PLANET Technology Information Day Prague, May 26, 2003
10:30 - 11:20

Brian Drabble (On Target Systems, United States of America)
Scheduling in the real world what makes it a hard problem?

Abstract

The focus of the presentation will be a survey of several state of the art constraint based scheduling and optimization techniques that are being applied to real world applications in manufacturing, shipbuilding and military mission planning. These techniques are able to significantly reduce scheduling time, significantly increase solution quality and significantly increase the size of the problems that can be handled. The survey will describe the basic algorithms underlying the techniques, their advantages and disadvantages and the types of problem for which they most applicable. In addition to the technical descriptions several small demonstrations will also be provided. The presentation will conclude with details of future research directions and potential new application areas.

Biography

Brian Drabble is Chief Technical Office of On Target Systems (OTS), a research and development company specializing in mission planning, optimization and effects based operations. Prior to forming OTS Brian Drabble was a senior research associate and former Director of the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory at the University of Oregon. From 1988 to 1997 he was a senior member of technical staff in the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Brian Drabble has an extensive background in both basic research and its application to real world problems and applications. He has lead several large scale research projects in planning, scheduling and optimization for groups including DARPA, the Office Naval Research and the US Air force Rome Laboratory. Currently, he is leading several projects in the areas of mission planning, optimization and scheduling for clients including the US Air force, Navy and their allied research labs.