Alexander Brownlee

I'm a Lecturer within Computing Science and Mathematics at Stirling, and a member of the Data Science and Intelligent Systems and Computational Mathematics and Optimisation research groups. I am also a Visiting Fellow in Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University. I'm interested in explainable or value-added optimisation: techniques that yield optimal or near-optimal solutions but also reveal underlying information about the problem to help people make informed decisions. My main focus is in metaheuristics, including evolutionary algorithms and estimation of distribution algorithms; related issues such as fitness modelling (and mining such models), handling constraints and multiple objectives, and decision support. I am also interested in the underlying theory of what makes particular algorithms suited to particular problems. I have applied this work to application areas including scheduling and simulation-based optimisation in civil engineering and transport, software engineering, healthcare, and art.