Planning and Operations Research (Dagstuhl Seminar 18071)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar
18071 "Planning and Operations Research". The seminar brought together
researchers in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Planning,
Constraint Programming, and Operations Research. All three areas have
in common that they deal with complex systems where a huge space of
interacting options makes it almost impossible to humans to take
optimal or even good decisions. From a historical perspective,
operations research stems from the application of mathematical methods
to (mostly) industrial applications while planning and constraint
programming emerged as subfields of artificial intelligence where the
emphasis was traditionally more on symbolic and logical search
techniques for the intelligent selection and sequencing of actions to
achieve a set of goals. Therefore operations research often focuses on
the allocation of scarce resources such as transportation capacity,
machine availability, production materials, or money, while planning
focuses on the right choice of actions from a large space of
possibilities. While this difference results in problems in different
complexity classes, it is often possible to cast the same problem as an
OR, CP, or planning problem. In this seminar, we investigated the
commonalities and the overlap between the different areas to learn from
each other's expertise, bring the communities closer together, and
transfer knowledge about solution techniques that can be applied in all
areas.