On Thursday 11th of August 2011, I have passed my PhD viva. The title of the thesis is "Empowerment Scheduling: A Multi-objective Optimization Approach Using Guided Local Search". (download a copy from here!)
My two External Examiners, Professor Xin Yao of Birmingham and Dr Ian Miguel of St Andrews, conducted a robust examination, overseen by Independent Chair, Professor John Gillies.
My research focuses on field workforce scheduling, which involves scheduling staff to multiple jobs in different geographical locations. A good example is British Telecommunication’s daily scheduling of its 10,000+ technicians to serve its customers. I have worked on a management concept called “employee empowerment”. The idea is to allow employees some say in scheduling decisions. The aim is to improve morale, which hopefully will be translated into enhanced efficiency – win-win for both employer and employees.
I have advanced the field of employee empowerment by providing a rigorous formulation of the problem. Before this work, researchers gave examples to empowerment but no formal frameworks have been proposed to characterise empowerment. I have provided a model that enables quantitative assessment of costs and effects.
To tackle the scheduling problem under empowerment, I have extended the well-known single-objective Guided Local Search to multi-objective optimization. The extension is nontrivial in its own right. Its performance is comparable to state-of-the-art multi-objective methods on two of the most used multiobjective benchmark problems: “travelling salesman” and “knapsack” problems.
