This week Team Stratagem held our System Level Design Review and met with one of our liaisons. On Monday, we all met in person to practice our presentation the next day, and were also to meet virtually with Mr. Radke to discuss the use cases of our application and to further finalize their expectations of our project. On Tuesday, we had the privilege to mingle with industry professionals and our peers before our presentation. This was a valuable experience and all of us learned some important information and lessons. This will be the last blog post for the year of 2025, see you all next year!

Our SLDR presentation slides are linked here: Stratagem – SLDR Presentation.pptx. You need be logged into an UF account to access this presentation. If you do not have an UF account, please send an email to matthewdavis1@ufl.edu.

This week Team Stratagem presented our System Level Design Review (SLDR) presentation for peer review and will work to implement our feedback for our final SLDR presentation. We were unfortunately unable to meet with our liaisons on Monday, but used that time to review and practice our SLDR peer review presentation for Tuesday. The peer review presentation went well overall as we met beforehand in an IPPD conference room to practice our presentation. The most important feedback that we received was to make the slides more engaging as they are plain, to make text larger and easier to see and understand, and to simplify our explanations and overviews as they are too complex. We intend to implement this feedback before our final SLDR presentation on Tuesday, December 2, 2025.

This week Team Stratagem reviewed our feedback from our Prototype Inspection Day and continued to prepare for the System Level Design Review (SLDR) peer review next week. An important piece of feedback was that we did not explain who our client, CAE, is and what they do, which caused confusion for the judges. Team Stratagem intends to rectify this deficiency in our SLDR presentation. In addition to preparing for the SLDR peer review, we also worked on the User Interface for our project. William Zhu created the tree-based view below which shows every task as connected nodes emanating out from the final assembly in the center.

This week Team Stratagem held our biweekly liaison meeting and presented our project and prototype during Prototype Inspection Day. First, on Monday, we met virtually with our liaisons and clarified their requirements and expectations. On Tuesday, we presented our prototype to 6 judges and received very valuable feedback. The most common suggestion was that we should better explain what CAE is and what they do. We had previously created some of our presentations with our liaisons and sponsors at CAE as the target audience, and we would not need to explain their company to them. We will now develop slides to explain CAE at the beginning of non-CAE or open presentations.

This week Team Stratagem presented our project to the IPPD class and prepared our prototype demo and presentation for next week. We met on Monday virtually to prepare for presenting our project and current implementation and testing ideas to the class on Tuesday. On Tuesday we then presented to the class in the final lecture session of this semester and the presentation went well. We received some important feedback such as us needing to further explain our sponsor, CAE. We then spent the rest of the week preparing our Prototype Inspection Day (PID) presentation and demo. The image below shows Yuri and Will brainstorming the User Interface during a meeting.

This week Team Stratagem reviewed our Prototype Design feedback with our liaison and our coach. We met virtually with our liaison and coach on Monday and discussed the User Interface flow, our backend implementation, and our algorithmic implementation. We then met with our coach on Wednesday and identified what our next steps should be: to create concrete examples of our use cases and identify how we will account for resource constraints. We also assigned research and programming tasks to be done over the weekend before our next meeting. Next week we will meet in person with our coach, Dr. Jiang, and will also prepare for our Prototype Inspection.

This week Team Stratagem traveled to Tampa to present our prototype design plan to our sponsors, CAE. First we rehearsed our presentations on Monday and Wednesday, before we traveled to CAE’s Tampa headquarters on Thursday. We met our liaison Brian Stensrud and our executive sponsor Chris Catoe in person. We also had the privilege to meet the president of CAE USA, Merrill Stoddard, and were able to discuss CAE’s current business and future potential with him.

This week Team Stratagem participated in a peer review of our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) Presentation. We met several times beforehand to practice and review our presentation, and overall our presentation went well. There are several improvements for us to make before our actual PDR, which we have started to make. We also started brainstorming the User Interface (UI) of our application. We decided to make a VS Code style interface for flexibility and ease of use. Below is a video demo of the UI we intend to implement.

Next week we will travel to Tampa to present our prototype design at the CAE headquarters. We are excited to meet our liaison and stakeholders in person, and to get feedback on our prototype design ideas.

This week, Team Stratagem focused on creating fleshed out, top-down approach to our project architecture. Our first step was to lay out the client side and server side components. Next, we went into the actual flow of user interaction. The UI should support multiple workflows like login, project selection, and schedule imports, with support for CSV, XLSX, and MPP files. We also considered a clickable interface vs an AI chatbot for users to specify their scheduling wants via natural language.

Discussing User Flows and Edge Cases

We then discussed database architecture, sketched out the relationships between fields in our database, including user authentication information and scheduling information, and we will continue to flesh out the rest of our project for the upcoming Preliminary Design Review.

This week, Team Stratagem focused on solidifying the group plans and roles for the immediate future. Pictured below is an outline of the phases for each step of the project. It began with Context Research, which has allowed us to get a good feel of the scope and expectations of the project. Out next step is to explore UX and algorithmic design possibilities, by combining our ideas from brainstorming last week with group research.

Our current task is to work towards a prototype for the user interface, as well as a prototype for the scheduling algorithm. This would act as a baseline for further improvements before we tackle software architecture, implementation, and testing.