Research project: Scheduling
Scheduling research at Southampton is coordinated by Professor Chris Potts and is mainly focused on problems arising in production and transport industries.
Scheduling research at Southampton is coordinated by Professor Chris Potts and is mainly focused on problems arising in production and transport industries.
In production, the aim is to schedule machines so that goods are produced at low cost and so that customer due dates are satisfied. In road transport, scheduling typically involves the routing of vehicles through pick-up and drop-off points, often with constraints on the time that the vehicles should arrive at these points.
Research usually involves modelling real-life problems and developing solution methods. Solution methods can be exact, although to deal with the complexities of problems of a practical nature approximation solution methods are often used. Local search methods provide a rich class of approximate solution methods, and include simulated annealing, tabu search, variable neighbourhood search and genetic algorithms.