Case for support: An investigation of hyper-heuristic methods

Note: Peter Ross and Emma Hart have since moved from the University of Edinburgh to Napier University. The AI Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh was created in 1984 to transfer AI-related technology from the university into practice, working in partnership with a wide range of international businesses and organisations. These include NASA, the US Department of Defense, the RAF and DERA in the UK, Unilever, Hitachi, Pindar and many others. Its has been very successful – for example, the ‘Expert Provisioner’ system prototyped for and now used by RAF Logistics has, according to its users, saved them over £100 million so far; and the Yellow Pages books are laid out by software developed at AIAI for Pindar. The Evolutionary Computation group at the University of Edinburgh has been carrying out research into many aspects and applications of evolutionary algorithms for the past six years, notably work on timetabling and scheduling where the results have been widely used in practice internationally. The Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research group at the University of Nottingham has been carrying out successful research into the development and application of meta-heuristic techniques and hybridisations to scheduling problems (particularly timetabling) for the last six years, working with several government and commercial organisations. It is internationally recognised within the scheduling community for its work, especially on automated timetabling. The group now has 4 members of academic staff, two research assistants, six PhD students and a secretary. The group has many years of experience, within AI and OR, of meta-heuristic approaches to a variety of scheduling and optimisation problems, and extensive experience of practical and theoretical aspects of the problems that will be tackled in this proposal as well as a wide variety of related problems.