Optimising the world's combinatorial choices

The Optimisation group is looking for multiple students to contribute to our world leading research. Our interests range from practical to theoretical. So whether you are interested in path finding for AI in games, solving a complex scheduling problem, designing new algorithms, or working on our specialised modelling language, we will have a project that is of interest to you!

Examples of projects that have been completed by summer students within the optimisation group include:

• MiniZinc testing infrastructure: The optimisation group designs, develops and maintains MiniZinc, a free and open-source constraint modeling language with thousands of users around the world. As part of a summer project, a student has designed a testing infrastructure that helps avoid the occurrence of bugs in the compiler.
• Woodside pipe layout scheduling: To create the most efficient chemical production plant, Woodside collaborates with Monash to explore optimisation techniques capable of optimising the design of these plants. Summer students have helped to improve and visualize the proposed solutions generated by these techniques.
• Pathfinding for games: In computer games we use AI algorithms to help characters navigate their virtual environments. Although simple in principle these problems are surprisingly tricky in practice: there can be hundreds of moving agents, the environments are often large and constantly changing, and most of the available compute resources (CPU, memory) are prioritised elsewhere -- such as toward graphics! Students working on this project have developed new and influential pathfinding techniques, including ones that are used in current AAA games.