Senior Research Fellow / Research Fellow / Research Positions (Optimisation and Automated Planning)

[Adrian Pearce]

SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW/RESEARCH FELLOW IN OPTIMISATION

RESEARCH FELLOW IN AUTOMATED PLANNING

RESEARCH SOFTWARE ENGINEER

3 Positions

The University of Melbourne is seeking outstanding Research Fellows and a Research Software Engineer to conduct leading edge research in optimisation and automated planning for mine scheduling. 

The positions will be located in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering within the Melbourne School of Engineering.

Salary $98,387-$113,446 AUD p.a. (Senior Research Fellow) or $80,318-$95,375 (Research Fellow) or $56,226-$76,299 (Research Software Engineer) plus 9% superannuation; Employment type: Full-time Fixed Term

The successful candidates will conduct leading-edge research and development in the area of optimisation and automated planning technology for mine scheduling.  The work is part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, "Making the Pilbara Blend: Agile Mine Scheduling through Contingent Planning". It will be conducted as part of a research team of 7-8 Researchers.  

The overarching responsibility of these positions will be the development of constraint solving techniques, which integrate with contingent planning techniques, for synthesising contingent plans for short term production scheduling of iron ore in multi-mine pit settings.

This project tackles a challenging problem faced in mine scheduling. An increased need for consistent quality has occurred at the same time as the complexity of modern day mining operations has increased, across multiple mine sites with variable ore grades and increasing infrastructure constraints. There is a pressing need for more agile mining techniques that maximise net present value (NPV) while accommodating the complexities and uncertainties inherent in modern day mining operations. 

The goal of this project is to bring together automated planning techniques with constraint programming to address this paradigm shift, tackling some of the most important fundamental research challenges in scheduling, such as plan synthesis, contingent planning and continuous planning. The project will develop agile scheduling techniques of great economic importance. Carefully planned scheduling has the potential to reduce the need for new infrastructure, minimising environmental impacts and maximising regeneration after mining. 

http://www.agentlab.unimelb.edu.au/mining.html

Intelligent Agent Laboratory (agentlab)

http://www.agentlab.unimelb.edu.au

Constraint Programming group of NICTA

http://www.nicta.com.au/research/projects/constraint_programming_platform

Application Procedure 

www.jobs.unimelb.edu.au

Senior Research Fellow/Research Fellow in Optimisation: 0027452 (closing 12 October 2011)

Research Software Engineer Position no.:  0027454 (closing 12 October 2011)

Research Fellow in Automated Planning: 0027453 (closing 2 October 2011)

Contact

For more information, please contact Adrian Pearce <adrianrp at unimelb.edu.au>

http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~adrian