Explainable Industrial Optimizers

DELMIA Quintiq develops widely used optimizers providing high-quality solutions across a breadth of industries. Human planners, as users of the optimizers, possess substantial soft knowledge, which is often difficult or expensive to capture in mathematical optimization algorithms. The aim of the Explainable Industrial Optimizers project is to promote cooperative planning by the human users and the algorithms. One of the central features to support such cooperation is explainability, i.e., the ability to explain why a given solution was proposed. As the DELMIA Quintiq optimizers lack explainability, the goal is to enhance them with this feature.

Inspired by progress in Explainable Artificial Intelligence as well as triggered by customer demand, the goal is to develop methods applicable to very large-scale neighbourhood search enhanced with various meta-heuristic techniques. Given the difficulty to explain results of this class of algorithms, a first path that is considered is to explain the proposed solutions rather than logic behind the search. As a first application area for explainability, the broadly used Master Product Schedule optimizer in Company Planner is a prime candidate.

In this project you’ll be doing cutting-edge research on the border of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. You’ll be working at DELMIA Quintiq’s Den Bosch headquarters in an industrial environment, close to the practical use of the to-be-developed technology. DELMIA Quintiq provides a challenging environment within which you will be working with a highly experienced team of Combinatorial Optimization experts.

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