Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence 14 (2001) 265267

Preface

Articial intelligence and soft computing for planning

and scheduling: how to eciently solve
more realistic problems...

Planning and scheduling have always had at the same

time close and loose links. In its Articial Intelligence
meaning, Planning can be dened as building a sequence
of activities to reach a goal. Scheduling aims at
positioning activities through time, taking into account
various types of constraints, including resource constraints. These two elds are apparently complementary,
but have for a long time been considered by dierent
research communities, interested in dierent problems
and often using dierent methods. This is less and less
true: the interest of the two communities for more or less
new methods, related to Articial Intelligence, to
Operational research or to Combinatorial Optimisation
according to the opinions, has somehow strengthened
the links between these two elds. In both cases the use
of these methods has spectacularly increased during the
last years, and they have allowed to solve eciently
more realistic problems.
Classifying or giving labels to these methods is a
tricky } and perhaps futile } task, since the denition
of the boxes where to put them often needs to be
adjusted according to their content. Some of these
methods aim at solving Combinatorial Optimisation
problems, and can for instance be applied to Operational Research, e.g. meta-heuristics like Tabu search or
Simulated Annealing. If it is considered that a Combinatorial Optimisation method optimises a criterion, this
label is not adequate since these methods do not
necessarily lead to an optimum. Other methods can be
considered as coming from the Articial Intelligence
area, considered as a set of methods and techniques
allowing to imitate human abilities, like Fuzzy Logic,
Neural Networks, Case-Based Reasoning or even
Constraint Propagation. Nevertheless, most of these
techniques set into question the commonly used
boundaries between existing elds: Genetic Algorithms
are a multi-heuristic approach to Combinatorial Optimisation problems like Tabu Search and Simulated

Annealing, but is also relevant from Articial Intelligence or at least from Articial Life. The Multi-agent
paradigm is often seen as an implementation of
distributed Articial Intelligence but it can be considered as well as an extension of analysis/design methods
for computer science, like object-oriented methods...
Whatever the classication (and the term Soft
Computing may provide an exit to this problem, even
if not very pertinent for optimisation methods), the use
of these methods has opened new horizons to the
planning and scheduling research. This special issue
aims at illustrating these new possibilities.
AI techniques have been intensively applied in order
to dene computerised methods for building plans. In
real applications, Planning is often characterised by an
incomplete observability of the considered system state
and by the uncertainty of the eects of an action: these
characteristics have so rapidly led to use of probabilistic
approaches. Nevertheless, an important gap could be
noticed in the literature between the ambition to
solve dicult and complex problems and the trivial
illustrating examples which were used. The arrival to
maturity of the above mentioned solving methods (and
others) has changed this, and AI planning is now an
important challenge for the future by its expected ability
to give more exibility to automated systems. Mobile
robots are an important application area of AI
planning, and a representative example has been
included in this special issue. Nevertheless, many other
elds, from the strategic to the operational level,
are now accessible: we have tried to illustrate some of
them here.
Scheduling has always been an important area of
Operational Research but also, with the necessity to
optimise manufacturing productivity and lead times, a
very active eld in industrial software design. Therefore,
until the last decade, a poor fertilisation could be
noticed between OR techniques and industrial sched-

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Preface / Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence 14 (2001) 265267

ulers: many OR were oriented on nding the optimal

solution according to a single performance criterion,
whereas mainly heuristic approaches were used in
industrial products in order to support the workshop
manager by providing quickly an acceptable solution.
Acceptable means providing a sucient satisfaction
for several performance criteria, but also satisfying
temporal or technological complex constraints which
could hardly be taken into account by OR techniques.
New elds of scheduling can now be tackled and, as we
shall see, wider sets of constraints can be taken
into account and new problems can be now addressed,
like hoist scheduling or real time scheduling. The
selection of articles made for this special issue does not
pretend to build an exhaustive panel of the use of the AI
and Soft Computing techniques for Planning and
Scheduling. Its only ambition is to illustrate how more
realistic problems can be addressed using these methods.
Both review and application papers have been chosen:
the rst ones in order to give a global view on new
research directions; the later ones for showing practically how the methods can successfully solve real world
problems.
The article of van Wezel and Jorna is a good
introduction to this special issue. Under the pretext of
a reection on planning } the planning activity involves
several activities that must be planned. . . Are these two
levels similar? } it situates opportunistically planning
and scheduling, gives a cognitive perspective on planning and situates the contribution of Articial Intelligence on that eld.
Most of the following articles show that articial
intelligence or soft computing techniques do not only
provide solving methods, but rst of all modelling tools
allowing to better describe the defaults of the information in real world applications. R!egis Sabbadin gives a
review on methods that can be used when planning is
seen as a multi-stage decision under uncertainty. He
outlines the interest of Possibilistic Markov Decision
Processes compared to stochastic ones, with an academic illustration on robot movements. Extensions to
partially observable environments are suggested, showing that planning does not anymore require the
simplifying hypothesis which set into question its
application to real complex problems. Other approaches
to Planning are possible: it is seen by Miguel et al. as a
Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), which is nowadays a very promising and ecient approach. Hard
constraints being considered as too restrictive for
modelling real world problems, Planning in a dynamical
environment is seen as a dynamic exible CSP. A hot
real world planning application for the next future is
addressed by Pasquier et al.: a eet of vehicles planning
their journey opportunistically according to a changing
demand. A heuristic solution based on the Blackboard
approach is suggested here.

In the article of Aylett et al., AI planning technologies

are used to generate plant operating procedures for a
chemical process plant. An important eort is required
to generate such procedures manually: an automated
generation is made possible by a set of methods that
combine knowledge-based inference systems and constraint propagation.
Chang and Angkasith describe in their article an
operational short term planning problem: the sequencing of cutting operations. Applications of neural
networks to planning and scheduling are often based
on perceptron models, which require to get solved
examples in order to teach the network. This article
shows that the learning phase can be made useless by
using the natural property of Hopeld neural networks
to minimise their energy function. In that case, the point
is to model the problem in order to make possible an
analogy between the energy of the network and the
function to optimise: as a matter of fact, modelling the
problem according to the chosen solving method is
always a crucial phase in the use of the above mentioned
methods.
The short paper of Lazansky et al. is a bridge between
planning and scheduling: choices are made on the
activities to be planned, but time and resource capacities
are also managed by the suggested system. Like often,
the use of the multi-agent approach is justied by the
distributed nature of the problem. The multi-agent
approach provides so a paradigm allowing to solve the
problem by its modelling: the agents represent the actors
of the manufacturing planning (project planner, project
manager, production agents) and the discussions which
are necessary for production planning are modelled by
communication strategies between agents.
Chanas and Kasperski address here a pure scheduling
problem. Again, the used method } here fuzzy logic }
allows to better model reality by describing uncertain
processing times and exible due dates. The ability of
fuzzy logic to model both imprecise/uncertain data and
preferences has been intensively used in scheduling
during the last years. The article of Fargier and
Lamothe, dealing with the dicult problem of
hoist scheduling, also shows that fuzzy constraints not
only allow to better represent the exibility of real
world constraints, but also make the solving method
more ecient. Increased modelling capacities are not
always synonym to increased diculties to solve the
problem.
I hope that this panorama will illustrate both the great
variety of problems that can now be addressed in the
elds of Planning and Scheduling, and the important
evolution of the so-called Articial Intelligence or softcomputing techniques: even if the rst idea of Articial
Intelligence was to imitate human reasoning through
knowledge-based systems, most of the actual applications have their eciency in their ability to learn from or

Preface / Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence 14 (2001) 265267

to use less structured information. The growing interest

in Knowledge Capitalisation, Return of Experiment and
Data Mining show that this tendency is far from being
at its end.

267

B. Grabot
ENITLGP, 47, Avenue dAzereix, BP 1629,
F-65016 Tarbes, France
E-mail address: bernard@enit.fr