Dr. Mark S. Boddy

    Research Fellow
    Honeywell Laboratories
    mark.boddy@honeywell.com

    Biography: Dr. Boddy has been a research scientist at the Honeywell Laboratories since 1991. His current research interests include planning and scheduling, constraint satisfaction problems, temporal reasoning, managing risk while planning under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information, and negotiation protocols for distributed problem solving.
    In addition, he has lead or played a major role in the implementation of scheduling systems for applications including Space Shuttle mission operations, manufacturing of printed circuit cards, processor and  communication scheduling for the Boeing 777 Aircraft Information Management System, image data archiving, retrieval, and analysis for the Earth Observing System, batch manufacturing, and  petroleum refinery operations.

    A joint CSE/JDEHP/IE Colloquium
    Tuesday, November 19, 2002.  
    Refreshments shart at 3:20 pm.
    Talk starts at 3:45 pm. Great Hall, Kaufmann Academic Residential Center

    Recent Developments in Hybrid Reasoning for Planning and Scheduling

    Hybrid (mixed discrete/continuous) models are unavoidable in the solution of complex planning and scheduling problems. There are several interesting recent developments in this area. One is the broadening variety of approaches being developed in several different communities for the solution and optimization of hybrid systems. Another is the remarkable degree of progress in handling temporal  and metric constraints demonstrated at the most recent planning competition at AIPS in April of 2002, presumably to be surpassed in Trento 2003.

    So, on the one hand, the AI community has in hand an assortment of increasingly sophisticated ways to extend planning models and algorithms to incorporate continuous constraints. On the other, people working in OR, Chemical Engineering, and other disciplines continue to develop various generic techniques for hybrid systems. In this talk, I will survey, compare, and relate the planning-specific and generic approaches, pointing out strengths and weaknesses in their application to planning and scheduling problems. I will conclude with the identification of some open questions and for further work.

    Lecture at CSCE421/821
    Tuesday, November 19, 2002, 9:30 am
    Ferguson Hall, Room 112

    What Happens When Constraints Meet the Real World

    Lecture's slides
    Recommended reading
    • Temporal Reasonng for Planning and Scheduling in Complex Domains: Lessons Learned. Boddy. Advanced Planning Technology, AAAI Press,1996.
    • Hybrid Reasoning for Complex Systems. Boddy & Krebsbach.  AAAI Fall Symposium on on Model-directed Autonomous Systems, 1997.
    • A New Method for the Global Solution of Large Systems of Continuous Constraint.  Boddy & Johnson. First International Workshop on Global Constrained Optimization and Constraint Satisfaction (Cocos'02), 22002.
    Important pointers
    • Adventium Labs
    • Honeywell Technology
    • Constraint Systems Laboratory
    Acknowledgments

    Computer Science and Engineering, J.D. Edwards Honors Program and Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.