Kavitha G. Menon

Former PhD Student

I graduated with my bachelors from Calicut University in 2014 and masters’ in 2016 from National Institute of Technology, Warangal. In my masters, I was working on CFD simulations of Chemical Looping Combustion of coal. Different types of oxygen carriers like iron oxide, copper oxide and nickel oxide were tested. Results of the detailed comparison studies were reported in two journal papers and a book chapter. Lately, I shifted my area of research to Optimization realizing that it is one very prominent area throughout in any process or technology, starting from scheduling a process to its production, storage, distribution, utilization etc.

I joined Luis’s group for my PhD in spring 2017. Currently, I am working on Optimization Scheduling for large-scale industrial production. Various optimization studies are being conducted on different production plants with a motive to develop a suitable model using which the plant functioning can be efficiently scheduled in such a way to achieve maximum profit in minimum make span with effective utilization of the resources. We are working with an industrial partner from analytical services sector. We have so far developed a STN (State-Task Network)  based non-uniform time discrete scheduling model for large-scale plants and are currently trying to incorporate uncertainty into the large scale model.

Thesis: Scheduling process operations under uncertainty and integration with long term planning