Staff Profiles

Picture of Professor Adam Letchford

Professor Adam Letchford

Personal Chair

Department

Management Science

Contact

Room: A71a
Tel: +44 1524 5 94719
Fax: + 44 (0)1524 844885
Email:

Research Overview

Professor Letchford's research is in optimisation, i.e., finding the best solution to problems that have a huge (possibly infinite) number of solutions.  Optimisation is an inter-disciplinary subject, lying at the interface between Operational Research, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Engineering.

Professor Letchford concentrates mainly on methods for solving optimisation problems to proven optimality, rather than heuristic methods.  He also has a particular interest in combinatorial optimisation problems, i.e., problems in which variables are restricted to take integer (whole-number) values.

Professional Role

Chair of the Management Science Research Steering Committee
Coordinator of the LANCS optimisation cluster
Coordinator of the Optimisation Research Centre

External Roles

Associate Editor of:

  • Mathematical Programming Series A (2003-date)
  • Mathematical Programming Computation (2008-date)
  • Discrete Optimization (2009-date)
  • Computational Optimization & Applications (2005-2009).

Soon to be on advisory board of

  • EURO Journal on Computational Optimization.

Fellow of the Operational Research Society

Member of the peer review college of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2006-date)

Regular writer for Mathematical Reviews (2007-date)

Current Teaching

MSCI502: Introduction to Oper Res / Mngt Sci
MSCI534: Optimisation and Heuristics
MSCI536: Optimisation

Profile

BA (Hons) Linguistics & Psychology, Nottingham, 1989
MSc Operational Research, Lancaster, 1993
PhD Management Science, Lancaster, 1997
Recipient of IBM Faculty Award 2006
EPSRC Advanced Research Felowship holder 2006-2011
Fellow of the Operational Research Society since 2009

Publications

  • Letchford A N and Lodi A, 2011, 'Mathematical programming approaches to the traveling salesman problem'
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  • Letchford A N, Caprara A and Salazar J J, 2011, 'Decorous lower bounds for minimum linear arrangement', INFORMS Journal on Computing, vol 23, no. 1, pp. 26-40.
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  • Letchford A N, Fortini M, Lodi A and Wenger K M, 2011, 'Computing compatible tours for the traveling salesman problem', Mathematical Programming Computation, vol 3, no. 1, pp. 59-78.
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  • Letchford A N and Caprara A, 2010, 'New techniques for cost sharing in combinatorial optimization games', Mathematical Programming, vol 124, no. 1-2, pp. 93-118.
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  • Letchford A N and Galli L, 2010, 'Small bipartite subgraph polytopes', Operations Research Letters, vol 38, no. 5, pp. 337-340.
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  • Letchford A N, Reinelt G, Seitz H and Theis D O, 2010, 'On a class of metrics related to graph layout problems', Linear Algebra and its Applications, vol 433, no. 11-12, pp. 1760-1777.
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  • Letchford A N, Giandomenico M, Rossi F and Smriglio S, 2009, 'An application of the Lovasz-Schrijver M(K,K) operator to the stable set problem', Mathematical Programming, vol 120, no. 2, pp. 381-401.
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  • Letchford A N and Oukil A, 2009, 'Exploiting sparsity in pricing routines for the capacitated arc routing problem', Computers and Operations Research, vol 36, no. 7, pp. 2320-2327.
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  • Letchford A N and Burer S, 2009, 'On non-convex quadratic programming with box constraints', SIAM Journal on Optimization, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 1073-1089.
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Research Video

In this video, Adam Letchford describes his research into the 'travelling salesman problem'. Watch the video full size.

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