Event

Research Seminar: Models and Exact Algorithms for Solving Real-World Scheduling Problems. The CP Optimizer approach

  • Conférencier  Philippe Laborie, IBM France Lab, Gentilly

  • Lieu

    Room E004, JFK Building 29 Avenue J.F. Kennedy L-1855 Kirchberg

    LU

Abstract: Classical scheduling problems (like the job-shop or the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling problem) are among the most difficult problems studied in Combinatorial Optimization. Still, they are far from accounting for all the complexity of real-world scheduling applications. For more than 20 years, our team at ILOG (now IBM) has developed and integrated a large panel of techniques from Artificial Intelligence (Constraint Programming, Temporal Reasoning, Learning, …) and Operations Research (Mathematical Programming, Graph algorithms, Local Search, …) to solve our customers most complex scheduling problems. These works have led to the design of CP Optimizer, a generic solver based on a very expressive (but still, quite concise) mathematical modeling language to formulate real-world scheduling problems. The models are solved with an automatic search algorithm that is exact, efficient, robust and continuously improving. This seminar will give an overview of CP Optimizer illustrated by some examples.

Philippe Laborie is a Principal Scientist at IBM. He is one of the main designers of the mathematical modeling language for scheduling problems offered in CPLEX Optimization Studio and a significant contributor to the underlying automatic search algorithm. He graduated from Telecom ParisTech in 1992, and received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from LAAS/CNRS (Toulouse) on the integration of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling in 1995. Before joining IBM/ILOG in 1998, he worked at Electricité de France (Paris) and INRIA/IRISA (Rennes) on the Supervision and Diagnosis of complex systems (telecommunication and power distribution networks). His main scientific interests include planning, scheduling, supervision and diagnosis of complex systems and more generally, all decision problems dealing with time. He received the 2011 ICAPS Influential paper award. Philippe is member of the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and serves in the Program Committee of many conferences in AI (IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, ICAPS, CP, CPAIOR, …).