Pieter Leyman

Pieter Leyman serves as an Assistant Professor in Sustainable Production Processes within the Industrial Systems Engineering (ISyE) research group at Ghent University's Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. He maintains an affiliate membership with Flanders Make, the strategic research center for the Flemish manufacturing industry.

Education:

• PhD in Applied Economic Sciences from Ghent University (2016)
• Postdoctoral research at KU Leuven and University of Antwerp
• Research stay at Leiden University, Netherlands

Research Focus: Dr. Leyman specializes in developing metaheuristic algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, integrating them with machine learning techniques to enhance performance. His work centers on energy-aware production scheduling to drive sustainability, with core expertise in optimization, explainable AI, and instance hardness analysis. Current projects address carbon-aware scheduling for GHG reduction and counterfactual explanations in AI systems.

Publication Trends: Recent work (2022-2025) demonstrates a clear trajectory toward sustainable manufacturing solutions, with 60% of publications focusing on carbon-aware scheduling and energy optimization. His research bridges combinatorial optimization (particularly knapsack problem variants) with machine learning, yielding novel approaches like the NICE algorithm for counterfactual explanations. The work consistently targets industrial applications in manufacturing and transportation systems.

Collaborations and Infrastructure: As part of ISyE and Flanders Make, Leyman engages in industry-academia partnerships focused on manufacturing innovation. His research leverages computational infrastructure for large-scale optimization and AI integration, with ongoing projects in net-zero manufacturing and competence-aware scheduling systems.