Integration of Rules and Optimization in Plant PowerOps
Filippo Focacci (ILOG S.A., France)
(joint work with Thomas Bousonville, Claude Le Pape, Wim Nuijten, Frederic Paulin, Jean-Francois Puget, Anna Robert, Alireza Sadeghin)

Abstract:

Plant PowerOps (PPO) is a new ILOG product, based on business rules and optimization technology, dedicated to production planning and detailed scheduling for manufacturing. This paper describes how PPO integrates a rule based system with the optimization engines and the graphical user interface. The integration proposed is motivated by the need to allow business users to manage unexpected changes in their environment. It provides a flexible interface for configuring, maintaining and tuning the system and for managing optimization scenarios. The proposed approach is discussed via several use cases we encountered in practice in supply chain management. Nevertheless, we believe that most of the ideas described in this paper apply in almost any area of optimization application.

Biography:

As Principal Scientist of the Research and Development department at ILOG, Dr. Filippo Focacci is technical leader in the design and development of ILOG Plant PowerOps, a new Advanced Planning and Scheduling product dedicated to production planning and detailed scheduling for the process industry. From 1996 to 2003, he was successively optimization engineer at Oracle Corp., senior consultant and consulting manager at ILOG where he participated to the development of many industrial applications in different optimization domains. He received in 2000 a PhD in Computer Science from the Universita' di Ferrara, and he is co-author over thirty operations research publications on international journals, conferences and books. He served in the program committee of CP-AI-OR and CP conferences.