The adoption of Just in Time and lean manufacturing principles has resulted in the removal of buffers and safety stocks, and an increasing emphasis on the ability to respond rapidly to customer orders. As a consequence, logistics management and IT support have become key issues for the modernising company. Together with these trends, there has been a shift in emphasis from the management of individual nodes in the supply and distribution chain, to the management of flow through the network. In the modern enterprise, the transportation scheduling function is recognised as of vital importance in improving customer delivery service and controlling overall operational costs.
Logistics, resource co-ordination and management are areas in which AIAI has
been involved for some time. In this issue of the internet newsletter we focus
on O-Plan, the Open Planning Architecture. This is a general architecture for
co-ordinated command and control in which different agents have task
assignment, planning and execution monitoring roles. The project began in 1984
and has received support from a number of UK and US government agencies. It is
currently the only non-US project supported by the DARPA/Rome Laboratory
Knowledge Based Planning and Scheduling Initiative.
Guest Editor
Howard Beck h.beck@ed.ac.uk
Group Leader for Planning and Scheduling
or
AIAI information