Artificial Intelligence and Logistics (AILog)

Logistics is concerned with the organization and control of processes in space and time in order to transport or manufacture goods and the coordination of the resulting flows of material and information, as well as monetary flows. In a globalized economy, these processes become increasingly hard to handle: the resulting logistic networks get complex and show great dynamics, which results in partial observability and more and more prevents centralized process planning. Thus, recent trends in logistics point towards solutions with distributed and self-organizing processes, and methods from AI are increasingly used to tackle the emerging spatio-temporal problems.

Also, the use of techniques from AI and cognitive science enables to move from a de-centralized view of cooperating autonomous units to an "emancipated" society of logistic units interacting among themselves and with human agents. Particularly the interaction with humans in logistic processes (with users, system designers, analysts, or other stakeholders) is becoming a crucial in increasingly complex processes.

AILog-2011 is supposed to provide a forum for interdisciplinary research between logistics and AI. Often, researchers in logistics apply interesting AI techniques to solve existing problems, but do not have close contact to the progress of research in this field. Similarly, AI researchers are often not aware of the possibilities to connect their work to state-of-the art logistics.
AILog-2011 is an opportunity to bring together researchers from different disciplines to share and discuss ideas and focus on open problems.