SOBRAPO paper approved!

The paper submited to SOBRAPO magazine was selected for publications. A few changes are needed. Changes are being done. In a few weeks, the final version will be delivered for printing.

One step to be a doctor

I was approved in my thesis defense and now I have some time to make the recommended reviews in the thesis text and send the final version to the university. After this last step it will be time to wait for the diploma.

Thesis defense scheduled !

The committee was set and my PhD Thesis was scheduled for defense in March, 31, 2008.

Paper submitted to SOBRAPO Magazine

A paper entitled "A MULTI-OBJECTIVE ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION METHOD APPLIED TO SWITCH ENGINE SCHEDULING IN RAILROAD YARDS", co-authored by José Eugênio Leal, Thomas Sttüzle and Mauro Birattari was submitted to Pesquisa Operacional Magazine (Print ISSN 0101-7438) for publication.

Paper done. Back to YoYo

The paper on the conclusions about the competANTS recent tests is done and now it is under review from the co-authors. As planned, I am back now with the YoYo program.
Meanwhile I am in permanent contact with my peers in the academic and practitoner worlds to enhance the concepts and approaches in the YoYo algorithm.

One more play with the old fellow

In order to compare several pheromone update rule, I temporarily interrupted the work on the new YoYo algorithm and I took back my old CompetANTS algorithm and I am currently playing a little bit with it, testing some diffferent rules to check the influence of the instance characteristics and update rules in the quality of the results. After that I plan to write the last paper before the thesis.

Yes: Now it is time to begin the thesis writing

Now I started doing the writing deliverable of the PhD Thesis. The outline is already planned and I am producing the first paragraphs in paralel with the testing case with SOGY and the the YoYo code finishing.

Review and renew the simulator

With the help of my friend Otavio Lube, I am producing a new version of the Swith Order Generator program. Now, the new program, called SOGY will generate more accurate and specially formated data to be used as input for the YoYo program, that is about to be born.

Some more runs for the old bud

I am now doing a new test plan to evaluate the perfomance and tune the parameters of the old RRC program.
With the new results I plan to report on a paper and use it as a benchmark for the YoYo tests to be done in the following steps...