Global Utilities

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Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering

Clementsen, Davur S.
Course: PhD
Research Title/Topic: Travelling Purchaser Problem with Partial Knowledge and Changing Parameters
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Seng Loke and Dr Zhen He
Description:
The research concerns a computationally expensive optimization problem known as the Travelling Purchaser Problem. Simply put it can be described as the problem of acquiring a number of items on a shopping list at the lowest total cost considering both purchase cost and the required travelling cost. Besides the obvious application as a tool to help shoppers the Travelling Purchaser Problem is also a useful abstraction of problems in areas such as routing and scheduling. Current work on the Travelling Purchaser Problem assumes full knowledge of cost of travel between shops, item availability and item cost. In practise, this is not easily implemented. Therefore this research will be investigating the Travelling Purchaser Problem on a domain where only partial knowledge is available. Secondly the long processing time, often required to find an optimal solution, introduces the issue of problem parameters adjusting while processing. This could be an item selling out, going on sale or items being added to the list. Dealing with such modifications without restarting the computation entirely needs to be investigated.
Content Approved by: Head of School
Page maintained by: Applications Programmer
Last Updated: 14 October, 2009

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