[DMANET] Three pre-doctoral positions in OR/MS @ University of Antwerp

Vacancy for three PhD students - application deadline May 2014

The ANT/OR Operations Research group of the Department of Engineering
Management, University of Antwerp, Belgium has vacancies for

three pre-doctoral positions (PhD students) in Operations
Research/Management Science

The selected candidates will be hired for a four-year period subject
to yearly evaluation. They will receive a tax-free PhD scholarship of
approximately 1800 euro per month. They will enroll in the doctoral
program of the Faculty of Applied Economics and work towards obtaining
a PhD during the fourth year. Some light teaching/support activities
may also be demanded of the candidate.

The selected candidates will perform research on a specific topic
within the broad domain of Operations Research/Management Science. Two
research topics have already been defined:

- City bike repositioning. Bicycle sharing systems are popping up all
over the world, but bike stations tend to empty out or fill up. The
PhD student selected for this topic will analyze the problem of
repositioning bicycles in a bike sharing system. This research will
entail statistical analysis of demand/supply patterns of bikes at the
different stations, as well as the development of (exact and
metaheuristic) algorithms to optimize the activities of the
repositioning vehicles.

- Smart plant optimization in the petrochemical industry. The PhD
student selected for this topic will develop models and methods for
planning the semi-continuous production of a petrochemical companhy,
also looking at tactical decisions like plant layout and
configuration. Antwerp is the second largest petrochemical cluster in
the world and this research project will be executed in collaboration
with partners from the chemical industry.

Other potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

- Applications of metaheuristics in various fields (especially
transportation and logistics, humanitarian aid, public transportation,
...). The topic will be defined in collaboration with the PhD
supervisor.

- Metaheuristic theory: A large number of different metaheuristics
exist: tabu search, evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, ant
colony optimization, ... To solve a large number of theoretical and
real-life optimization problems, metaheuristics typically outperform
all other methods. However, very little knowledge is available on why
and how these methods work and an overarching theory of metaheuristic
development is still lacking? The aim of this topic is to work towards
a better theoretical understanding of metaheuristic optimization.

The ideal candidate has a good background in operations research
(www.scienceofbetter.org), statistics, and mathematics, including good
programming skills and a good command of the English language. Typical
activities the candidate will perform are the development of heuristic
optimization algorithms, implementation in a programming environment,
running computational experiments, and analyzing the results
statistically, as well as writing research papers and giving
conference presentations.

The candidates will join the ANT/OR research group (antor.ua.ac.be), a
young and dynamic team of researchers mainly working on applications
of operations research. They will work under the direct supervision of
Prof. Kenneth Sörensen (www.uantwerpen.be/kenneth-sorensen) and/or
prof. Trijntje Cornelissens (www.uantwerpen.be/trijntje-cornelissens).
They will work at the city campus of the University of Antwerp.
Antwerp is a lively city in the center of Europe, well-known for its
history, its fashion and diamond industry, and its generally excellent
quality of life.

To apply, go to http://antor.ua.ac.be/apply and submit your complete
file (instructions can be found on the website). Application deadline
is 1 May 2014 but early application is encouraged. Final-year master
students who have not yet received their degree are also encouraged to
apply when interested. The selected PhD students will be expected to
start working before 1 October 2014.

For more information, contact kenneth.sorensen@uantwerpen.be.

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