Building the theory for the practice

Many problems in commerce and industry have the property that a solution is specified by the combination of a fairly small number of inter-related decisions, but the number of combinations of decisions is astronomical. They include problems of facility location, resource allocation, school and university timetabling, vehicle routing, crew rostering, machine scheduling, cutting and packing, production planning, and many more. For example, in timetabling, even if we only need to assign times and rooms to a few hundred events, the number of potential timetables can easily exceed the estimated number of particles in the universe.

One of the great successes of OR is that such problems can often still be addressed; that is, we can find not only possible timetables but also find good ones, or even the best ones. However, many problems remain which are outside the scope of existing methods and technologies, and LANCS is addressing this challenge through three research clusters:

Discrete and Non-linear Optimisation

Several important industries, such as the chemical process industries and the utilities, regularly face hard optimisation problems that have both discrete and nonlinear aspects. The optimisation cluster is concerned with techniques for solving such problems to proven optimality or near-optimality.

Heuristic Understanding

Some of the best solvers use heuristics’ which can be thought of as algorithms that capture rules-of-thumb’ and have been found to work well in practice. This cluster aims to develop a deeper scientific understanding of such heuristics.

Systems to Build Systems

New OR solutions often require a lot of human resources, including experts in OR, programmers and software engineers. In this cluster, we address the challenge of building computer systems which support the development of systems to solve problems, i.e. computer programs to write, or aid in the writing of, other computer programs. An aim is that OR applications can be automatically built `to order’, for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) just as easily as for large enterprises. SMEs account for a large fraction of UK GDP, and so improvements in the efficiency of this sector could be of particular national importance.

related resources:

	LANCS Initiative
	Healthcare
	Green Logistics
	Transport
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