Researchers Compute the Way to Better Resource Exploitation (Diversity)

  • Published
  • By Maria Callier
  • Office of Scientific Research
ARLINGTON, Virginia --  Supporting the Air Force's commitment to make the best possible use of aircraft, fuel, and personnel, two Air Force Research Laboratory-sponsored researchers at Colorado State University are working to solve computationally difficult problems related to logistics planning, vehicle routing, resource allocation, circuit design, wireless frequency assignment, and scheduling. Prior to the research of Dr. Adele Howe and Dr. Darrell Whitley, no means existed for precisely computing the complex data related to resource exploitation problems, let alone for deriving an efficient algorithm capable of combining two different solutions and obtaining (with high probability) a third, best possible solution. In this capacity, the pair's ongoing efforts to seek out, establish, and refine powerful new tools and techniques to such ends are making important headway.

While Dr. Howe and Dr. Whitley share a passion for finding optimal solutions to taxing problems, each brings unique research interests and expertise to the collaborative equation. It is this diversity of collective experience--spanning areas such as genetic algorithms, neural networks, and scheduling applications--that fosters the lab-funded duo's capacity to leverage a wide range of cross-disciplinary techniques and results and, in turn, to approach computationally problematic scenarios in a novel, dynamic way.  Relying on tremendous amounts of data to verify their analytical results, the researchers are steadily progressing towards algorithms and similarly intricate mathematical schemes for achieving more efficient delivery and usage of AF resources--all without the logistical issues historically plaguing such processes. The challenges inherent to this work will continue as Drs. Howe and Whitley advance their multidisciplinary knowledge to encompass mathematics, statistics, operations research, and computer science on an ever-broadening scale.