ASAP

We are a holder of the U.K. largest Operational Research Science and Innovation Grant, LANCS, which supports collaboration between four leading Operational Research groups in the U.K. (Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff, Southampton) (2008-2013, £13 million).

We are actively involved in NATCOR, a collaboration between ten universities, to develop and deliver taught courses in Operational Research to PhD students. We host the course entitled Heuristics & Approximation Algorithms.

Spin-off Companies

EventMAP Ltd	The Timetabling and Scheduling Specialists.
Aptia Solutions Ltd	Leading the way in automatic nesting software.
Staff Roster Solutions	Fast, intelligent, rostering automation.

Research Reports

2009 - 2011 | 2007 - 2008
2005 - 2006 | 2003 - 2004
2001 - 2002 | 1999 - 2000

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ASAP Group

The Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning (ASAP) research group carries out multi-disciplinary research into mathematical models and algorithms for a variety of real world optimisation problems. ASAP research work aims to set the following research directions on the international agenda:

Modelling the complexity and uncertainty inherent in complex, real-world problems across a wide range of application areas including airport optimization, cutting and packing, educational timetabling, healthcare, network routing, personnel scheduling, portfolio optimization, production scheduling/rescheduling, public transport optimization, space allocation, transportation logistics optimization and vehicle routing.
Developing intelligent systems that can automatically aid the design and implementation of more efficient, effective, reusable, easier-to-implement/deploy/use general computational search methods that are applicable to a range of real-world problems.
Developing rigorous mathematical theories for a more profound understanding of real world problems and effective design of intelligent decision support systems.

Our expertise in Computer Science and Operational Research allows us to bring a unique and novel perspective to traditional Operational Research problems, and also to bring new real-world problems to the Computer Science community.

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News

»	Dr. Rong Qu will be promoted to Associate Professor from Autumn 2013. Congratulations to Rong!
»	ASAP PhD students Wasakorn Laesanklang and Rodrigo Pinheiro presented a poster at the EMORG (East Midlands OR Group) Networking and Showcase Event which took place at the University of Loughborough on 1-May-2013.
»	The following PhD students recently passed their vivas with minor corrections: Stefan Ravizza (Enhanching Decision Systems for Airport Ground Movements, supervised by Jason Atkin, Andrew Parkes, and Edmund Burke), Ozgur Ulker (Office Space Allocation by using Mathematical Programming and Meta-heuristics, supervised by Dario Landa-Silva and Graham Kendall), and Monica Banerjea-Brodeur (Hyper-Heuristics in Healthcare, supervised by Ender Özcan, Graham Kendall and Edmund Burke). Congratulations to all!
»	Dr Qu, Dr Atkin and Dr Landa-Silva have been awarded a Royal Society International Exchange Scheme grant, of £11830, from April 2013 to March 2015, with Dr Bai at University of Nottingham Ningbo, China.
»	Duc-Cuong Dang, Daniel Karapetyan and Jose Carlos Ortiz Bayliss have recently joined ASAP as the LANCS initiative research fellows.
»	Professor Bob John joined ASAP February 1st from De Montfort University. He is the new Head of the Group and leads on the LANCS initiative. Bob's research area is type-2 Fuzzy Logic.
»	Dr. Rong Qu and her co-authors have been awarded a prize from the Elsevier press for authoring the top cited article 2007-2011 in the Europan Journal of Operational Research for the paper entitled "A graph-based hyper-heuristic for educational timetabling problems."