Michael Forbes

Associate Professor Michael Forbes holds a position in the School of Mathematics and Physics within the Faculty of Science at the University of Queensland. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution. Prior to joining academia, Forbes accumulated over 20 years of industry experience applying optimisation methods to real-world industrial challenges before returning to the University of Queensland in 2010.

Forbes' research focuses on developing Mixed Integer Programming models for industrial applications and specialised techniques for solving computationally intensive Mixed Integer Programming problems. His work covers diverse areas such as vehicle routing, supply chain optimisation, mine planning, public transport vehicle and crew scheduling and rostering for buses, trains, and planes, hospital staff scheduling and rostering including operation scheduling and room allocation, power generation and planning, network design for communications, electricity, gas, and water systems, and maintenance scheduling. He supervises PhD students on topics including combining Dantzig-Wolfe and Benders decomposition, multi-objective robust mine planning, no-overlap constraints in scheduling, and optimal tanglegrams.

His key publications encompass 'Algorithms for pickup and delivery problems with hours of service constraints' by Sippel, Forbes, and Menesch (Computers and Operations Research, 2025), 'Benders decomposition with delayed disaggregation for the active passive vehicle routing problem' by Rist, Tilk, and Forbes (European Journal of Operational Research, 2024), 'Combining optimisation and simulation using logic based benders decomposition' by Forbes et al. (European Journal of Operational Research, 2023), 'Logic-based benders decomposition for wildfire suppression' by Harris, Forbes, and Taimre (Computers & Operations Research, 2023), 'A new formulation for the dial-a-ride problem' by Rist and Forbes (Transportation Science, 2021), 'Vehicle routing and crew scheduling for metropolitan mail distribution at Australia Post' (European Journal of Operational Research, 2006), and seminal early papers including 'An Exact Algorithm for Multiple Depot Bus Scheduling' (European Journal of Operational Research, 1994) and 'Exact Solution of Locomotive Scheduling Problems' (Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1991).

Forbes' research exerts considerable practical influence. His vehicle scheduling algorithms remain widely cited and implemented in public transport operations. Approaches from his work support rail journey planning in multiple countries, particularly the UK. Additionally, he holds a patent for fibre optic network design using integer programming, with versions of these algorithms deployed worldwide, including for Australia's National Broadband Network.