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SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence
2005 Award Presentation and Lectures

Stephen F. Smith
Research Professor
Director, Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory

Execution-Driven Planning and Scheduling Technologies

Advances in sensing technologies now provide unprecedented ability to obtain and maintain real-time information on the location and status of materials and resources over time. In application areas as diverse as supply chain management, transportation planning and disaster relief it is now truly possible to base planning, scheduling and logistics decisions on actual execution state, offering the possibility for much more informed and responsive organizational decision-making. Yet, most contemporary planning and scheduling tools are not designed for such continuous, �real-time� operations and are not able to take advantage of execution data streams. In this talk, I describe work toward a new class of /execution�driven/ planning and scheduling technologies. These technologies combine two key ideas: (1) the use of dynamic, incremental search techniques, which promote anytime response to evolving execution circumstances and enable planning to keep pace with execution, and (2) the use of flexible plan and schedule representations, which encapsulate execution contingencies and serve to insulate and localize re-planning processes. Because of their inherent incremental nature, execution driven planning and scheduling technologies extrapolate naturally to multi-agent planning and scheduling contexts. They also integrate flexibly with user-imposed constraints and decisions. I will summarize current research progress and results in the design of such systems, and identify outstanding technical challenges.

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