The drive behind the Centre for Emergent Computing is the desire to solve real problems that people care about. Many industrial and commercial problems do not have perfect solutions that can be found in a reasonable time - we need methods that find acceptable solutions in the time available. Solutions are also required that are robust and which can evolve with changing circumstances. Many biological and social systems are very good at doing exactly this, and they can give us insight and inspiration into new methods of problem solving.
Emergent Computing studies and uses biologically and socially inspired systems in which complex behaviour at the global level emerges from the interaction of large numbers of simple components. This type of system is ideal for building software systems to solve complex problems, since the algorithmic complexity is achieved through software which is simple at the design level. This has significant advantages over conventional software development techniques.
The Centre for Emergent Computing conducts fundamental research in the area, but also provides solutions to industrial and commercial problems using these novel techniques. There are currently seven research projects funded by the European Commission, SHEFC, EPSRC and Scottish Enterprise. The Centre is the largest research group of its kind in Britain. It has been involved in coordinating and facilitating European research in the area for the last seven years. There are strong project links with twenty higher education institutions worldwide.
The Centre has a particular expertise and experience with combinatorial optimisation problems, which include application areas such as scheduling, timetabling, vehicle routing and bin packing problems.