" I believe that constructing methods that join AI approaches with modern methods of statistical analysis and optimization will be one of the most important and fruitful areas of research in the next decade.""

J. Wesley Barnes

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OR/IE Graduate Advisor

wbarnes@mail.utexas.edu

Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professor in Engineering
Ph.D., University of Arkansas

Research Interests

Applied probability, heuristic methods of combinatorial optimization applied to planning and managerial problems, group theory, and metaheuristic search.

Recent Publications

“A Note on Characterizing the k-Opt Neighborhood via Group Theory,” (with B. Colletti and S. Dokov), Journal of Heuristics, Volume 5, pp. 47-51, 1999.

“Solving the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows using Tabu Search,” (With W. Nanry), Transportation Research Part B, Volume 34, No.2, pp.107-121, February 2000.

“Linearity in the Traveling Salesman Problem,” (With B. Colletti), Applied Mathematics Letters, Volume 13, No. 3, pp. 27-32, April 2000.

“Local Search Structure in the Symmetric Traveling Salesperson Problem Under a General Class of Rearrangement Neighborhoods,” (With B. Colletti), to appear Applied Mathematics Letters, Volume 14, pp 105-108, January 2001

“Using Group Theory and Transition Matrices to Study a Class of Metaheuristic Neighborhoods,” to appear in European Journal of Operational Research.

Research Funding

IBM
Texas Advanced Research Program
United States Air Force
ARPA-DOD
Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Recent Ph.D. Dissertations Supervised

"Solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem using Tabu Search," John B. Chambers

"A Tabu Search Approach to the General Vehicle Routing Problem," William B. Carlton

"Solving Precedence Constrained Vehicle Routing Problems Using Reactive Tabu Search,"William Nanry

"Using Group Theory to Characterize the Properties of Search Neighborhoods in Metaheuristic Search Procedures for Permutation and Partitioning Problems,"Bruce Colletti