Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R60577/01
Title:	Investigate Novel Methods for Optimising Shelf Space Allocation
Principal Investigator:	Kendall, Professor G
Other Investigators:	Petrovic, Professor S Cowling, Professor PI Burke, Professor EK
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Retail Vision Space I.T. Software Solutions Ltd Tesco
Department:	School of Computer Science
Organisation:	University of Nottingham
Scheme:	Fast Stream
Starts:	31 July 2002	Ends:	30 July 2005	Value (£):	62,947
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Retail Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
A major aspect of this research is to define an appropriate, formal model for this problem. We want this model, and the solutions produced, to be acknowledged by our partners as being of value in that it solves the relevant problem and not a simplified abstraction of the problem. We will investigate the latest optimisation techniques to produce good quality shelf layouts. Search techniques such as genetic and ant algorithms will be used in isolation as well as being hybridised with exact methods and local search methods (the so called memetic algorithm). Due to the nature of the problem we will also investigate multi-objective approaches as we believe they have great potential for this problem. We also plan to investigate using case based reasoning, as an initialisation strategy, as well as decomposing the problem into smaller sub-problems as we have found these techniques to be effective in other problem domains. We will carry out a through comparison and evaluation of the approaches we adopt. We will test our results against a variety of problems, the majority of which we hope to draw from leading UK retailers as the literature is lacking in this area. As well as being of relevance to the optimisation of shelf layouts it is envisaged that the advances made as a result of this research will be applicable to many other problem domains. We belive this is an novel and ambitious, yet achievable, research proposal which has the opportunity to provide real financial benefits for UK industry.
Key Findings
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Organisation Website:	http://www.nottingham.ac.uk