This is the academic website of Dr. Thomas Weise (汤卫思), full professor at Hefei University (合肥大学) located in the beautiful city of Hefei (合肥市) in the Anhui Province (安徽省) in China.

My research area is metaheuristic optimization and operations research. I mainly focus on discrete and combinatorial problems from domains such as logistics, production planning, scheduling, and packing.

My current main research interest is a technique called Frequency Fitness Assignment (FFA), 频率适应度分配), which is an “Algorithm Plugin” that removes the bias towards better solutions from its host algorithm and makes it invariant under all injective transformations of the objective function value. This is the strongest theoretically possible invariance property and the only other algorithms that possess it are random sampling, random walks, and exhaustive enumeration. These methods are very bad optimization methods. Yet, if we plug it into the (1+1) EA, for instance, it leads to a speed-up of three orders of magnitude on the NP-hard MaxSat problem. While I currently focus on finding the limits, advantages, drawbacks, and use cases of FFA, I also contribute to a wide range of topics in optimization.

Besides doing research, I supervise great students, teach classes, write open source software, sometimes give talks, and contribute to the research community as reviewer and editor.