This project will target major savings in the airline industry, with resulting benefits for others such as tourism. The efficient use of airline fuel, which will be directly addressed in the project, is very important for the environment. The algorithms developed can improve cost and quality of service for Australian transportation, manufacturing and other industries. The solutions developed within the project will be sold by the industrial partner, CTI, into major companies worldwide, and the technology will be used to develop further products. Finally the project will extend Australia's lead in constraint programming and expertise in optimisation. This creates a major opportunity for the Australian software industry.
Scheduling is critical to the success of any airline. A good schedule accurately meets customer demand and also exploits the resources of the airline efficiently, keeping down aircraft costs, personnel costs and fuel costs. Because airline scheduling is a large and complex problem, it cannot be solved to optimality by existing techniques. The aim of this project is to develop novel constraint solving and optimisation algorithms to build better airline schedules. The research introduces new ways of combining algorithms to solve complex problems involving different kinds of constraints and resources. The results apply across industry sectors, providing methods for building schedules that can significantly reduce resource costs.
All organisations plan, and all organisations suffer from the disruptions that occur when plans are put into practice. Few organisations manage to balance operational control with planning to as to maintain both efficiency and flexibility to deal with the unexpected. This project addresses this requirement for the transportation and logistics industries. The results discovered within the project will enable the industrial partner, CTI, to develop solutions for major companies worldwide. The technology will be used to build further optimisation products. Moreover the project will extend Australia's lead in constraint programming and expertise in optimisation. This creates a major opportunity for Australia's software industry.
The integration of tactical planning with operational control, addressed in this project, stands to bring huge benefits in productivity and customer service for trucking and airlines. This project explores enhanced operational control that incorporates not only concrete local information but also abstract global information. Tactical planning is adapted to this more intelligent operational behaviour. The approach depends on an integration of integer/linear programming for tactical optimisation, with constraint propagation and search operational control. The research goal is to integrate proactive and reactive scheduling for logistics and transportation.
This project will target major savings in airlines, trucking, rail and public transport, with resulting benefits for industrial logistics, travel and tourism. The results discovered within the project will enable the industrial partner, CTI, to develop solutions for major companies worldwide. The results can also be transferred to other industrial optimisation applications, such as mining, services and manufacturing. Finally the project will build on Australia's international prominence in data analysis and combinatorial optimisation, and capitalise on a major opportunity for the Australian software industry.
Industrial combinatorial problems are hard to state, hard to solve and hard to implement. This project applies data mining to help identify properties that make solutions robust, and it applies techniques for analysing and constructing optimisation algorithms to help generate efficient solutions that match the problem. Software that generates industrial benchmarks matching every kind of transportation crewing problem will drive our work, and encourage external research and industry to assess our results. A method for fast development of efficient solutions will represent both a technical and a social breakthrough, dramatically increasing the takeup of optimisation technology.