Project Details

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Digital twin of an automated food assembly robot

Company: The Hungry Group

Major(s):
Primary: IE
Secondary: CMPSC

Non-Disclosure Agreement: YES

Intellectual Property: YES

The Hungry Group operates a next-generation, fully automated kitchen powered by a food-assembly robot. We serve customers across multiple brands every day and are committed to delivering meals within strict timing windows to maximize satisfaction and throughput. As part of this capstone project, you will join our product-engineering team to create a simulation-based digital twin of the existing assembly line and use it for system optimization and what-if analysis to drive meaningful performance gains. Your work will unfold in four progressive phases: 1. Digital-Twin Development: Build and validate a high-fidelity, system-level model of the current assembly robot, capturing mechanical-motion timing, state-machine control logic, and upstream/downstream interactions. 2. Baseline Performance Characterization: Run “day-in-the-life” order streams through the twin to quantify current cycle times, queue lengths, and resource utilization relative to our timing goals, establishing the benchmark against which all future improvements will be measured. 3. Capacity-Limit Analysis: Stress-test the model with escalating demand scenarios to pinpoint the maximum order volume that still meets the timing service level requirements, providing clear guidance how much headroom (or shortfall) exists before service levels degrade. 4. Bottleneck Identification and Design Iterations: Use simulation to locate rate-limiting steps and trial improvements such as parallelizing tasks, increasing dispenser speeds, or adding or removing dispensers, and then prioritize the upgrades that deliver the greatest gains in productivity while maintaining service timing requirements. Achieving these objectives will unlock higher hourly throughput, increase reliability, reduce wait times, and open new revenue opportunities.