In this position paper, we present ideas about creating a next generation framework towards an adaptive interface for data communication and visualisation systems. Our objective is to develop a system that accepts large data sets as inputs and provides user-centric, meaningful visual information...

When designing systems that are complex, dynamic and stochastic in nature, simulation is generally recognised as one of the best design support technologies, and a valuable aid in the strategic and tactical decision making process. A simulation model consists of a set of rules that define how a...

Our research has shown that schedules can be built mimicking a human scheduler by using a set of rules that involve domain knowledge. This chapter presents a Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA) for the nurse scheduling problem that chooses such suitable scheduling rules from a set for each...

Intelligent agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), one way of using intelligent agents, carries great potential for progressing our understanding of management practices and how they link to retail performance. We have developed...

Variance reduction techniques have been shown by others in the past to be a useful tool to reduce variance in Simulation studies. However, their application and success in the past has been mainly domain specific, with relatively little guidelines as to their general applicability, in particular...

Service industries, such as ports, are attentive to their standards, a smooth service flow and economic viability. Cost benefit analysis has proven itself as a useful tool to support this type of decision making; it has been used by businesses and governmental agencies for many years. In this...

During our earlier research, it was recognised that in order to be successful with an indirect genetic algorithm approach using a decoder, the decoder has to strike a balance between being an optimiser in its own right and finding feasible solutions. Previously this balance was achieved...

This paper presents a new type of genetic algorithm for the set covering problem. It differs from previous evolutionary approaches first because it is an indirect algorithm, i.e. the actual solutions are found by an external decoder function. The genetic algorithm itself provides this decoder...

There is considerable interest in the use of genetic algorithms to solve problems arising in the areas of scheduling and timetabling. However, the classical genetic algorithm paradigm is not well equipped to handle the conflict between objectives and constraints that typically occurs in such...

The aim of this research is twofold: Firstly, to model and solve a complex nurse scheduling problem with an integer programming formulation and evolutionary algorithms. Secondly, to detail a novel statistical method of comparing and hence building better scheduling algorithms by identifying...