April 2007 to November 2007
Funded by a leading blue chip telecommunications company, this project at the School of MACS, Heriot-Watt University, is to investigate advanced metaheuristic optimisation methods to address a specific large-scale problem arising in parts of the telecommunications industry. Commercial issues necessitate that the research can only be vaguely described here. The sponsors have identified a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve the provision of certain services (or indeed to make certain services possible). Sometimes these issues can be interpreted as the task of solving a specific large scale optimisation problem. In previous collaborative work with, the PI has helped develop an optimisation method that, broadly speaking, enables mobile network infrastructure to be optimised with respect to a range of quality of service factors. However, to apply this research with maximal benefit, a new problem needs to be solved, which requires further research in large-scale optimisation, specifically in connection with adaptive penalty functions, constraint handling, and multi-objective optimisation. A preliminary investigation identified that a certain family of techniques could solve this problem, and this research is to investigate and develop those techniques further.
Project Team:
Principal Investigator (and part time researcher on this project): David Corne; Research Associate: TBA