About the webinar

The problem instances have been provided by Air Liquide, a French multinational company which supplies industrial gases and services to various industries. The goal is to assign delivery and loading shifts to match the demand requirements subject to a set of soft and hard constraints in order to minimise the total distribution cost and maximise the total quantity delivered over the planning horizon. He will describe the state-of-the-art selection hyper-heuristic method for solving this scheduling and routing problem.

The session will cover: 

• Description of the Air Liquide inventory routing problem
• Introduce the concept of hyper-heuristics
• Present the state-of-the-art hyper-heuristic method in solving the problem
• Describe the advantages of using data science techniques for the heuristic selection

About Ahmed Kheiri: 

Dr Ahmed Kheiri is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Research at Lancaster University Management School, Department of Management Science. Dr Kheiri is the Co-leader of the Fundamentals Theme of the Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous systems (LIRA) Research Centre. His research interests lie at the intersection of operational research and computer science, investigating general cross domain optimisation methods to solve NP-hard optimisation problems. He has published more than 40 refereed papers in reputable journals and highly respected international conferences. 

During his career, he received several academic awards some are awarded from participation in international optimisation challenges. He has co-chaired several workshops, edited several books, given many invited talks, organised several international conferences, reviewed numerous academic journal articles and has served on many program/technical committees in major international conferences.