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Lancaster University
Management School
Dept of Management Science
Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK

Room: B61
T: +44 (0)1524 593117
a.kheiri [at] lancaster.ac.uk


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Thanks for visiting my personal web pages. On these pages you will find information about my research, teaching, publications, research resources, and more.

Dr Ahmed Kheiri, B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., PhD., FHEA, PGCert, MIEEE, MACM

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Biography

Dr Ahmed Kheiri is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor) in Operations Research at Lancaster University Management School, Department of Management Science and actively involved in two of its research groups: Optimisation Research Group and Health Systems Research Group. In addition, he is a member of the multidisciplinary Data Science Institute (DSI), Centre for Transport and Logistics (CENTRAL), Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous Systems Centre (LIRA), Centre for Health Futures, Security Lancaster and STOR-i, an EPSRC-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistics and Operational Research with substantial industrial engagement. Dr Kheiri has taken up the role of Fundamentals Theme Co-Lead for the LIRA in April 2022.

He received his B.Sc. (Hons - First Class) from the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and received his M.Sc. (Distinction) and PhD. from the University of Nottingham, UK. The external examiner, Prof. Greet Vanden Berghe, referred to the doctoral thesis as "an outstanding and should be distinguished". Since completing his PhD, Dr Kheiri has continued to carry out research in the area of heuristics and broadened his research interests and published key papers on real-world optimisation problems. He held research positions at the University of Exeter, and the Cardiff School of Mathematics in Wales. He participated in an EPSRC funded project (EP/K000519/1) focusing on selection hyper-heuristics and in a Health and Care Research Wales funded project entitled Prudent Elective Surgery Scheduling: A Whole Systems Approach, which involved the investigation of how scheduling and modelling techniques can be used to help improve the throughput of patients in operating theatres in Wales. Dr Kheiri visits UofK frequently and he is involved in the university's teaching and research activities.

His research interests lie at the intersection of operational research and computer science, investigating flexible and general cross domain optimisation methods to solve NP-hard optimisation problems. He has designed and implemented intelligent, flexible, ready-to-use high level hyper-heuristic methods for decision support and applied them to a wide range of real-world problems, the results of which have been published in high-ranking journals and conferences. Dr Kheiri's research is inherently impactful, as he prefers to work on real problems, presented by clients outside academia.

Dr Kheiri has undergone PGCAP training, and is now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He is a Member of the IEEE (MIEEE), a Member of the ACM (MACM) and a Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.

Dr Kheiri has been successful in winning research funding from a variety of sources including EPSRC, Innovate UK and industry. To date he has been involved in more than 5 grants amounting to more than seven hundred thousand pounds. He has published more than 40 refereed papers in reputable journals (the vast majority indexed in SCI/SCI-Expanded) and highly respected international conferences. He has published two invited review papers on selection hyper-heuristics and meteheuristics in EJOR. During his career, he received several academic awards some are awarded from participation in international optimisation challenges. He was recently awarded a prize by EURO/ROADEF for work in inventory routing. In 2020, he received the Lancaster University Management School Dean's Award for his excellent achievements across the board in research, teaching and engagement.

Dr Kheiri is active in the Evolutionary Computation field, being a member of the organising committee of GECCO since 2020. Notably, in 2022, Dr. Kheiri co-founded and assumed the role of the first Hybrid Scheduling Chair, a position he continues to hold as of 2024. He has co-chaired several workshops, edited several books, given many invited talks, organised several international conferences, reviewed numerous academic journal articles and has served on many program/technical committees in major international conferences. He was Keynote Editor for the OR Society Annual Conference (OR60). Dr Kheiri is recognised internationally as an expert in hyper-heuristics, and he is currently ranked at position 10 out of over 1,250 researchers on the hyper-heuristic bibliography.

In his spare time he enjoys playing and watching football.