The Western Australian Centre of Excellence in Industrial Optimisation (WACEIO) was approved by the Western Australian State Government in early 2001.

A major driving force behind the establishment of WACEIO was the recognition of the significant contribution that industrially focussed optimisation technology can make towards increased efficiency and productivity of local business and industry. WACEIO brings together a number of independent research groups from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Australian Telecommunication Research Institute (ATRI), the Muresk Institute of Agriculture, the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), and various industry partners. This combination of expert researchers proficient in both the applied and fundamental aspects of industrial optimisation brings a unique synergy to the research activities and direction of the Centre. By merging both users and developers of industrial optimisation, WACEIO is the first of its kind in Australia to conduct innovative, industrially relevant, optimisation research and development as well as a range of industry focussed training programs.

The progress that has been made to date is detailed in the links (located in the sidebar). In brief some of our achievements include:

• The establishment of new collaborative links with each of the key focus industries: agriculture and fisheries; mining, petroleum and physical modelling; defence; telecommunications; and transport and logistics.
• The establishment of strong links with a number of leading national and international optimisation research groups. This has resulted in a number of key adjunct appointments and increased opportunity for joint R & D Funding. An example of some recent success is the winning of a grant of $161,000 under the Chinese Higher Education Strategic Initiative (CHESI) scheme of the Commonwealth Government to further research collaboration. This is a joint initiative with the Centre for Informatics and Applied Optimisation (CIAO) at Ballarat.
• The Centre has attracted $1, 355, 275 of external competitive research funding to date. Some of the ARC grants won are linkage grants with WA industry.
• The research team has produced 151 refereed publications in recognised international journals and conference proceedings.
• The strong involvement of the Centre's staff in National and International Conferences. In particularly, the Centre hosted 3 successful research conferences and has had significant input in 7 international conferences. In addition, Centre staff delivered 5 Invited/Plenary lectures at National Conferences and 10 Keynote/Plenary lectures at International Conferences.

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