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Digest No. 2001-02 Editor: Graham Kendall Please send material/submissions/comments for the WATT Digest to gxk@cs.nott.ac.uk. WATT Digests are emailed monthly to WATT members and also appear here. Contents
Welcome to the WATT Digest no. 2001-02.
1. WATT EMAIL Groups
A new e-mail list (watt-announcement@cs.nott.ac.uk) has been set up.
When anybody wants to make an announcement, please send an email to this
e-mail list. The e-mail will be forwarded to watt@cs.nott.ac.uk
automatically. 2. WATT Discussions (and dealing with inconsistent input)e
Over the past few weeks there has been a discussion in the WATT EMAIL
group about dealing with inconsistent input (this led to point 1,
above). If you missed this discussion, deleted the EMAIL's or would just like to
review what took place, we have placed the discussion on the web, see 3. WATT Workshop
The 4th WATT Workshop will be held at the EURO Conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on July 9-11, 2001. Details of the EURO Conference can be seen on the Web page: http://www.fbk.eur.nl/PRJ/EURO2001/content.html The submission for abstracts is now closed and the list of papers for this workshop has now been finalised. The list can also be seen at http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/events/rot-abstracts.html 4. EJOR Special Issue
A feature issue of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR)
on "Timetabling and Rostering" will be organised in conjunction with the
4th WATT Workshop. The deadline for submission of papers is 31st August
2001. A call for papers can be seen at 5. PATAT Selected Papers
The Selected papers from PATAT the 3rd International Conference for the
Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT'2000) will be
available soon (published by Springer). All those that attended the
conference will automatically be sent a copy. A full list of the papers is available at 6. Special Session at GECCO 2001
At GECCO 2001 (San Francisco, California, Holiday Inn Golden Gateway
Hotel, July 7-11) there are a series of "Birds of a Feather" Workshops.
These will be held on Saturday 7th July. One of these sessions (being organised by Peter Cowling and Graham Kendall) is entitled The format of the workshop is as follows 60 minutes : Plenary Speaker 15 minutes : Break 90 minutes : Presentation of Accepted Papers 15 minutes : Break 60 minutes : Panel Discussion Lunch (A buffet is being provided by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the Journal of Scheduling who are sponsoring this session) The list of speakers are Stephen F. Smith, Carnegie Mellon University Title: Is Scheduling a Solved Problem? Abstract: In recent years, scheduling research has had an increasing impact on practical problems, and a range of scheduling techniques have made their way into real-world application development. Constraint-based models now couple rich representational flexibility with highly scalable constraint management and search procedures. Similarly, mathematical programming tools are now capable of addressing problems of unprecedented scale, and meta-heuristics provide robust capabilities for schedule optimization. With these mounting successes and advances, it might be tempting to conclude that the chief technical hurdles underlying the scheduling problem have been overcome. However, such a conclusion (at best) presumes a rather narrow and specialized interpretation of scheduling, and (at worst) ignores much of the process and broader context of scheduling in most practical environments. In this talk, I argue against this conclusion and outline several remaining challenges for scheduling research. Semi-Plenary Speakers Martin Middendorf, University of Karlsruhe (Paper Title : Prospects for Dynamic Algorithm Control: Lessons from the Phase Structure of Ant Scheduling Algorithms) David Montana, BBN Corporation (Paper Title : Optimized Scheduling for the Masses) Claude Le Pape, ILOG (Draft Title : Constraint Programming + Local Search) The details of the original aims of the workshop are given below This workshop will allow those attending to discuss how scheduling research can be advanced in the next ten years. There are many techniques that have been reported in the literature that have produced excellent results when applied to scheduling problems. For example the use of meta-heuristic techniques (such as tabu search and simulated annealing) and evolutionary techniques (such as genetic and memetic algorithms). One emerging research area is to develop heuristics that operate at a higher level of generality than current technology can support. This will involve advances in heuristics, meta-heuristics and an emerging technique tentatively called a hyper-heuristic. Another interesting idea is to use an "adaptive" heuristic. This uses the idea that a scheduling problem can be solved using a heuristic but, for many reasons, this heuristic can lead to solutions which, although, better than previous efforts, can be even better if the heuristic is allowed to adapt as the search progresses. Through this workshop we hope to achieve three main aims: Allow the delegates to learn about some of the latest techniques and ideas that are being applied by leading researchers in the scheduling community. Invite other researchers to present their ideas as to how the field should develop in the next ten years. We are not looking for results of their current research, rather we are looking for new, blue sky ideas that can lead the research in the near future. Promote discussion on these ideas so that the scheduling community as a whole can benefit. Further details about these workshops can be found at http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2001/workshops/index.html The main GECCO page is at http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2001/ In addition a page for the scheduling workshop is being maintained at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxk/gecco2001/ 7. Timetabling Bibliography
The WATT pages contain a comprehensive bibliography up to 1995
(see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/bibliography.html) 8. ASAP Web Pages
The ASAP group at Nottingham has just completed an overhaul of their web
pages. Their new URL is 9. Problem Datasets
The WATT pages contain a small number of problem datasets 10. Timetabling Resources
The WATT page at 11. Items Wanted
In order to make WATT Digest as interesting as possible, I would like to include as much as I can in each issue. 12. Conferences of Interest to the Timetabling Community
Conferences of interest to timetablers can be found at the Conference
Diary web site for the Journal of Scheduling. The URL is |
