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 [email protected].