The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, South African Chapter, invite you to the following event:

A talk on "Optimising practical problems - research and reality" by Dr Irene Moser

Computational intelligence research aims to provide general-purpose heuristics for complex optimisation problems. In reality, problems often have so many ramifications that no individual out-of-the box solver can be applied directly. In most cases, even making adjustments to these general-purpose techniques doesn't provide the best possible solutions. This talk is about two practical problems: A vehicle routing problem of an industry partner in Melbourne and a telescope scheduling problem in radio astronomy.

Laminex is a company that produces, imports and distributes laminates all over Australia. Their nightly challenge is to allocate laminate boards to customised trucks for next-day delivery all over Melbourne.

In astronomy, operating telescopes has been a semi-automated process with astronomers in (at least remote) attendance when their sources are being observed. The imminent construction of the Square Kilometre Array in South Africa and Australia asks for more automation - running three hundred telescopes, some of which have to be synchronised some of the time to observe the same source cannot be achieved manually. Telescope time is scarce, even in times of the SKA, and the challenge is to minimise the movements of a telescope, to achieve a shortest possible path through a sky full of observable targets which 'move' thanks to the Earth's complex orbit and rotation patterns.

Irene Moser completed her PhD and joined staff at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, in 2008. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, an Academic Director of Researcher Training and Course Coordinator of the Bachelor of Information and Communication Technologies. Her research interests include optimisation algorithms and heuristics, combinatorial, single-, multiobjective and constrained optimisation and approaches to practical problems.