Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory

Problems of large-scale coordination and logistics are ubiquitous, and better solutions are becoming increasingly critical in many domains. In manufacturing, trends toward industrial globalization and constrained market focus on high value-adding products, together with new coordination concepts such as electronic marketplaces, require organizations to become more agile. Military command and control infra-structure is faced with shrinking budgets and personnel, even though current geopolitical realities demand improved capability for rapid crisis-action mission planning and deployment. The rising cost of health care places a premium on more efficient methods for administration and delivery.

Intelligent systems technologies provide new opportunities for addressing such problems of large-scale planning, scheduling and control. The Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory (ICLL) is developing new theories, techniques and software technologies that capitalize on these opportunities and enable flexible, robust, efficient, and high quality management and control of complex organizations. Our research is tackling fundamental technological challenges relating to problem complexity and solution/system scalability, decision-making under diverse and complex constraints, time-stressed decision-making in dynamic domains, human-computer collaboration, multi-agent and distributed decision-making, and solution/system reconfigurability, reuse and self-improvement. Methodologically, our research is driven by the requirements and complexities of actual applications; we are developing, validating and transitioning intelligent planning and scheduling tools in a variety of application contexts spanning manufacturing management, transportation logistics, and space mission planning.