Principle Investigators
Dr Jun Chen (QMUL)
Dr. Jun Chen is now a Lecturer in Engineering Science at QMUL. He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln and received his PhD degree from the University of Sheffield. He has published more than 40 scientific papers in areas of multi-objective optimisation, interpretable fuzzy systems, data-driven modelling, and intelligent transportation systems. Dr. Chen was among the first researchers to investigate the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption in airport ground movements (EP/H004424/2), and proposed the Active Routing (AR) concept. AR forms the cornerstone of a major ongoing EPSRC funded project (EP/N029496/1, EP/N029356/1 and EP/N029577/1, in total in excess of £1M) for which Dr. Chen is the lead PI (with BAEs, AirFrance-KLM, Rolls Royce, Manchester and Zurich Airports, and Simio plc.). He has also been the PI on four industrial projects with Anglian Water, and was the CI on three Innovate UK projects (with IMS and Tesco plc, and Siemens). From 2016, he serves as an associate member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.
Email: jun.chen (at) qmul.ac.uk
Website: www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/staff/jun.chen
Professor Mahdi Mahfouf (University of Sheffield)
Prof Mahdi Mahfouf holds a Personal Chair in Intelligent Systems Engineering in the Sheffield University Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. He has been active in research on modelling, control and optimisation for more than 29 years with more than 300 publications, half of these being journal papers. His research expertise lies in modelling uncertainties of large-scale nonlinear systems while reconciling accuracy and transparency and developing new algorithms for multi-criteria decision-making for convex/non-convex problems with an emphasis on economic and societal impact. This is invaluable to the proposed project in identifying unstable regions during aircraft ground maneuvering. He has received several paper prizes and research awards for building successful synergies between systems and control engineering principles and life sciences as well as industrial systems.
Email: m.mahfouf (at) sheffield.ac.uk
Website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/staff/mm
Dr John Woodward (QMUL)
John Woodward is currently a lecturer at the Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more specifically the automated design of algorithms including meta-heuristic and hyper-heuristic approaches. He currently jointly hosts a workshop at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) on the automated design of heuristics and algorithms.
Email: j.woodward (at) qmul.ac.uk
Website: www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/profiles/woodwardjohn.html
Co-Investigators
Prof David Allerton (University of Sheffield)
Prof Dave Allerton (CI) held the Chair in Avionics at Cranfield University and Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor and will contribute to TRANSIT with his extensive experience in real-time modelling airframe dynamics and aircraft engine performance.
Email: d.j.allerton (at) sheffield.ac.uk
Website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/staff/dja
Dr Mudassir Lone (Cranfield University)
Dr. Mudassir Lone is a Lecturer at Cranfield University. He received his BA and MEng degrees from Cambridge, and PhD from Cranfield. His research interests include aircraft stability and control, aeroelasticity, simulation and modelling, and aircraft flight testing. His experience in designing and conducting piloted trials is highly relevant for evaluating the methodologies proposed in TRANSIT. He is a professional member of AIAA and has served on the AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Technical Committee since 2010. Part of airline pilots for trial studies in this project will be sourced through his link with National Flying Laboratory Centre (NFLC), in particular through Dr. Jim Gautrey (Head of NFLC).
Email: m.m.lone (at) cranfield.ac.uk
Website: dr-mudassir-mm-lone
Dr Alexander Brownlee (University of Stirling)
Alexander Brownlee is a Lecturer at the University of Stirling. He received his PhD from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen 2009. He then worked as a software engineer in industry, and a research associate at Loughborough University before moving to Stirling. Dr Brownlee’s current research interests are in the area of “value-added optimisation”; techniques which yield optimal or near-optimal solutions but also reveal underlying information about the problem to better support decision making. His 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; and application areas including scheduling and simulation-based optimisation in civil engineering and transport.
Email: sbr (at) cs.stir.ac.uk
Website: www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~sbr/
Researcher-co-investigators
Dr Michal Weiszer (QMUL)
Michal Weiszer is a Research Assistant at the Queen Mary University of London. He worked on integration of airport ground movement with runway scheduling, multi-objective optimisation and real-time routing for taxiing aircraft (EP/H004424/2). Research methods include metaheuristics, multi-objective optimisation, decision support and other problem solving heuristics.
Email: m.weiszer (at) qmul.ac.uk
Website: www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/staff/m.weiszer
Researcher
Dr Olusayo Obajemu (University of Sheffield)
Olusayo Obajemu is currently a research associate with the department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He received his PhD degree from the University of Sheffield in 2016 where he worked on dynamic risk modelling and management of patients diagnosed with bladder cancer. He received a masters degree with distinction from the University of Sheffield and his masters thesis was in developing optimal models and schedules for the hot rolling of steel process. He has interests in machine learning, survival analysis and computational intelligence methods for decision support in aerospace, healthcare and materials science.
Email: o.obajemu (at) sheffield.ac.uk
Website: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/staff/rstu/obajemu/
Dr Hafiz Ul-Asad (Cranfield University)
Email: h.ul-asad (at) cranfield.ac.uk