Optimisation Research Group
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Optimisation technology is ubiquitous in our society. It schedules planes and their crews, coordinates the production of steel, and organizes the transportation of iron ore from the mines to the ports. Optimisation clears the day-ahead and real-time markets to deliver electricity to millions of people. It organizes kidney exchanges and cancer treatments and helps scientists understand the fundamental fabric of life, control complex chemical reactions, and design drugs that may benefit billions of individuals.
Mission
The optimisation research group carries out fundamental and applied research that addresses grand challenges faced by our society in infrastructure resilience, smart energy systems, computational life sciences, and logistics, networks, and supply chains. Our mission is to contribute pioneering scientific results and innovative optimisation systems and to work with our partners in deploying our contributions for the benefits of society.
Projects
Technology
Our research is multi-disciplinary and integrates technologies from artificial intelligence, operations research, and theoretical computer science. We make scientific advances in constraint and mathematical programming, local search and approximation algorithms, planning and diagnosis, simulation and forecasting, computational social choices, and stochastic optimization. We develop an optimisation platform that integrates these technologies and will transform the design and implementation of complex optimisation applications. We aim at developing optimisation systems that interoperate naturally with other components in comprehensive software solutions.
Contact
Pascal Van Hentenryck, Optimisation Research Group Leader (pvh@nicta.com.au)
PhD Scholarships Available
PhD and Masters Scholarships are available in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane to support national and international students for research in optimisation, as a priority research area. For more information read here
News
- Geoffrey Chu and Peter Stuckey win best paper award at CP2012 for their paper "Systematically Identifying and Exploiting Dominance Relations"
- Nina Narodytska receives an "Honourable Mention" from ACP for her PhD thesis at CP2012
- Geoffrey Chu awarded the 2012 ACP Doctoral Research Award for his thesis "Improving Combinatorial Optimization"
- Daniel Harabor wins the HDR student poster/presentation competition within the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science
- Patrik Haslum wins best paper award at ICAPS 2012 - E. Keyder, J. Hoffmann and P. Haslum - "Semi-Relaxed Plan Heuristics"