Staff Profile

Dr Alan Soper
AC3 (Senior Lecturer)
Mathematical Sciences Department

Telephone: +44 (0)20 8331 8561
Fax: +44 (0)20 8331 8665
Room: QM417
Email:
Personal Web Site

Qualifications
PhD 1982 Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge
MSc 1989 Imperial College London


Biography
Alan Soper graduated in theoretical physics in 1978 and initially did research on constructing classical solutions to Yang Mills gauge field theory, which represent magnetically charged, elementary particles. He worked in the computer industry for the Digital Equipment Corporation (now part of HP) fron 1984-88 and has since done research on algorithms allied to computation. The main applications areas have been graph partitioning and drawing, with most theoretical results obtained in scheduling.

Research/Scholarly interests
Scheduling Algorithms,
Optimisation, Financial Mathematics

Course Coordinator 2012/13
Financial Modelling and Analysis

Selected publications
Kellerer, H., Soper A.J., Strusevich V.A.(2013) Preemptive scheduling on two identical parallel machines with a single transporter. Journal of Combinatorial Optimisation, 25(2), pp. 279-307.

Kellerer, H., Soper A.J., Strusevich V.A.(2010) Transporting jobs through a processing center with two parallel machines. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6508. pp. 408-422.

Lushchakova, Irina, Soper, Alan and Strusevich, Vitaly A. (2009) Transporting jobs through a two-machine open shop. Naval Research Logistics, 56 (1). pp. 1-18.

C.Crawford, C.Walshaw and A.Soper (2012) A Multilevel Force-Directed Graph Drawing Algorithm using Multilevel Global Force Approximation. 16th International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV) pp. 454-459 IEEE 2012.

Rodney, Demane, Soper, Alan and Walshaw, Chris (2008) Multilevel approaches applied to the capacitated clustering problem. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Scientific Computing, CSC 2008, July 14-17, 2008, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. CSREA Press, Bogart, Georgia, USA, pp. 271-277.

Soper A.J., Strusevich V.A.(2007) An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Two-machine Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with an Interstage Transporter. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 18(3) pp. 565-591.

A. Soper, C. Walshaw and M. Cross (2004) A Combined Evolutionary Search and Multilevel Approach to Graph Partitioning, Journal of Global Optimisation, Vol 29 (2004) pp. 225-241.

Recent conference presentations
ECCO France, May-June 2013
AIRO Italy, Sep 2012
EURO Portugal, Jul 2010



School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
University of Greenwich
Old Royal Naval College
Park Row
London SE10 9LS
UK