
The eye as a window to the brain: tackling neurodegenerative disorders
This project explores whether retinal imaging can be used as a clinical screen for presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.
This research is comprised of two distinct, but related projects that will tackle complex industry personnel scheduling and logistics problems. KU Leuven is the home institution for one project and the University of Melbourne will host the second. The collaboration will ensure the successful completion of the research goals.
Some of the most critical decision-making challenges in industry take the form of mathematical optimisation problems, which seek to efficiently determine optimal decisions from a huge number of choices.
Often these problems have difficult and conflicting constraints that make even finding an acceptable solution challenging, let alone a provably optimal one. Complicating matters further, there are often several conflicting goals that must be considered to trade-off or balance economic, social and environmental outcomes.
Efficient algorithms for complex personnel scheduling problems are critical for ensuring organisations can provide a suitably qualified workforce at minimal cost while satisfying a wide variety of strict regulations meeting occupational health and safety requirements, as well as employee preferences. Likewise, efficient algorithms for complex logistics and transportation problems, such as optimal packing of container ships and delivery vehicles, are also critical to ensure supply chain efficiencies.
This research project will focus on two particular instances of these critical industrial optimisation problems:
Industry needs support from academic experts in optimisation to cast their industrial decision-making challenges onto a mathematical optimisation framework and to access state-of-the-art optimisation technologies in the form of mathematical models and algorithms to find optimal solutions. However, it is critically important that the algorithms developed for one industry partner’s problem are rigorously stress-tested to:
By rigorously stress-testing any algorithm, well beyond showing trust and reliability on the initial motivating industrial case study, there is an opportunity to develop innovative algorithms that generalise well to suit a broader range of industry partners and to achieve further impact
The University of Melbourne has strong expertise in tackling related scheduling problems but will benefit enormously from the specific expertise of the KU Leuven team developed over several decades in advancing models and algorithms for nurse rostering and cutting and packing problems.
The partnership will enable new collaborative links with Melbourne based hospitals to be forged to support this project, via the new ARC Training Centre in Optimisation Technologies, Integrated Methodologies and Applications (OPTIMA).
The KU Leuven team will also benefit from the application of the University of Melbourne’s Instance Space Analysis methodology to gain deep insights into the strengths and weaknesses of nurse rostering and cutting and packing algorithms, and ensure that the project’s newly developed algorithmic advances are rigorously “stress-tested” to understand their robustness and reliability for a wide range of hospital industrial settings in both Australia and Belgium.
The industrial optimisation problems tackled in the Melbourne-based project include:
The graduate researcher on this project is: Kelvin Liu
The University of Melbourne participants: Professor Kate Smith-Miles, Associate Professor Alysson Costa
KU Leuven: Dr Tony Wauters, Professor Greet Vanden Berghe
The industrial optimisation problems tackled in the KU Leuven-based project include:
The graduate researcher on this project is: Lennart Van Hirtum
KU Leuven: Dr Tony Wauters, Professor Greet Vanden Berghe
The University of Melbourne: Professor Kate Smith-Miles, Associate Professor Alysson Costa
This project explores whether retinal imaging can be used as a clinical screen for presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.
Two paired projects researching flexible materials in the design of biosensors and emerging 5G technologies.
This project will investigate how long-distance connections in the enteric nervous system (ENS) operate and study how transplanted stem cells can repair specific lesions in the mouse ENS.
Two paired projects researching soil-structure interaction frameworks for offshore foundations.