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Preface
Annealing, but is also relevant from Articial Intelligence or at least from Articial Life. The Multi-agent
paradigm is often seen as an implementation of
distributed Articial Intelligence but it can be considered as well as an extension of analysis/design methods
for computer science, like object-oriented methods...
Whatever the classication (and the term Soft
Computing may provide an exit to this problem, even
if not very pertinent for optimisation methods), the use
of these methods has opened new horizons to the
planning and scheduling research. This special issue
aims at illustrating these new possibilities.
AI techniques have been intensively applied in order
to dene computerised methods for building plans. In
real applications, Planning is often characterised by an
incomplete observability of the considered system state
and by the uncertainty of the eects of an action: these
characteristics have so rapidly led to use of probabilistic
approaches. Nevertheless, an important gap could be
noticed in the literature between the ambition to
solve dicult and complex problems and the trivial
illustrating examples which were used. The arrival to
maturity of the above mentioned solving methods (and
others) has changed this, and AI planning is now an
important challenge for the future by its expected ability
to give more exibility to automated systems. Mobile
robots are an important application area of AI
planning, and a representative example has been
included in this special issue. Nevertheless, many other
elds, from the strategic to the operational level,
are now accessible: we have tried to illustrate some of
them here.
Scheduling has always been an important area of
Operational Research but also, with the necessity to
optimise manufacturing productivity and lead times, a
very active eld in industrial software design. Therefore,
until the last decade, a poor fertilisation could be
noticed between OR techniques and industrial sched-
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