Welcome to 2025! CTMTDS is pleased to share news and highlights from the past few months
IN THE SPOTLIGHT #
Congratulations to
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Dr. Braden Thorne who has graduated! Braden passed his thesis with minor revisions by examiners.
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Sandy Spiers who has had his thesis passed with minor revisions by examiners, and has received a Chancellor's Commendation.
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Ryan Leadbetter who has had his thesis passed with minor revisions.
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Tyler Bikaun, Tim Pesch and Chau Nguyen who have all submitted their theses in recent months.
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Dr. Hoa Bui was awarded the Curtinnovation Trailblazer Award 2024.
Centre Celebration Showcase Event #
On 6th November 2024, CTMTDS held a Centre Celebration Showcase event at Curtin 137 St George's Terrace, Perth, to showcase highlights across the CTMTDS research program and celebrate the successful collaborations and outcomes from each Centre Research Theme.
Special guest speaker Prof Neville Plint (Mining3 and University of Queensland) was warmly welcomed, and he shared his insights and experience on the nexus of academic and industry collaborations and ways to forge pathways to innovation.
Highlights from the afternoon included the real-world solutions and applied research developed by CTMTDS researchers including tools to improve maintenance planning, predictive maintenance, shutdowns and long-term planning outcomes for the mining and maintenance industry.
The panel presentation on innovation in academia and industry was chaired by Andrew Bell with speakers Dr Geoffrey Batt, Prof Melinda Hodkiewicz, Zane Prickett, Peter Rose, Prof Neville Plint, Dr. Hoa Bui and Braden Thorne. The panellists explored the academic/industry nexus and areas of success and learnings from all perspectives.
While the formal CTMTDS research program winds up in 2025, the Centre's legacy aims to connect participants and networks across our research partners (Curtin, UWA and CSIRO) with industry, through hubs such as WADSIH, CIDS, UWA Data Institute, Curtin Optimisation Centre, Trailblazer and other relevant groups to continue the momentum and support shared benefits for future research collaboration of data science research activities.
ARC Centre continuation in 2025 #
We are pleased to advise that the ARC has approved an extension of the Centre project end date to 31 December 2025 to allow for a final set of short term 'Value-Add' projects to take place. These projects have been codesigned with industry partners and academic leads. Thanks to all of the Centre Partners who confirmed their support of this extension of CTMTDS under the current agreement. We look forward to announcing the final suite of short term codesigned projects commencing shortly.
The Atlassian cloud-based platform for Centre data has been launched! #
The Centre has now transferred to a cloud-based platform through Atlassian for JIRA/ Confluence. Please keep note of Atlassian newsfeeds for further updates.
The Centre's new public website is now live and will continue to be updated over the coming weeks – watch this space! Thanks to John Hille of CSIRO for this seamless transition and to Michael Stewart for designing this new website, which you can see by following this link.
Round up of team news in 2024 #
During the last half of 2024, the Centre bid farewell to postdoctoral researchers Dr. Sirui Li, who has started a lecturing role at Murdoch University; Dr. Michael Stewart, who has joined CSIRO in a research role; and Dr Hoa Bui, who is now a researcher in the Centre for Optimisation at Curtin University.
PhD graduate Ziyu Zhao is now a lecturer at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, China, at the School of Transportation and Civil Engineering. Her research focus is smart construction and transportation, aiming to bring advanced AI techniques such as LLMs and Knowledge Graphs into the construction and transportation domains.
PhD Tyler Bikaun has commenced a full-time position of Founding Engineer at WhyHow.AI
PhD Tim Pesch is now a Research Officer at The Kids (formerly Telethon Kids Institute) in Geospatial Health and Development.
We wish Sirui, Michael, Hoa, Ziyu, Tim and Tyler all our best in their future roles!
Researchers Catch-Ups in 2024 #
In 2024, the Researcher Catch-up Seminar series took place, across Curtin, UWA and virtually, with speakers from the Centre, industry and the academic community.
In August, Tim Pesch presented on 'Estimation and Testing with Extended Sequential Order Statistics' at UWA summarising his research over the past 3 years. Tim demonstrated an approach to reliably predict equipment lifetime for load-sharing systems with heterogeneous components. Generators which produce a certain power output together or wash tanks which filter a substance are examples of such systems. 'Extended Sequential Order Statistics' allow us to adequately model a dependence structure between heterogeneous components. The main idea is that upon failure of one component, the lifetime expectancy of the remaining components can change.
Following this, CTMTDS PhD student Ponpot Jartnillaphand presented 'Advanced Matheuristic Algorithm for Optimizing Maintenance Team Assignment and Job Scheduling with Shift Constraints'; a talk on a novel metaheuristic algorithm, which combines a two-stage heuristic, a metaheuristic technique, and an advanced exact optimization method. The approach addresses the complex problem of maintenance team assignment and job scheduling with shift constraints, optimizing the assignment of workers to teams across various shifts. The algorithm effectively minimizes the overall schedule completion time while adhering to critical precedence constraints, offering a significant advancement in workforce optimization.
The last Researcher’s Catch up presented by PhD students Yingying Yang and Chau Nguyen took place in October 2024.
Yingying Yang explained 'An Exact Method for Bi-objective Optimization'. In many real-world industrial applications, decision-makers face the challenge of balancing multiple objectives in their optimization problems. This class of problems yields a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, where no single solution is superior in all objectives. Instead, each solution reflects a trade-off between the objectives. In this presentation, I will talk about bi-objective optimization models with two conflicting objectives, as well as an efficient exact method that integrates cutting planes and Benders decomposition into the epsilon constraint method.
Chau Nguyen presented on 'Topic Analysis and Classification of EGU Conference Abstracts' The corpus of abstracts from the European Geoscience Union EGU General Assemblies 2000 - 2024 covers a wide range of technical geoscience topics. Chau will present challenges in unstructured format and unavailable topics of these abstracts, and methods to extract topics from EGU Divisions. Next, Chau will talk about how to classify EGU abstracts based on extracted topics using pre-trained language models. Preliminary results using data in one year of abstracts (EGU 2015) show reasonable performance of classifying EGU abstracts. For future work, the study aims to expand the analysis to cover more data of abstracts (2000 - 2024) from EGU General Assemblies
CTMTDS Training and Engagement #
'Coding for Researchers' 2 Day Training course with David Glance – July 2024 #
CTMTDS held a 2-day workshop on 'Coding for Researchers', at Curtin Future of Work Murray Street building on the 12th and 17th July 2024. The workshop introduced participants to the fundamentals of a risk-based approach to cybersecurity, and covered the principles of a secure software development lifecycle (in this case Microsoft’s SDLC), concepts of privacy and personal data and how developers should be cognisant of the impact their software may have on the privacy of users and people and organisations that have their data as part of the functionality of the application. The legal landscape for both cybersecurity and privacy was also covered to summarise obligations on the developer operating in Australia and potentially other markets. Thanks to all who participated and provided great feedback on the session.
MRIWA Research Showcase #
CTMTDS partner, MRIWA annual Research Showcase in August 2024. The day focused on the future of minerals research and discussed the journey of MRIWA Mining Equipment, Technology, Service projects, past and present. The broad range of speakers across mining, marine, environment, landscape, energy projects shared insights on the challenges, application and impact research into today’s markets.
Upcoming Events and Training #
The Centre will be running a 2 day 'CTMTDS Data science training for Reliability and Maintenance Engineers' course on 24th and 25th February 2025. The syllabus focuses on understanding data types, extracting and importing data, principles and practice of data visualisation as well as simple analysis and modelling across reliability, linear regression and degradation modelling. Invitations have been sent to all industry partners. We welcome participants from a broad range of backgrounds to join this course, delivered over two days by Dr Aloke Phatak at Curtin 139 St Georges Terrace Perth.
The next CTMTDS Milestone 3 presentation (Yingying Yang) and Researcher's Presentation (Srimali Gunasekara) will take place on Friday, 21st February 2025 at 1:00pm-2:00pm at Curtin University Bentley, which will focus on maintenance scheduling and include the final milestone 3 presentation for Yingying:
1:00pm-1:30pm Yingying Yang – Milestone 3 presentation (30 mins including questions)
Title: Benders Decomposition for optimal maintenance scheduling and facility location problems
Abstract: In this presentation I will summarize the outcomes of my PhD research, which focuses on developing mathematical models to tackle real-world industrial optimization challenges and designing advanced algorithms based on Benders decomposition to enhance computational efficiency. In this talk, I will present case studies on maintenance scheduling optimization and facility location optimization, arising from industrial applications, with solution strategies that improve operational efficiency and support better decision-making. This work combines theoretical insights with practical applications, contributing to the fields of industrial engineering, operations research, and decision science.
1:30pm-1:55pm Srimali Gunasekara – Researcher’s catch-up presentation (20 mins with 5 minutes questions)
Title: Shutdown Maintenance Scheduling using Two-Stage Stochastic Programming with Endogenous Uncertainty
Abstract: In this talk, I will present a scheduling problem of preventive maintenance activities in two consecutive maintenance plans. Due to budget, resource, and time limitations of maintenance plans, maintenance of some components needs to be postponed from the first shutdown to the second with the risk of costly failures in between. We minimise the total expected cost of maintenance and scheduling by developing a two-stage stochastic programming model. The first stage determines which components should be postponed, whereas the second stage determines whether these components undergo maintenance in the second shutdown based on the occurrence of a failure event. The probability of failure depends on the first-stage decision leading to a stochastic problem with endogenous uncertainty. We generated instances using a benchmark data set and solved the model using an algorithm that combines simulated annealing and sample average approximation methods.
Stay tuned for our next issue where we will cover: #
- Training Opportunities for Centre participants in 2025
- New Value Add projects in 2025
- Updates on Cloud based platform for Centre data
- New publications in 2025
Do you have news to share?
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