How General is Your Algorithm?
One of the research issues that has been tackled for at least 50 years is attempting to develop algorithms that are better than other algorithms on a certain type of problem (for example, vehicle routing, traveling salesman problem etc.). And it is easy to judge if you have a better algorithm. You run it on […]
Football Fixture Scheduling: Are all clashes equal?
In a paper published in JORS: Kendall G. (2008) Scheduling English Football Fixtures Over Holiday Periods. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 59(6), pages 743-755 (doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602382) I investigated if it was possible to produce superior fixtures for the Christmas/New Year Period with respect to minimising the distance that is traveled by supporters on two particular […]
Examination Timetabling: Carter Dataset
In a previous blog I mentioned two examination timetabling datasets. The Carter dataset and the ITC (International Timetabling Competition) dataset. I thought it would be worthwhile describing these datasets for anybody that is interested, as they are the datasets that everybody in the scientific community uses in order to test any proposed algorithms.In this blog, […]
Non-symmetric Vehicle Routing
For a while I have been thinking about Vehicle Routing (you can see a previous blog here). Most of the problems I come across (though I am happy to be corrected) assume that distances are symmetric. That is, the distance between location i and location j is the same as the distance between location j […]
Hyper-heuristics: An Ongoing Research Idea
For the past few months a colleague and I have been putting a day aside every six weeks or so to work on a joint project. This is the first time I have programmed with somebody but its working out well. We each take responsibility for a C++ class and then plug everything together at […]
Football Fixture Scheduling: Another Project
Over the past nine months or so I have been working with a local company who provides an online service to schedule various types of sporting events. They contacted me after seeing my contact details on wikipedia (which was a nice way to be contacted). The company need to produce double round robin tournaments but […]
MISTA Conference: Venue for 2011 announced
MISTA 2009 finished in the time honoured fashion of a social day. On this occasion it was a cruise down the River Liffey, followed by a two hour guided tour around Dublin, ending up at Trinity College Dublin (which, strangley enough is where MISTA 2009 started as it was the first place we visited when […]
MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (David Hine)
The last plenary at MISTA was given by David Hine. He is a sergeant with the Public Order Unit at New Scotland Yard (in particular Football Intelligence). His talk gave the delegates an overview of the issues and problems he faces in organising resources to police football matches in London, the wider UK and also […]
MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (Edmund Burke)
The MISTA conference had two plenary talks today (Raymond Kwan – see earlier blog) and Edmund Burke. Edmund’s talk was entitled A Comparison of Two Methods for Reducing Take-Off Delay at London Heathrow Airport and focussed on his work (and Jason Atkin and John Greenwood) that investigates scheduling aircraft at Heathrow in preparation for take […]
MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (Raymond Kwan)
Our second plenary talk took place this morning. Raymond Kwan, from The University of Leeds, gave a talk entitled “Case Studies of Successful Train Crew Scheduling.”The talk was based on his spin out company (TrainTRACS) that markets software to UK train operators across the UK and is used to schedule train crews. As well as […]