Modelling and Optimisation of Aircraft Operations

Aviation is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. While the global pandemic has temporarily slowed the trend of growth in this industry, improving the efficiency of operations will still have a large impact on the environment and on global connectivity and enterprise. Dr Alexander Brownlee of the University of Stirling has been working with several industrial partners to improve the efficiency of aircraft routing, both in the air and on the ground (taxiing being particularly inefficient because aircraft are designed for flight). This involves application of machine learning to predict movement times accounting for a large number of external factors, and application of hybrid optimisation techniques combining exact routing and scheduling algorithms with randomised search (metaheuristics).

Dr Brownlee is also investigating the application of metaheuristics to optimisation of buildings for energy efficiency (including large scale optimisation of city-wide building stocks), and understanding what makes specific problems easy or hard for metaheuristics.

For more information about the project contact Dr Alexander Brownlee (sbr@cs.stir.ac.uk), Lecturer at School of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling.

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