Rate My Professor Alysson Machado Costa

Alysson Machado Costa is an Associate Professor of Optimisation in the School of Mathematics and Statistics within the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD in Business Administration with a specialization in Quantitative Methods from HEC Montréal, Université de Montréal, in 2006. Prior to his current role, he served at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of São Paulo from 2008. Since 2017, he has held a Senior Lectureship position, advancing to Associate Professor. His academic career includes supervision of nine PhD students, one postdoctoral researcher, and currently three PhD candidates. He has been a chief investigator on multiple research projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Brazilian agencies CAPES, CNPq, and FAPESP, the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Commission via Marie-Curie Actions.

Costa's research focuses on mathematical programming, with emphasis on mixed-integer programming modelling and decomposition solution algorithms. He applies these techniques to operations research problems in diverse domains, including optimising production systems with heterogeneous workforces, multi-manned assembly line worker integration and balancing, drayage routing with longer combination vehicles, container loading via block-building constraint programming, 2D bin packing instance space analysis, tactical master surgery scheduling using stochastic mixed integer programming, and seasonal decisions for environmental water use. He has published over 40 journal articles on optimisation theory and multidisciplinary applications, particularly in applied engineering. Key publications include 'Model and heuristics for the multi-manned assembly line worker integration and balancing problem,' 'Adaptive large neighborhood search for drayage routing problems involving longer combination vehicles' (2023), 'A block-building constraint programming model for the container loading problem,' and 'A sequential stochastic mixed integer programming model for tactical master surgery scheduling.' Among his honors, he received the Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2008 for the best thesis in Applied Mathematics in Canada and recognition from the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society in 2007. Costa serves as joint lead of the ADVANCE research theme in the OPTIMA consortium.