SmartGeo Portal "Geographic information management system"

Problem Description

Designed and promoted by a Consortium comprising two entities (SmartGeo and the University of Coimbra), the SGP-GIMS project aims at developing a totally innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) application, which will operate on a Web platform, allowing to integrate, manage and manipulate geographic information at a lower cost and simpler utilisation than competing solutions.

In addition, the application to be developed will incorporate two new and significant functionalities - the capacity to manipulate and display large volumes of information ("Big Data") and the ability to optimize, according to multiple criteria, the routes of mobile agents in a network.

Modelling & Computational Challenges

The shortest multi-criteria path problem is a natural extension of the classic shortest path problem, coming through need to optimize multiple conflict resources. This allow to find ever more refined solutions that represent substantial value added to their holders. This problem is NP-complete (non-deterministic polynomial time), because the number of Pareto solutions (not dominated solutions among themselves) grows exponentially with the size of the network. Although real problem are usually multi-criteria in nature, the difficulty to deal with this kind of problems has discouraged the investment industry.

The use of routing optimization algorithms in a given network, by considering simultaneously criteria, is an important asset in a GIS application that intend to be differentiated. It should be noted that solutions obtained by mono-criterion optimization routing algorithm often depart from those obtained by intuition and human experience which take into account several features that are not included in the mono-criterion model.

Research at LCM

The CMUC team will work in the following problems: Development of a software which will be a support to the additive and subtractive techniques, maximising its advantages; Modelling and numerical simulation of the selective laser melting process for fast prediction of distortions; Development of a software that allows to create a cooling system in order to optimise the injection cycles and the quality of the produced pieces.

Results (papers, reports, software)

• Prototype of the developed algorithms

• Master degree thesis

  • André Filipe Maurício de Araújo Oliveira, Extensões do Problema do Caixeiro Viajante. (Mestrado em Matemática - área de especialização: Estatística, optimização e matemática financeira)
  • João Valença, Visualisation and Analysis of Geographic Information: Algorithms and Data Structures. (Master's Degree in Informatics Engineering)

• Communications in congress

  • J. L. Santos, A. Oliveira. New constructive heuristics for the travelling salesman problem, 2015 CORS/INFORMS International Conference, Montreal, Canada, June 14-17, 2015
  • A. Oliveira, J. L. Santos. The multi-objective travelling salesman problem, 27th European Conference on Operational Research, Glasgow, UK, July 12-15, 2015
  • V. Freitas, J. L. Santos. Speed-up Techniques for the Multi-objective Shortest Path Problem, 27th European Conference on Operational Research, Glasgow, UK, July 12-15, 2015
  • Arnaud Liefooghe, Sebastien Verel, Luís Paquete, Jin-Kao Han. Experiments on Local Search for Bi-objective Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Programming. 8th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, Guimarães, Portugal, March 29 - April 1, 2015

• Posters

  • João Valença, Luís Paquete, Carlos Caçador, Pedro Reino. Visualization and Analysis of Geographic Information: Representation Algorithms and Data Structures. 18th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science?, Lisboa, Portugal, 9 a 12 de junho de 2015
  • Bernardo Marques, Luís Paquete, Carlos Caçador, Pedro Reino. Algorithms and Data Structures for Large Scale Geographic Information Systems: A Performance Analysis. 18th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science?, Lisboa, Portugal, 9 a 12 de junho de 2015

• Papers in Proceedings

  • Arnaud Liefooghe, Sebastien Verel, Luís Paquete, Jin-Kao Han. Experiments on Local Search for Bi-objective Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Programming. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, Guimarães, Portugal, March 29 - April 1, 2015

Project Team

• José Luis Esteves dos Santos (CMUC)
• Luís Filipe dos Santos Coelho Paquete (CISUC)

Project Reference

QREN project n.º 34164, in consortium with Smartgeo solutions, Lda