Robots gain more capabilities every year, yet the use of planning methods to determine the overall behavior is still the exception rather than the norm. A robotics planning competition (in 2017) could foster mutual and closer cooperation between the planning and robotics communities. A first domain could be based on the RoboCup Logistics League in simulation. We propose this as a challenge to t...

In this paper, we study a logistics problem arising in military transport planning. A military organization operates a large fleet of vehicles in a depot to serve the requests of various operational units. Each request has a fixed start and end time, and is served by a prescribed number of vehicles. We address the following two problems: (1) how many vehicles are at least needed to meet a given...

This chapter reports the findings of a questionnaire survey on the adoption and utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) – an important tool to enhance efficiency and responsiveness in modern-day supply chains – in the Chinese third-party logistics (3PL) industry. As a global manufacturing base, China has a burgeoning 3PL industry serving a large number of domestic firms as...

Future crewed missions to Mars present a maintenance logistics challenge that is unprecedented in human spaceflight. Mission endurance – defined as the time between resupply opportunities – will be significantly longer than previous missions, and therefore logistics planning horizons are longer and the impact of uncertainty is magnified. Maintenance logistics forecasting typically assumes that ...

U. S. Army Policy is outpacing technology capability in the requirements for systems’ prognostics. During the past five years, research and development (RBD) has been ongoing in the area of component prognostic techniques in laboratories, universities, and industry. The R&D has resulted in point solutions to specific items, but in general, they are expensive and provide limited system-level inf...

In all industries, competition between business organizations is vital to utilize collaborative logistics for planning, forecasting and efficient customer response to optimize the supply chain. Consequently, numerous business organizations build coalitions among themselves making their partnerships

We analyze the integrated tactical capacity planning of spare parts supply and workforce allocation in maintenance logistics of advanced equipment. The equipment time-to-failure, spare parts replenishment time, and equipment repair time are random and independent of each other.

The military logistics community requires a scalable, high fidelity simulation capability for modeling the detailed, dynamic, logistics activities of a distributed military organization. Furthermore, such detailed logistics simulations could be coupled with existing combat simulations to understand better the impact of logistics activities upon combat operations. BBN is developing a scalable, a...

The execution of field operations by a fleet of cooperating machines needs to be carefully planned, in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Hence, it is necessary to describe these operations with mathematical models that can be used for optimal planning. The complexity of agricultural operations makes such modeling difficult. Important variables for planning, such as logistics for crop yield, ...

sion diagrams (BDDs) to compactly represent world states in a planning problem and efficiently explore the underlying state space. It was the first general planning system based on model-checking methods. It can handle the STRIPS subset of the PDDL language and some additional features from ADL, namely, negative preconditions and (universal) conditional effects. At the Fifth International Confe...