Research – OPTIMA

Research Themes

OPTIMA's research is organised around three themes to address the needs of industry

Integrate

Many academic fields have contributed to optimisation methodologies and technologies, but the siloed nature of these efforts misses an opportunity. OPTIMA will integrate multidisciplinary optimisation methodologies, spearheaded by its world-leading investigators who span relevant disciplines, into a common toolkit. By tackling industry problems that require inspiration from multiple fields, OPTIMA will dissolve silos, making state-of-the-art methodologies more accessible to industry.

Advance

Industrial optimisation problems are typically “messier” and more complex than classical text-book examples for which optimisation techniques are developed. They are large-scale, with multiple competing objectives, multi-source uncertainties, and require decisions on multiple time-scales. OPTIMA will radically advance an industry-ready optimisation toolkit to support such complexities exemplified by our collection of industry partner challenge problems.

Uptake

Successful application of optimisation methods for industrial decision-making problems requires significant expertise, often beyond the reach of domain experts in a position to identify key industry needs. Current end-user tools for optimisation are limited in the feedback and guidance they provide to users, affecting trust and uptake. OPTIMA will transform optimisation technology to prioritise end-user ease, comprehension, and trust.

Our Projects

We have ten current projects with our industry partners

Optimisation of production by “selected turbine de-rating”

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Kate Smith-Miles

OPTIMA Research Fellow: Andrés Muñoz

PhD Student: Advertising

Learn more – Energy

Performance Optimisation of Call Centre Operations

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Peter Taylor and Professor Mark Fackrell

PhD Student: Hritika Gupta

Learn more – Communications

Large-scale optimisation of the numbers and locations of meters and monitoring devices

OPTIMA CIs: Assoc. Professor Guido Tack

Associates: Dr Mario Boley

PhD candidate: Rehan Mendis

Predict-and-Optimise through Time at Water Recycling Treatment Plants

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Peter Stuckey

Associates: Professor James Bailey

PhD candidate: Vincent Barbosa Vaz

Learn more – Infrastructure

Waterways long-term ambient WQ monitoring network

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Kate Smith-Miles

Associates: Professor Tim Fletcher

PhD Candidate: Vaughn Gray

Multi-objective optimisation of environmental outcomes in urban water systems

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Kate Smith-Miles

Associates: Professor Tim Fletcher, Dr Mathew Burns

PhD Candidate: Shiraz (Yi) Zhen

Learn more – Infrastructure

Optimising multi-item retail inventories using Artificial Intelligence

OPTIMA CIs: Professor Peter Stuckey

Associates: Dr John Betts

PhD Student: Zahra Namazian

Learn more – Retail

Aircraft design optimisation

New design prototypes of aeroplanes or electric batteries need to be studied to establish their performance characteristics under a multitude of use cases.

The challenge lies in choosing how to combine highly accurate but sparse information with abundant but sometimes unreliable information when modelling these design problems.

Learn more – Advanced manufacturing