, Alexa Hurston, Noel Lopez, Brock Spence, Daniela Zamora, and Jason Zou
Faculty Advisor
Faculty Evaluator
