Research Assessment in the UK
Like it or not the academic world is slowly (or perhaps not that slowly) moving towards being judged by how highly cited our work is. Actually, it is not a bad measure as if you publish something and nobody ever reads it, or refers to it (i.e. cites it in their own work), then was […]
Vehicle Routing: Case Study at EURO
I am at the EURO 2009 conference at the moment and have just been to a very interesting presentation (the picture was taken during the presentation). A few days ago I wrote a blog on various formulations of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) (see original post). This blog talked about the many variants of the […]
General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS)
Yesterday (5th July 2009) I attended a workshop run by GAMS (run as part of the EURO 2009 conference – see previous post). They provide a piece of software called GAMS (General Algebraic Modeling System: http://www.gams.com) which enables an easy way to develop mathematical models and then solve them by calling various solvers (such as […]
EURO 2009 Conference
I am at the EURO conference at the moment (see http://www.euro-2009.de) (the picture was taken during the opening ceremony). This is an annual conference for the European Operational Research Societies. This year it has attracted around 2000 delegates, which was a lot more than we had expected (I know as I am on the main […]
Cloud Computing
I have spent the day (30th June 2009) in London, attending a Microsoft Cloud Computing forum. The picture shows Microsoft’s Offices in Victoria. I was not really sure what Cloud Computing was before I went and I am still not totally sure now! I am also not sure of the real differences between Grid Computing […]
Google Scholar
I guess that most people are aware of Google. It is so well known that it is almost a verb now; if not so already – a bit like hoover.Most people will also be aware of other Google tools such as maps and blogs (indeed this is a blog that I set up through Google). […]
Model Formulation: Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)
If you are aware of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), you will know that it is quite an easy problem to state, although it has many variations which make it one of the more complex standard models. Here is a fairly standard description (model): You are given:– a set of customers (each one having a […]
Horse Race Prediction with Neural Networks
I was sorting through some old papers recently and I came across my undergraduate final year dissertation. I recall that it started as a project about genetic algorithms but quickly turned into a project that used neural networks to predict the outcome of horse races. I trained a back propagation network and used the final […]
MISTA Conference
Since 2003 I have chaired the Multidiscplinary Conference on Scheduling: Theory and Applications (MISTA). The first conference (2003) was held in Nottingham, the second (2005) was held in New York and the third conference (2007) took place in Paris. The 2009 conference (the 4th in the series) is due to take place in Dublin (10th […]
Scheduling Football Fixtures
The fixtures for the English football season have just been published (Wednesday 17th June 2009), ready for the kick off in August. Paul Fletcher’s (another blogger) excellent article describes some of the complexities that have to be considered when generating the fixtures. My research has focused on scheduling the fixtures over the Christmas/New Year period. […]