Subject to: Greet Vanden Berghe

Subject to

Greet Vanden Berghe holds a degree in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering (KU Leuven). She has always been interested in mathematical modelling which led her in the direction of pursuing combinatorial optimization research. Her PhD focused on scheduling and particularly on developing a general model for personnel rostering that would be applicable across a wide range of health care organizations. This subject provided the perfect opportunity to initiate cooperation with the University of Nottingham, where she spent a one-year research stay. In 2002, she obtained a PhD in Engineering Science (Ghent University). Greet Vanden Berghe was appointed as professor at KU Leuven, Department of Computer Science in October 2014. She is currently a member of research unit NUMA (Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics) and leads the CODeS research group located at KU Leuven-Gent. Operational research represents Greet Vanden Berghe's primary research interest. Within the broad domain of operational research she focuses on complex combinatorial optimization problems. Examples of such problems include personnel scheduling, vehicle routing and all sorts of logistic operations. Her fundamental research activities involve mathematical modelling and the development of intelligent search algorithms such as heuristics and decomposition methods. She has successfully developed many heuristic decomposition algorithms, smart ways of tightening objectives or relaxing constraints, heuristics based on lower and upper bounding, and general-purpose local search operators. These new algorithm components have helped achieve the best computational results in several international competitions and benchmarking challenges. When studying industrial combinatorial optimization problems, especially their complicated constraints and objectives, Greet Vanden Berghe's team experienced that theory almost always falls short when it comes to efectively solving real-world problems. These insights led to the development of completely new yet highly efficient models and algorithms for industrial problems. Interestingly, developments for industrial-scale optimization problems often result in new theoretical insights given the inevitable need to simplify reality when modelling. Indeed, these new modelling methodologies are competitive with and often better than state-of-the-art algorithms focused on theoretical problems. CODeS provides benchmarks for various international challenges involving problems such as pickup and delivery, vehicle routing and sports timetabling. Greet Vanden Berghe cooperates with industry within many applied research projects (supported by VLAIO or by the companies themselves). These projects target the internal use of optimization algorithms for real-world applications. Implementations of these algorithms are often deployed in more generally applicable decision support systems.