Neil Urquhart
Neil Urquhart

Dr Neil Urquhart

Lecturer

Biography

Dr Neil Urquhart is a lecturer within the School of Computing. After studying computing as an undergraduate he worked as a software developer and systems administrator in the printing and packaging sector.

He returned to academia and completed a PhD in 2002 which examined the use of nature inspired techniques and software agents to construct and optimise delivery networks.

Since 2002 he has worked as a lecturer within the School Of Computing at Edinburgh Napier where he is currently the programme leader for Computing Science.

Research Areas

News

Events

Esteem

Conference Organising Activity

  • Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2010
  • Neil Urquhart to chair Meta-Heuristics stream at YOR19
  • Co-Chair EvoStim 2011
  • Meta-heuristics stream chair for YOR17.
  • Two CAVES members have papers accepted at EvoSTAR Conference to be held in Copenhagen in April
  • Dr Neil Urquhart and Kevin Sim are to chair the second edition of EvoINDUSTRY at EvoStar 2014 in Baeza Spain.
  • Edinburgh Napier Staff Conference 2013 (member of conference planning group)

 

Editorial Activity

  • New book on automated scheduling and planning, being published by Springer due for release late 2013.

 

Media Activity

  • Optimisation@IIDI featured on LogisticsManager.Com

 

Date


79 results

Modelling Individual Preferences to Study and Predict Effects of Traffic Policies

Conference Proceeding
Nguyen, J., Powers, S., Urquhart, N., Farrenkopf, T., & Guckert, M. (2021)
Modelling Individual Preferences to Study and Predict Effects of Traffic Policies. In Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Social Good. The PAAMS Collection 19th International Conference, PAAMS 2021, Salamanca, Spain, October 6–8, 2021, Proceedings (163-175). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85739-4_14
Traffic can be viewed as a complex adaptive system in which systemic patterns arise as emergent phenomena. Global behaviour is a result of behavioural patterns of a large set ...

Optimisation Algorithms for Parallel Machine Scheduling Problems with Setup Times

Conference Proceeding
Kittel, F., Enekel, J., Guckert, M., Holznigenkemper, J., & Urquhart, N. (2021)
Optimisation Algorithms for Parallel Machine Scheduling Problems with Setup Times. In GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (131-132). https://doi.org/10.1145/3449726.3459487
Parallel machine scheduling is a problem of high practical relevance for the manufacturing industry. In this paper, we address a variant in which an unweighted combination of ...

A Conceptual Framework for Establishing Trust in Real World Intelligent Systems

Journal Article
Guckert, M., Gumpfer, N., Hannig, J., Keller, T., & Urquhart, N. (2021)
A Conceptual Framework for Establishing Trust in Real World Intelligent Systems. Cognitive Systems Research, 68, 143-155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2021.04.001
Intelligent information systems that contain emergent elements often encounter trust problems because results do not get sufficiently explained and the procedure itself can no...

Automated, Explainable Rule Extraction from MAP-Elites archives

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., Höhl, S., & Hart, E. (2021)
Automated, Explainable Rule Extraction from MAP-Elites archives. In Applications of Evolutionary Computation: 24th International Conference, EvoApplications 2021. , (258-272). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72699-7_17
Quality-diversity(QD) algorithms that return a large archive of elite solutions to a problem provide insights into how high-performing solutions are distributed throughout a f...

Real Time Optimisation of Traffic Signals to Prioritise Public Transport

Conference Proceeding
Plötz, P., Wittpohl, M., & Urquhart, N. (2021)
Real Time Optimisation of Traffic Signals to Prioritise Public Transport. In Applications of Evolutionary Computation: 24th International Conference, EvoApplications 2021 (162-177). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72699-7_11
This paper examines the optimisation of traffic signals to prioritise public transportation (busses) in real time. A novel representation for the traffic signal prioritisation...

Athos: An Extensible DSL for Model Driven Traffic and Transport Simulation

Conference Proceeding
Hoffmann, B., Urquhart, N., Chalmers, K., & Guckert, M. (2020)
Athos: An Extensible DSL for Model Driven Traffic and Transport Simulation
Multi-agent systems may be considered appropriate tools for simulating complex systems such as those based around traffic and transportation networks. Modelling traffic partic...

Using MAP-Elites to support policy making around Workforce Scheduling and Routing

Journal Article
Urquhart, N., Hart, E., & Hutcheson, W. (2020)
Using MAP-Elites to support policy making around Workforce Scheduling and Routing. Automatisierungstechnik, 68(2), https://doi.org/10.1515/auto-2019-0107
English abstract: Algorithms such as MAP-Elites provide a means of allowing users to explore a solution space by returning an archive of high-performing solutions. Such an arc...

An Illumination Algorithm Approach to Solving the Micro-Depot Routing Problem

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., Hoehl, S., & Hart, E. (2019)
An Illumination Algorithm Approach to Solving the Micro-Depot Routing Problem. In GECCO '19: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion. , (1347-1355). https://doi.org/10.1145/3321707.3321767
An increasing emphasis on reducing pollution and congestion in city centres combined with an increase in online shopping is changing the ways in which logistics companies addr...

Increasing Trust in Meta-Heuristics by Using MAP-Elites

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., Guckert, M., & Powers, S. (2019)
Increasing Trust in Meta-Heuristics by Using MAP-Elites. In GECCO '19 Companion, (1345-1348). https://doi.org/10.1145/3319619.3326816
Intelligent AI systems using approaches containing emergent elements often encounter acceptance problems. Results do not get sufficiently explained and the procedure itself ca...

Simulating Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems with Athos

Conference Proceeding
Hoffman, B., Guckert, M., Chalmers, K., & Urquhart, N. (2019)
Simulating Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems with Athos. In Proceedings of the 33rd International ECMS Conference on Modelling and Simulation ECMS 2019, (296-302). https://doi.org/10.7148/2019-0296
Complex routing problems, such as vehicle routing problems with additional constraints, are both hard to solve and hard to express in a form that is accessible to the human ex...

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