WATT Digests

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Digest No. 2002-03

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. 2002-03.
In this issue:

  1. WATT EMAIL Groups
  2. The 1st MISTA Conference
  3. Optimization Tutorials
  4. EJOR Special Issue
  5. GECCO Co-evolution track
  6. Timetabling Bibliography
  7. Problem Datasets
  8. Timetabling Resources
  9. Items Wanted
  10. Conferences of Interest to the Timetabling Community

Please send material/submissions/comments for the WATT Digest to gxk@cs.nott.ac.uk. WATT Digests are emailed three monthly to WATT members and also appear here.

1. WATT EMAIL Groups

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. The e-mail list watt@cs.nott.ac.uk will continue to be used as a discussion group. If anybody wants to contribute, please send email only to watt@cs.nott.ac.uk. Members who do not want to be involved in discussions should send an e-mail to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk). She will remove you from watt and add you to watt-announcement.

2. The 1st MISTA Conference

The 1st Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications (MISTA 2003), Tuesday 12th - Saturday 16th August 2003 hosted by The University of Nottingham, UK

This conference is the first in a series of conferences that serve as a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors on all aspects of multi-disciplinary scheduling. The conference will cover, but not be limited to, the following disciplines:

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering
  • Management
  • Manufacturing
  • Mathematics
  • Operational Research

    The aim is to bring together scheduling researchers and practitioners from all the disciplines that engage with scheduling research. The scope of the conference includes (but is not limited to):

  • Commercial Packages
  • Automated Reasoning
  • Timetabling
  • Constraint Logic Programming
  • Evolutionary Algorithms
  • Rostering
  • Knowledge-Based Systems
  • Heuristic Search
  • Real-Time Scheduling
  • Local Search
  • Shop-Floor Scheduling
  • Multi-processor Scheduling
  • Transport Scheduling
  • Process Scheduling
  • Complexity of Scheduling Problems
  • Rule-Based Expert Systems
  • Real World Scheduling
  • Sports Scheduling
  • Production Scheduling
  • Vehicle Routing
  • Machine Scheduling
  • Meta-heuristic Search
  • Batch Scheduling
  • Theoretical Scheduling
  • Applications
  • Delivery Scheduling

    Submitting to MISTA

    Authors are invited to submit papers in one of two categories:

    (a) Full Papers
    Authors should submit papers describing significant, original and unpublished work. Six (hard) copies of the paper should be submitted by January 24th 2003 to the address below. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. The authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to submit their papers to a second round of refereeing so that their papers can be considered for a post-conference volume to be published by Kluwer. This can either be the same paper as was submitted to the conference or an updated version in the light of comments received or new work undertaken. Papers should be formatted using Kluwer guidelines (link available soon).

    (b) Abstracts
    Authors can submit abstracts of up to 2 pages (formatted in the same way as for the full papers) to the address below. Six (hard) copies of the abstract should be submitted by January 24th 2003. Abstracts will be fully refereed. The abstracts will not go forward to the second round of refereeing for the post-conference volume. However, authors of accepted abstracts will have the opportunity to write a paper (based on their abstract) and submit it for the selected papers volume at a later date (shortly after the conference). People who wish to give a talk (e.g. practitioners, researchers with incomplete work) but do not want to write an academic paper can submit under this category. Accepted abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings.

    All submissions should include a cover page which clearly states:

  • The title of the paper
  • Names, affiliations and EMAIL addresses of the authors
  • Who is the corresponding author
  • Keywords (chosen from the above list, where possible)
  • The category of submission (full paper or abstract) Formating Your Paper

    You should format your papers (both full papers and abstracts) using the Kluwer single column conference proceedings style file (LaTeX) or template (Word).

    Submit To:

    Alison Payne (MISTA)
    Automated Scheduling and Planning Research Group
    School of Computer Science and Information Technology
    Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB. United Kingdom

    Important Dates:

    Deadline for Paper Submission : 24th January 2003, 5.00pm GMT
    Referees Comments Returned to Authors : 30th April 2003
    Camera Ready Deadline : 30th June 2003
    Early Registration Deadline : 30th June 2003
    Conference : Tuesday 12th - Saturday 16th August 2003

    See http://www.mistaconference.org/ for more details

    3. Optimization Tutorials

    On Tuesday 12th August 2003, in conjunction with the MISTA conference, we will be holding a tutorial day that will allow leading reseachers to present some of the modern optimization techniques that are being used today. We expect each tutorial to last about 2 hours. The tutorials are being aimed at a level applicable to students in the first year of their PhD and, as such, will be applicable to many people including those from industry, researchers who do not work in this field but who wish to find out more about these techniques, as well as those working in the field who, perhaps, need a refresher.

    We are still in the planning stages but we expect the day to be split into a number of streams but there will be a publication which covers all the tutorials that are given. This publication, we expect, to be available on the day.

    Places will be limited, so early booking is essential. If you would like to be placed on a mailing list, for when the we have more details about the event, please send an EMAIL to Graham Kendall (gxk@cs.nott.ac.uk), who will keep in touch with you. People who register early will be given the option to book first (before the main event is open to general registration).

    The confirmed speakers/authors so far are

  • Emile Aarts, Simulated Annealing
  • Dipankar Dasgupta : Artificial Immune Systems
  • Kalyanmoy Deb : Multi-objective Optimization
  • Eugene Freuder : Constraint Reasoning
  • Michel Gendreau : Tabu Search
  • David Goldberg : Genetic Algorithms
  • Pierre Hansen : Variable Neighborhood Search
  • John Koza/Ricardo Poli : Genetic Programming
  • Roman Slowinski : Rough Sets
  • Mike Trick : Integer Programming
  • Darrell Whitley : Complexity Theory and The No Free Lunch Theorem
  • Xin Yao : Machine Learning

    For more information, please see

    http://www.mistaconference.org/2003/tutorials.html, for the tutorials

    and

    http://www.mistaconference.org for the MISTA conference.

    4. EJOR Special Issue

    A feature issue of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) on "Timetabling and Rostering" was organised in conjunction with the 4th WATT Workshop. The deadline for submission has now passed and the submitted papers are undergoing the second round of refereeing.

    This issue will be published in 2003.

    5. GECCO Co-evolution track

    The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2003) will present the latest high-quality results in the growing field of genetic and evolutionary computation. GECCO-2003 continues the tradition of bringing together researchers from the entire spectrum of research in genetic and evolutionary computation, including genetic algorithms; classifier systems; genetic programming; evolvable hardware; DNA and molecular computing; evolutionary strategies; evolutionary programming; evolutionary scheduling and routing; artificial life, adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; as well as real-world applications of all of these areas.

    The Coevolution Track welcomes papers that include (but are not limited) to the following themes:

  • Artificial Life
  • Economics
  • Game Playing
  • Game Theory
  • Negotiation
  • Neural Networks
  • Optimization
  • Robotics
  • Time Series Prediction

    And, if you are using co-evolution for timetabling, we'd be very interested in seeing a paper.

    See http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxk/gecco/2003/ for more details

    6. Timetabling Bibliography

    The WATT pages contain a comprehensive bibliography up to 1995 (see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/bibliography.html)

    We are currently working on updating this resource to include ALL timetabling papers from the 1995 to date.

    We would like you to tell us about ANY timetabling papers you know from 1995. However please note that we are aware of all the papers published as part of the PATAT series of conferences.

    If you know of any timetabling papers please EMAIL them to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham, UK

    7. Problem Datasets

    The WATT pages contain a small number of problem datasets (see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/downloads.html)
    Set of 200 random examples for shift scheduling problem are availiable from

    http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/Rota/benchmarke.htm

    We would like to extend these datasets and we invite you to submit any datasets you have available so they can be listed on the WATT pages. We are particularly interested in datasets relating to course timetabling, examination timetabling, school timetabling and personnel timetabling.

    If you have any solution results we would also like to put these on WATT so that future researchers have something to compare against. Also, if you know of the references where the datasets are used, that would also be useful.

    Please EMAIL any information to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham, UK

    8. Timetabling Resources

    The WATT page at

    http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/resources.html

    contains a list of useful resources to timetabling researchers. Please take a few minutes to look at it and see if there is anything missing. If you would like a link added to the page, please EMAIL J Dario Landa SIlva (jds@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham

    9. 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.

    Please let me have anything that you think may be of interest to the timetabling community. Just to give you some ideas, how about sending me

    Titles and abstracts of good, recent papers you have come across
    Upcoming conferences
    Reviews of papers
    Details about software packages
    Recently published thesis Timetabling problems that you are working on (and maybe could use some help with)
    Questions that you would like to ask the community

    10. 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

    http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jpages/1094-6136/sites.html