The development and analysis of metaheuristic methods and their implementation to practical problems including sports timetabling and employee scheduling.
The analysis of tactics in sports, especially football and cricket.
Born in 1953 in Warwickshire. Worked for British Rail in York and London before serendipitously landing in Lancaster. Married with three children and two grandchildren so far. Lives just outside Lancaster, sings, plays cricket, tennis, indoor hockey and golf, walks, travels, listens to music, goes to the theatre. Actively supports Lancaster City Football Club in a vaguely patriotic though largely masochistic fashion.
Strategic Management Simulation; Introduction to Project and Event Management; supervision of placements, projects and dissertations. Recently also Heuristics, Optimisation, Introduction to OR, Introductory Statistics, Introduction to Business Analytics, Project Management Skills, OR and its Context.
BA, MSc Oxford (Mathematics)
PhD Lancaster (Operational Research)
Cricket and rugby fixture schedule analysis and timetabling
Cricket umpire scheduling for both professional and amateur leagues
Analysis of parameters for Simulated Annealing
Member of OR Society's Education and Research Committee
Metaheuristic techniques for the solution of complex combinatorial problems with more than one objective
Member of OR Society's Education and Research Committee
Ear-marked EPSRC PhD grant 1992-5
Recently the Director of the MSc in Project Management. Betwen 2003 and 2009 I was the Management School's Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies.
The thesis includes nine published papers, all on the subject of Neighbourhood Search metaheuristic techniques for solving combinatorial optimization problems with more than one type of objective. The first five are very application-oriented. The first of these five concerns a real type of problem, but does not report a specific implementation of the application. However, the next four papers go further and describe highly complex problems which have arisen in practice and the approaches and techniques used by the author to solve them. The last four papers complement these by exploring the development of the techniques, reporting the results of experiments into their application and extension. Thus the research demonstrates a progress from the particular to the general. Specific approaches were found to work well in particular situations; this provided a spur to discover whether these techniques could be developed and used successfully in other circumstances.
One of the most useful results of this research is the demonstration of how metaheuristic approaches can be used in practice to solve large complex real problems. Careful definition of seemingly ill-defined notions and the intelligent development and application of techniques have combined to produce methods which give highly satisfactory solutions to such problems. The main theoretical result from this research is the development of an approach called "Subcost-Guided Search", which includes "Subcost-Guided Simulated Annealing". Papers 2, 4 and 5 show its application for real problems, while papers 8 and 9 discuss experimental results and different ways of applying the idea.
Other useful contributions are also presented. For example, the related issues of problem formulation, neighbourhood definition and the nature of search space are highlighted in several of the papers. The proposed measurement and effect of problem complexity are also discussed.
The papers were all strictly refereed and published in high-quality journals or books.
Timetabling of the county cricket fixtures and allocation of umpires to all the top cricket matches in England and Wales every year since 1990 for the England and Wales Cricket Board.
Similar types of project, though on a slightly smaller scale, for New Zealand Cricket, Basketball New Zealand, New Zealand Rugby, the Minor Counties Cricket Association, the Devon Cricket League, the Home Counties Cricket League and the ICC Cricket World Cups in 1999 and 2007.
Design, creation and implementation of a computer system to timetable the lessons for Ripley St. Thomas School in Lancaster, again using innovative and up-to-date techniques of my own devising. This was used in practice for five years (1992-1996).
External examiner for twelve PhD students at Strathclyde University (2), University of Wales (Swansea), Birmingham University, Swinburne University of Technology, Waikato University, Nottingham University (2), Leeds University, Napier University, Bradford University and Cardiff University. Internal examiner for six PhD students in the Department of Management Science.
