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

An Agent Based Technique for Improving Multi-Stakeholder Optimisation Problems

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., & Powers, S. T. (2019)
An Agent Based Technique for Improving Multi-Stakeholder Optimisation Problems. In PAAMS 2019: Advances in Practical Applications of Survivable Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection: vol 1 – Main track and Demos proceedings, 285-289. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24209-1_32
We present an agent based framework for improving multi-stakeholder optimisation problems, which we define as optimisation problems where the solution is utilised by a number ...

Simulating the actions of commuters using a multi-agent system

Journal Article
Urquhart, N., Powers, S., Wall, Z., Fonzone, A., Ge, J., & Polhill, G. (2019)
Simulating the actions of commuters using a multi-agent system. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 22(2), https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.4007
The activity of commuting to and from a place of work affects not only those travelling but also wider society through their contribution to congestion and pollution. It is de...

Quantifying the effects of increasing user choice in MAP-Elites applied to a Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem.

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., Hart, E., & Hutcheson, W. (2019)
Quantifying the effects of increasing user choice in MAP-Elites applied to a Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem. In EvoApplications 2019: Applications of Evolutionary Computation, 49-63. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16692-2_4
Quality-diversity algorithms such as MAP-Elites provide a means of supporting the users when finding and choosing solutions to a problem by returning a set of solutions which ...

Athos - A Model Driven Approach to Describe and Solve Optimisation Problems

Conference Proceeding
Hoffman, B., Chalmers, K., Urquhart, N., & Guckert, M. (2019)
Athos - A Model Driven Approach to Describe and Solve Optimisation Problems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3300111.3300114
Implementing solutions for optimisation problems with general purpose high-level programming languages is a time consuming task that can only be carried out by professional so...

Trusting Intelligent Machines: Deepening Trust Within Socio-Technical Systems

Journal Article
Andras, P., Esterle, L., Guckert, M., Anh Han, T., Lewis, P. R., Milanovic, K., …Wells, S. (2018)
Trusting Intelligent Machines: Deepening Trust Within Socio-Technical Systems. IEEE technology & society magazine, 37(4), 76-83. https://doi.org/10.1109/MTS.2018.2876107
Intelligent machines have reached capabilities that go beyond a level that a human being can fully comprehend without sufficiently detailed understanding of the underlying mec...

SICSA Demofest 2018 - Supporting user choice in optimisation.

Exhibition / Performance
Urquhart, N., Hutcheson, W., & Hoehl, S. SICSA Demofest 2018 - Supporting user choice in optimisation. 6 November 2018 - 6 November 2018. (Unpublished)

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Urquhart, N., Hutcheson, W., & Hoehl, S. SICSA Demofest 2018 - Supporting user choice in optimisation. 6 November 2018 - 6 November 2018. (Unpublished
Many complex optimisation problems can have multiple solutions, techniques such as MAP –Elites will produce a large number of solutions from which the user should make the fi...

Optimisation and Illumination of a Real-world Workforce Scheduling and Routing Application via Map-Elites

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., & Hart, E. (2018)
Optimisation and Illumination of a Real-world Workforce Scheduling and Routing Application via Map-Elites. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XV 15th International Conference, Coimbra, Portugal, September 8–12, 2018, Proceedings, Part Ihttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99253-2_39
Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems (WSRP) are very common in many practical domains, and usually have a number of objectives. Illumination algorithms such as Map-Elites...

A new rich vehicle routing problem model and benchmark resource

Conference Proceeding
Sim, K., Hart, E., Urquhart, N. B., & Pigden, T. (2018)
A new rich vehicle routing problem model and benchmark resource. In Advances in Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control in Engineering and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89988-6_30
We describe a new rich VRP model that captures many real-world constraints, following a recently proposed taxonomy that addresses both scenario and problem physical characteri...

Creating optimised employee travel plans

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., & Hart, E. (2019)
Creating optimised employee travel plans. In Advances in Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control in Engineering and Sciences. , (489-502). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89988-6_29
The routing of employees who provide services such as home health or social care is a complex problem. When sending an employee between two addresses , there may exist more th...

Towards reducing complexity of multi-agent simulations by applying model-driven techniques

Conference Proceeding
Hoffman, B., Chalmers, K., Urquhart, N., Farrenkopf, T., & Guckert, M. (2018)
Towards reducing complexity of multi-agent simulations by applying model-driven techniques. In Y. Demazeau, B. An, J. Bajo, & A. Fernández-Caballero (Eds.), Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complexity: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2018, 187-199. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94580-4_15
Creating multi-agent simulations is a challenging task often requiring programming skills at the professional software developer level. Model driven methods of software develo...

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