AI Fundamentals: Constraint-Based Production Scheduling

ENTIRE-UCC-002

€7,000
*(100% discounted through de minimus funding for SMEs and public sector organisations)

This Skills Development course will be delivered as an On-site, two day course. Interested attendees can pre-register via this online form available here. The course will take place on the 17th and 18th Feb 2025 in the Western Gateway Building, University College Cork.

This skills development course will be delivered by Helmut Simonis from University College Cork. Helmut Simonis has been working in the field of Constraint Programming since 1986, when he joined the CHIP project at ECRC, an industrial research centre in Munich, Germany. He was technical director of COSYTEC in France from 1990 to 2000, a company focusing on constraint based applications for scheduling, personnel assignment, and transportation problems. In 2000, he joined Parc Technologies, a startup from Imperial College London as a senior research scientist. He also held an appointment at IC-Parc, Imperial College London, before becoming a co-founder of CrossCore Optimization in London. Helmut Simonis joined UCC in 2008.

Helmut Simonis won the best application paper award of the CP conference twice, in 2009 and 2013. He was application track editor of the Constraints Journal, and member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Constraint Programming (ACP). In 2013 and 2014, he served as president of the ACP. In 2022, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award of the ACP. Helmut Simonis holds four patents on Network Management, which are now owned by Cisco Systems. Helmut Simonis has been providing training on Constraint Programming and Scheduling for industrial customers since 1988, he is the author on an on-line course on Constraint Programming, and recently finished a survey of training material for teaching Constraint Programming.

Project and production scheduling is an important element in optimizing performance, reducing cost, and satisfying customer demand in industry. Scheduling solutions can address many problem types in manufacturing, from short-term, reactive operational scheduling to mid
to long term strategic capacity planning. AI based methods, in particular Constraint Programming, provide state-of-the-art solutions to the scheduling problem. 

The skills development course will use a mix of industrial case studies, overview presentations and some hands-on experience with different open-source tools available for constraint-based scheduling. The course will show where scheduling fits in current AI trends, how different constraint types (temporal, resource based, and human related) can be used to describe a scheduling problem, and how a solution can help humans make better decisions.

• Position Constraint-Based Scheduling in the general AI field
• Understand the need for and potential of automated scheduling
• Understand the basic ideas behind Constraint-Based Scheduling
• Identify the different constraint types occurring in scheduling
• Understand the strength and weaknesses of available tools

• Small to Medium Enterprises
• Small mid caps (companies which are larger than an SME and have up to 3000 employees)
• Public sector organisations
• Individuals with specific roles such as:
  • Budget holders
  • Production managers
  • Logistics/Supply Chain Analysts
  • IT Specialists in private and public settings
  • Business Consultants, etc