Planning and Scheduling

We are working on various problems related to scheduling and routing, such as vehicle routing, warehouse planning, or educational timetabling. Our work is inspired by real-life problems coming from practice, such as course timetabling in the UniTime system, vehicle routing with Wereldo company, or warehouse planning with Notino company. We solve these problems using metaheuristics, constraint programming, or mixed integer programming.

The main research areas of this group include

which we are solving both static, dynamic or uncertain scheduling and planning problems using methods of artificial intelligence and operations research such as various search algorithms, metaheuristics, integer, or constraint programming. While in classical scheduling, the whole problem is known in advance, in the dynamic or uncertain case, the problem changes over time as the solution is created. Jobs, tasks, transfer requests, as well as resources may appear and disappear (job or request arrivals, machine failures, or vehicle breakdowns) or the parameters of jobs or tasks may change (capacity or travel time changes). Therefore, efficient construction of the schedule and routes with appropriate reactions to uncertain and dynamic changes is requested in the dynamic scheduling or routing problem.

Our recent work concentrates on warehouse planning, which requires consideration of various problems such as order picking or storage manipulation. While storage manipulation focuses on arranging products to maximize space utilization and streamline material handling, managing the order-picking process involves organizing both the orders to be picked and the associated material-handling tasks. We are working on problems with human pickers as well as with robotic pickers, where there are many new research opportunities. We are inspired by the cooperation with Notino company, the industrial partner of our faculty.

We are working on various transportation problems such as freight transportation, optimization for railways, data transfer planning, or scheduling of mobile robots. Freight transportation is related to logistics problems with backgrounds in vehicle routing. We aim to solve the problems from practice, considering large-scale routing problems with rich characteristics. Our work on vehicle routing problems in freight transportation led to the construction of the software which is nowadays used by Wereldo company. Scheduling of mobile robots in the factory involves the transportation of robots, their processing of jobs, and traditional machine scheduling.

University course timetabling solves the problem of finding a suitable timetable for courses taught at the university. Courses are assigned to time slots and available classrooms so that the student's requirements, preferences of teachers as well as the study requirements are all met. A long-term research in this area, together with the collaboration with the Purdue University led to the development of a unique timetabling system, that can solve many timetabling problems of a very large scale. This system, called UniTime, is also applied for timetabling at our university for most of the faculties, including our Faculty of Informatics. We have been also involved in organizing a university course timetabling competition ITC 2019 with about 600 registered users from 66 countries.

Information for students

The areas of planning and scheduling domains of transportation or logistics provide several interesting topics, including both practical and theoretical research. You can join this group by writing a bachelor's or master's thesis or doctoral study. IS MUNI provides topics for the bachelor's or master's thesis. These topics are offered and supervised by the members of this research team. More than that, based on the mutual agreement with the student, it is also possible to create a new topic in the area of our research.

Topics for doctoral students:

Selected topics of master and bachelor thesis:

Collaborations

We cooperate with various teams. Those are especially

Research group

We are members of Sitola research laboratory.

Contact

doc. Mgr. Hana Rudová, PhD.
hanka@fi.muni.cz
https://www.fi.muni.cz/~hanka/