Professor Robin Purshouse
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Professor of Decision Sciences
+44 114 222 5618
Full contact details
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Amy Johnson Building
Portobello Street
91Ö±²¥
S1 3JD
- Profile
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Robin Purshouse received the MEng degree in Control Systems Engineering in 1999 and a PhD in Control Systems in 2004 for his research on evolutionary many-objective optimisation under the supervision of Peter Fleming. Commercial experience includes (1999-2000), (2003-2007) and (2007-2008). He returned to the University of 91Ö±²¥ in 2008 - initially as a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Related Research and, since 2010, as a Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering.
Robin was a principal architect of the 91Ö±²¥ Alcohol Policy Model, alongside Alan Brennan, RachidRafia, and Petra Meier. He was the holder of an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant award (October 2012 - September 2014) and, with Peter Fleming and Carlos Fonseca, was General Chair of the seventh international conference in the world-leading series on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO) held in 91Ö±²¥ in March 2013.
- Research interests
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Robin's research aims to help improve how we identify and choose between possible solutions to a problem, with a particular focus on the process of policy appraisal. There are a number of factors that make policy appraisal a challenging research area:
Multiple trade-offs When deciding on a best course of action, there is usually more than one performance criterion, or objective, to be considered. If these objectives are in conflict with each other, then we are faced with multiple ‘best’ solutions offering different trade-offs between the objectives. In decision analysis we often use methods that attempt to identify these trade-offs, but if there are more than three objectives to consider then some of the most popular methods are likely to fail at this task. Multiple stakeholders In order to identify a single best solution, we need to introduce subjective preferences for different trade-offs between objectives. Most decisions will affect a multitude of different stakeholders, so we need to use methods that can build a consensus or arbitrate between different sets of values. Some of the best practice methods for achieving this are quite unpopular with the stakeholders themselves. Open questions exist for government decisions: should the preferences be those of society? How do we measure these? How do we achieve consistency between different decisions? Deep uncertainty In decision analysis, we try to measure how well each possible solution performs against each objective. For engineering design problems, we can often build mathematical models that can predict quite precisely how an option will perform once implemented. However, when considering social policy, our current models of social processes are subject to much more uncertainty. We need to develop methods that can improve our quantitative understanding of social systems and also think more about how to integrate attitudes to risk, and the value of delaying a decision to reduce uncertainty, into trade-off analysis methods. Cognitive challenge In decision analysis, the aims are to provide support to the individuals tasked with making a decision and to help develop a shared understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. Communication of trade-offs is vital to these aims, and this task starts to become challenging as the number of objectives rises beyond three. If our predictions are precise, then visualisation methods are available – but when our predictions are uncertain then these current methods are of limited value.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- . Social Science & Medicine, 117577-117577.
- . BMC Public Health, 24(1).
- . Drug and Alcohol Review.
- . Environmental Modelling & Software, 173, 105959-105959.
- . Health Economics.
- . Futures, 152, 103200-103200.
- . Appetite, 189, 106933-106933.
- . Health Economics.
- . Public Administration.
- . American Journal of Epidemiology.
- . International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research, 10(1), 24-33.
- . Addiction.
- . Scientific Data, 9(1).
- . Addictive Behaviors, 107094-107094.
- . Addiction.
- . International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(11).
- . Addiction (Abingdon, England).
- . Applied Soft Computing.
- . Complexity, 2020.
- . Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 23(3).
- . Statistical Methods in Medical Research.
- . Health Education and Behavior.
- . Wellcome Open Research, 4.
- . Addiction, 113(2), 372-373.
- . Alcohol and Alcoholism, 52(3), 372-381.
- . Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, 24(1-2), 71-81.
- . Engineering Optimization, 48(4), 652-671.
- . Annals of Operations Research, 236(1), 149-176.
- . Health Economics, 24(10), 1368-1388.
- . Addiction, 110(8), 1272-1280.
- . European Journal of Operational Research, 243(2), 442-453.
- . International Journal of Systems Science, 46(13), 2407-2420.
- . European Journal of Operational Research.
- . Information Sciences, 282, 363-387.
- . Frontiers in Psychiatry.
- . Lancet, 383(9929), 1655-1664.
- . Addiction, 109(4), 568-569.
- . J Health Econ, 34, 96-103.
- . IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 44(11), 2221-2231.
- . BMC Fam Pract, 15, 26.
- . Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation - GECCO '14.
- . International Journal of Systems Science.
- . NORDIC STUDIES ON ALCOHOL AND DRUGS, 30(5), 445-447.
- . Alcohol and Alcoholism, 48(2), 180-188.
- . Alcohol and Alcoholism, 48(2), 241-249.
- . Information Sciences.
- . Lancet, 375(9723), 1355-1364.
- . Addiction, 105(3), 383-393.
- . Addiction, 105(3), 400-401.
- . IEEE T EVOLUT COMPUT, 11(6), 770-784.
- Evolutionary algorithms in control systems engineering: a survey. CONTROL ENG PRACT, 10(11), 1223-1241.
- . IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 34(22), 14-25.
- An analysis of intersectional disparities in alcohol consumption in the US. Social Science and Medicine.
- . Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 26(2).
- Methods for constrained optimization of expensive mixed-integer multi-objective problems, with application to an internal combustion engine design problem. European Journal of Operational Research.
- . Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(3).
- . International Journal of Microsimulation, 13(2), 21-60.
- . Drug and Alcohol Review.
- . Drug and Alcohol Review.
- . Drug and Alcohol Review.
Chapters
- , Natural Computing Series (pp. 3-28). Springer International Publishing
- , Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 424-438). Springer International Publishing
- Improving the pharmaceutical R&D process: how simulation can support management decision making., Computer Applications in Pharmaceutical Research and Development (pp. 247-273).
Conference proceedings papers
- (pp 319-332)
- The impact of alcohol availability policies on alcohol-related mortality by socioeconomic status in the united states: A modelling study. ALCOHOL-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 47 (pp 250-251)
- Targeted brief intervention strategies in social groups: An empirical agent-based modeling study. ALCOHOL-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 47 (pp 137-137)
- Mapping intersectional inequalities in alcohol consumption in the US: A multilevel model of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy. ALCOHOL-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 47 (pp 358-359)
- Simulation of alcohol control policies for health equity (SIMAH) - A novel approach to modeling alcohol control intervention scenarios in the United States. ALCOHOL-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 47 (pp 38-39)
- . 2022 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), 4 December 2022 - 7 December 2022.
- INTRODUCING THE SIMULATION OF ALCOHOL CONTROL POLICIES FOR HEALTH EQUITY (SIMAH) MICROSIMULATION MODEL. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 46 (pp 32A-32A)
- . 2021 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 17 October 2021 - 20 October 2021.
- . GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (pp 1531-1539). Lille, France, 10 July 2021 - 14 July 2021.
- (pp 721-733)
- . 2020 28th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), 15 September 2020 - 18 September 2020.
- . 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) (pp 2148-2153). Bari, Italy, 6 October 2019 - 9 October 2019.
- . Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
- ALCOHOL POLICY MODELING USING THEORY - A NEW COMPUTATIONAL PLATFORM FOR DEVELOPING MECHANISM-BASED EXPLANATORY MODELS. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 43 (pp 142A-142A)
- SYNTHESIZING THE RATIONAL ADDICTION AND MYOPIC CHOICE ECONOMIC MODELS TO EXPLAIN POPULATION ALCOHOL USE AND UNDERSTAND PRICING POLICIES: AN AGENT-BASED SIMULATION. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 43 (pp 141A-141A)
- Toward a unified framework for model calibration and optimisation in virtual engineering workflows. 2019 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEMS, MAN AND CYBERNETICS (SMC) (pp 3148-3153)
- . Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2018) (pp 689-696), 15 July 2018 - 19 July 2018.
- . Proceedings of GECCO '18, 15 July 2018 - 19 July 2018.
- MODELING SOCIAL NETWORK SELECTION AND INFLUENCE MECHANISMS ON ALCOHOL USE AT LARGE SCALE: AN EXPLORATORY AGENT-BASED MODEL. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 42 (pp 331A-331A)
- A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR MODELING ALCOHOL USE DYNAMICS OVER OPULATION HEALTH TIME HORIZONS. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 42 (pp 331A-331A)
- PLATFORM FOR CALIBRATED, SYSTEM-BASED MODELS OF ALCOHOL USE DYNAMICS. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 42 (pp 331A-331A)
- (pp 490-497)
- TOWARD A DYNAMIC ALCOHOL POLICY MODEL FOR APPRAISAL OF POPULATION-LEVEL INTERVENTIONS. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 41 (pp 330A-330A)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10173 (pp 1-15)
- . Proceedings of the 2016 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp 597-604). New York
- . Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering, Vol. 4 (pp 662-671)
- (pp 141-155)
- . 2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 6 July 2014 - 11 July 2014.
- . IFAC Proceedings Volumes, Vol. 47(3) (pp 2634-2639)
- . Proceedings - 2013 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, SMC 2013 (pp 615-620)
- . The Lancet, Vol. 382 (pp S47-S47)
- . GECCO 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (pp 101-102)
- . IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 17(4) (pp 474-494)
- . 2013 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2013 (pp 916-923)
- On Finding Well-Spread Pareto Optimal Solutions by Preference-inspired Co-evolutionary Algorithm. GECCO'13: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2013 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (pp 695-702)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7811 LNCS (pp 337-351)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7811 LNCS (pp 726-740)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7811 LNCS (pp 428-442)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7811 LNCS
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7811 LNCS (pp 21-35)
- . 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2012
- . IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings
- . GECCO'12 - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (pp 513-520)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 6576 LNCS (pp 136-150)
- MODELLING GENERAL AND TARGETED PRICE POLICY OPTIONS: ESTIMATION OF EFFECTS ON DIFFERENT SUBGROUPS OF THE POPULATION. ALCOHOLISM-CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH, Vol. 34(6) (pp 251A-251A)
- Many-objective optimization: An engineering design perspective. EVOLUTIONARY MULTI-CRITERION OPTIMIZATION, Vol. 3410 (pp 14-32)
- Evolutionary many-objective optimisation: An exploratory analysis. CEC: 2003 CONGRESS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION, VOLS 1-4, PROCEEDINGS (pp 2066-2073)
- Conflict, harmony, and independence: Relationships in evolutionary multi-criterion optimisation. EVOLUTIONARY MULTI-CRITERION OPTIMIZATION, PROCEEDINGS, Vol. 2632 (pp 16-30)
- Adaptive divide-and-conquer methodology for evolutionary multi-criterion optimisation. EVOLUTIONARY MULTI-CRITERION OPTIMIZATION, PROCEEDINGS, Vol. 2632 (pp 133-147)
- Why Use Elitism And Sharing In A Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm?. GECCO (pp 520-527)
- Evolutionary computing: Opportunities for control. NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR COMPUTER CONTROL 2001 (pp 21-32)
- . Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO '23 Companion), July 15--19, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal, 15 July 2023 - 19 May 2023.
Reports
- Active Robust Optimization - Enhancing Robustness to Uncertain Environments
Preprints
- , Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
- , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
- . Social Science & Medicine, 117577-117577.
- Grants
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Current Grants
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The HealthMod Cluster: Enhancing Policy Modelling Capabilities to Tackle the Economic Determinants of Health and Health Inequality, MRC, 04/2023 - 03/2028, £9,055,452, as Co-I
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Targeting multiple levels of ‘the smoking cessation system’ using novel scientific approaches, CRUK, 04/2022 - 03/2027, £531,098, as PI
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, RCUK, 06/2021 - 11/2022, £181,653, as Co-PI
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A microsimulation of alcohol control interventions to advance health equity and
reverse the current decrease in life expectancy in the US, NIH, 10/2020 - 09/2025, $332,505, as sub award PI -
(the SIPHER Consortium), 09/2019 - 03/2025, £6,926,749, as co-PI
Previous Grants
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Developing a proof-of-concept agent-based model of the relationship between food advertising and food choices in England, RCUK, 09/2022 - 03/2023, £24,990, as Co-PI
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SIPHER – Systems science in Public health and Health Economic Research, Research England, 04/2021 - 03/2022, as PI
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Many-objective Optimisation Pilot Project, Industrial, 10/2018 - 05/2019, £64,720, as PI
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Consortium Developmental Grant, UK Prevention Research Partnership, 07/2018 - 11/2018, £46,105, as Co-I
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DYNAMO: DYNamic Analysis Modelling and Optimisation of GDI Engines, 04/2018 - 06/2021, £401,252, as PI
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Liger - an Open-source Integrated Optimisation Environment, Digital Engineering and Test Centre, 01/2018 - 05/2019, £60,000, as PI
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CASCADE: Calibrated Agent Simulations for Combined Analysis of Drinking Etiologies, NIAAA, 08/2016 - 04/2022, $2,313,250, as PI
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Optimization for robust design: Integrating model-based systems engineering with multi-criteria decision-making support in a distributed framework, EPSRC, 05/2014 - 05/2018, £1,074,429, as co-PI
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ASUR hybrid power packs, Industrial, 10/2013 - 03/2014, £29,991, as PI
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Value-based Bayesian sequential analysis for fault monitoring, EPSRC, 01/2013 - 08/2014, £18,099, as co-PI
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Complex systems modelling of alcohol consumption dynamics in the British population, ESRC, 10/2012 - 09/2014, £173,428, as PI
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Alcohol policy modelling and evaluation, MRC, 11/2010 - 10/2013, £1,034,163, as co-PI
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- Teaching activities
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ACS125 Systems Modelling and Simulation
Jointly led by George Panoutsos and Robin Purshouse, this module aims to provide students with an introductory systems perspective on both the science and art of mathematical modelling. Robin provides an introduction to discrete, stochastic and hybrid systems in the Spring Semester. The module motivates the need for mathematical modelling through a series of six major case studies, spread throughout the academic year. A diverse range of systems is considered, with the Spring Semester focusing on the pharmacoeconomics of HIV treatment options, the effect of environmental variability on an automotive suspension system, and the digital control of a hydraulic extrusion press.
ACS108 Laboratory and Professional Skills
Robin leads on the Employability Theme within this wider module on professional and laboratory skills taught by the Level 1 team at ACSE. Within the theme, through a series on engagements spread across the academic year, students are encouraged to reflect on the competencies needed to be professional systems engineers and active citizens. Our current industrial guest speakers on the module are Marion Carrabin from and Luke Creasey from .