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Investing the LANCS Resources

Edmund BurkeNottingham / Stirling

Sanja Petrovic

LANCS InitiativeScientific and Industrial Advisory BoardNovember 28-29 2011, Cumberland Lodge

Automated Scheduling, Optimisationand Planning Group (ASAP)

School of Computer ScienceUniversity of Nottingham

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ASAP Group

7 members of academic staff

8 research fellows

1 industrial research associate

38 PhD students

1 MRes student

1 member of administrative

support staff

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LANCS Members

• 4 Lecturers

• 1 Transitional Fellow

• To be appointed: 1 Professor

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Collaboration with Stirling

• Apply together for research funding in relevant research areas.

• Common supervision of PhD studentsand post-doctoral research students.

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EPSRC Programme Grant Application

• A joint application for £6.7M between UCL, Stirling/Nottingham, Birmingham and York

• Successfully through to the final stage;interview in February

• Will address the challenge of adaptivity in search based software engineering by  exploring hyper-heuristic methods

• Close synergy with LANCS 'Systems to Build Systems' cluster

• Strong support from partner universities

• Stirling and Nottingham plan to work closely together- joint supervisions - potential funding for both institutions

Collaboration with Stirling (cont)

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Sustainability ofResearch Capacity

How to ensure the sustainability of research capacity beyond the grant support ?

• MSc course on Operational Research

Unique feature: offered by the School of Computer Science

Syllabus would reflect our expertise in Operational Research, and Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence

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Optimisation

Healthcare

Heuristic Understanding

Systems to Build Systems

Transport and Logistics

Stochastic Modelling

+ Southampton & LancasterUnderstanding heuristics for communication of optimisation and simulation with application to A&E staffing

+ Cardiff, Staff Rosters Solutions

Better understanding of heuristics for nurse rostering

+ Southampton, NATS and EUROCONTROL Improvement of airport operations + Southampton have joined SINTEF in a consortium Work on the real airport problems at Heathrow +Optrak

Real world vehicle routing problems

+ Southampton & Portsmouth cooperative search + Turkish university (hyper-)heuristics in dynamic environments Landscape analysis of heuristics for stochastic optimisation problems Formulation and understanding the landscape and heuristics for timetabling problems

Computer-based search methodologies

available at reasonable costto small organisations

Research Between/Within Clusters

+City Hospital NottinghamRadiotherapy planning and scheduling

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Questions ?

All comments are very welcome!