EvoSTIM2002
3rd European Workshop on Scheduling and Timetabling
3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Methods for AI Planning

Scheduling and Timetabling are amongst the most successful applications of evolutionary techniques. A related and promising field for the application of evolutionary methods is AI Planning.

EvoSTIM2002 is the third European event specifically dedicated to the applications of evolutionary computation to scheduling and timetabling, following on from the successful EvoSTIM2001 held in Italy in April 2001. EvoSTIM2002 is merged with the Second EvoPlan workshop, the first was held in Las Vegas in July 2000, to include evolutionary methods for AI Planning.

It gives European and non-European researchers in those fields an opportunity to present their latest research and discuss current developments and applications. It is also an opportunity to meet with other researchers and industrialists working in the same field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Case studies of applications of evolutionary techniques to real-life problems in scheduling, timetabling, and AI Planning
• Theoretical Developments, including benchmarking and other comparative studies
• Hybrid methods and Novel Heuristics
• Methods for fast and minimally disruptive rescheduling
• Dynamic Scheduling
• Distributed Scheduling
• Scheduling in industrial environments including transport and distribution
• Educational courses and exam timetabling
• Employee and workforce scheduling
• Organisation and resource scheduling
• Generation of plans and construction of planners
• Plan merging and decomposition of planning problems
• Handling of multiple goals in scheduling and planning
• Planning under ressource constraints

Draft: subject to change

See also:
Programme overview | EuroGP programme | EvoCOP programme | EvoIASP programme

Disruption Management for an Airline - Rescheduling of Aircraft
Love M., Sorensen K. R., Larsen J., Clausen J.

Abstract:
The Aircraft Recovery Problem (ARP) involves decisions concerning aircraft to flight assignments in situations where unforeseen events have disrupted the existing flight schedule, e.g. bad weather causing flight delays. The aircraft recovery problem aims to recover these flight schedules through a series of reassignments of aircraft to flights, delaying of flights and cancellations of flights. This article demonstrates an effective method to solve ARP. A heuristic is implemented, which is able to generate feasible revised flight schedules of a good quality in less than 10 seconds. This article is a product of the DESCARTES project, a project funded by the European Union between the Technical University of Denmark, British Airways and Carmen.

Session:
EvoSTIM Session 1: Methods of solving scheduling problems: April 3, 0900-1100

Ant Colony Optimization with the Relative Pheromone Evaluation Method
Merkle D., Middendorf M.

Abstract:
In this paper the relative pheromone evaluation method for Ant Colony Optimization is investigated. We compare this method to the standard pheromone method and the summation method. Moreover we propose a new variant of the relative pheromone evaluation method. Experiments performed for various instances of the single machine scheduling problems with earliness costs and multiple due dates show the potential of the relative pheromone evaluation method.

Session:
EvoSTIM Session 1: Methods of solving scheduling problems: April 3, 0900-1100

Improving Street Based Routing using Building Block Mutations
Urquhart N., Ross P., Paechter B., Chisholm K.

Abstract:
Street based routing (SBR) is a real-world inspired routing problem that builds routes within an urban area for mail deliveries. The authors have previously attempted to solve this problem using an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). In this paper the authors examine a heuristic mutation based on concept of building blocks. In this case a building block is defined as a group of genes, which when placed together within a genotype result in a useful feature within the phenotype. After evaluation on three test data sets our experiments conclude that the explicit use of heuristic building blocks makes a significant improvement to the SBR algorithms results.

Session:
EvoSTIM Session 1: Methods of solving scheduling problems: April 3, 0900-1100

EvoSTIM Chairs:

Emma Hart
emmah@dcs.napier.ac.uk
School of Computing
Napier University
219 Colinton Road
Edinburgh
EH14 1DJ
Scotland, UK

Martin Middendorf
middendorf@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Computer Science Group
Catholic University of Eichstätt
Ostenstr. 28
D-85072 Eichstätt
Germany

EvoSTIM program Committee :

Daniel Borrajo (Spain)
Marco Dorigo (Belgium)
Agoston E. Eiben (The Netherlands)
Emma Hart (UK)
John Levine (UK)
Martin Middendorf (Germany)
Daniel Merkle (Germany)
Ben Paechter (UK)
Peter Swann (UK)
Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi (Italy)
Peter Ross (UK)