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Adam Letchford supervises 3 postgraduate research students. If these students have produced research profiles, these are listed below:

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Professor Adam Letchford

Professor

Adam Letchford

Lancaster University

The Management School

LA1 4YX

Lancaster

Research overview

My research is in optimisation, i.e., finding the best solution to problems that have a huge (possibly infinite) number of solutions.  Optimisation is an inter-disciplinary subject, lying at the interface between Operational Research, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Engineering.

I concentrate mainly on methods for solving optimisation problems to proven optimality, rather than heuristic methods.  I have a particular interest in combinatorial optimisation problems, i.e., problems in which variables are restricted to take integer (whole-number) values.

PhD supervision

Most of my PhD students work on exact solution algorithms for NP-hard optimisation problems. Candidates need to be comfortable with mathematics. Experience in programming (in, e.g., C, Julia, MatLab or Python) is highly desirable, as is basic knowledge of linear algebra and graph theory.

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My Role

  • Professor of Analytics and Optimisation
  • LUMS Director of Research Enhancement

Current Teaching

MSCI534: Optimisation and Heuristics
STOR607: Deterministic Optimisation

External Roles

  • Fellow of the Operational Research Society (since 2009).
  • Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College (since 2006)
  • Member of the UKRI Future Leaders Peer Review College (since 2018)
  • Associate Editor of EURO Journal on Computational Optimization (since 2012)
  • Associate Editor of the Open Journal on Mathematical Optimization (since 2018)

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons) Linguistics & Psychology, Nottingham, 1989
  • MSc Operational Research, Lancaster, 1993
  • PhD Management Science, Lancaster, 1997

Other Interests and Hobbies

  • Romance languages (especially Italian and Spanish)
  • Playing music (mostly keyboards and bass guitar these days)
  • Philosophy and theology.

PhD Supervisions Completed

  • Congzheng (Joshua) Liu (2023) Extensions to newsvendor problems.
  • Thu Huong Dang (2022) Exact and heuristic approaches to arc routing problems.
  • M. Hasan Mansoor (2022) Combinatorial optimisation: relaxation and heuristics.
  • Georgia Souli (2020) New valid inequalities for knapsack and fixed-charge problems.
  • Zhaoyu (Joe) Zhong (2018) Optimal resource allocation in base stations for mobile wireless communications.
  • Robert Maidstone (2016) Efficient analysis of complex change-point problems.
  • Terry James (2015) Control of multi-class queueing systems with abandonments and adversarial customers.
  • Saeideh Nasiri (2014) Vehicle routing on real road networks.
  • Franklin Djeumou Fomeni (2014) The quadratic knapsack problem and related problems.
  • Sebastian J. Miller (2013) Simple plant location problem: heuristics, algorithms and reductions.
  • Konstantinos Kaparis (2008) Knapsack problems: inequalities, separation and heuristics.
  • Amar Oukil (2008) Exploiting sparsity in vehicle routing algorithms.
  • Daniel .J. Grainger (2008) Contributions to quadratic 0-1 programming.
  • Nicholas A. Pearson (2006) Minimum cuts, circuits and tours in planar graphs.

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