Workshop: A Conversation Between AI and OR on Sequential Decision Making,held at Rutgers University, Spring 2012.

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty arises in problems that span transportation and logistics, energy, health and military operations. Real-world instances of these problems are fundamentally intractable, beyond the reach of our most powerful computers. Parallel research among communities such as operations research and computer science has produced a diversity of algorithmic strategies that offer unique features, but significant language and notational barriers have limited the sharing of ideas. This workshop will consist of a series of conversations so that leading professionals, post-docs and students from both communities will better learn the languages of both communities. A major activity will be the design of challenge problems that benefit from the combined skills of both communities. For example, the problem of optimizing fleets of UAVs is a problem class that would be solved in very different ways by each community. Computer scientists tend to solve these as swarms of loosely coordinated, independent agents. Operations researchers have the tools to optimize these fleets using large-scale optimization, reflecting the perspective of a single controller. If successful, the workshop will lead to avenues for improved collaboration between the operations research and computer science communities, including a roadmap for future collaboration between the two research communities. Ultimately this should lead to increased capabilities for solving problems that have been intractable up to now by exploiting the unique skills that each community brings, most prominently the computational power of machine learning and mathematical programming.