There has recently been an increased emphasis on reducing energy consumption in manufacturing, driven by the fluctuations in energy costs and the growing importance given to environmental impact of manufactured goods. Lots of attention has been given to the reduction of machine tools energy consumption, as they require large amounts of energy to perform manufacturing tasks. One area that has re...

Advances in information technology and telecommunications, together with ever growing amounts of data, offer opportunities for transportation companies to improve the quality of the service that they provide to their customers. This paper explores this issue in the context of a dynamic and stochastic routing problem in which a single, uncapacitated vehicle serves a set of known customers locati...

Most current-day AI planning systems operate by iteratively refining a partial plan until it meets the goal requirements. In the past five years, significant progress has been made in our understanding of the spectrum and capabilities of such refinement planners. In this talk, I will summarize this understanding in terms of a unified framework for refinement planning and discuss several current...

We study path planning on grids with blocked and unblocked cells. Any-angle path-planning algorithms find short paths fast because they propagate information along grid edges without constraining the resulting paths to grid edges. Incremental pathplanning algorithms solve a series of similar pathplanning problems faster than repeated single-shot searches because they reuse information from the ...

A large body of work exists in process industry supply chain optimisation. We describe the state of the art of research in infrastructure design, modelling and analysis and planning and scheduling, together with some industrial examples. We will consider two network design type problems in more detail and then draw some conclusions about the degree to which different classes of problem have bee...