The conference “Decision making with AI in the industry” took place on the 19th of March online, organized by the European Supply Chain Forum (ESCF), together with the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI). The conference brought together more than 200 members from both the academia and practice across the warehousing, transportation and biomanufacturing industries, showcasing the applicability and versatility of AI methods to decision-making and overall process optimization in industrial settings.
Program AI planner of the future
Prof. Tom Van Woensel, the Director of ESCF and Director of education at the Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (IE&IS) kicked off the session with a presentation on the “AI planner of the future” program bound to start in September 2021 and last for at least five years. The IE& IS program is focused on both the technical and human aspects in the context of AI planning for supply chains and logistics while considering “people, profit, and the planet”.
Smart Warehousing
Monique van den Broek gave a lecture about Smart Warehousing: Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligence in retail and e-commerce distribution centers. Mrs. Van den Broek is Principal Consultant at CQM, a company that helps organizations unroll the intricacies of their processes and then builds frameworks for decision making based on factual information and quantitative models.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for train shunting
Dr. Wan-Jui Lee, an AI Researcher at Dutch Railways (NS), gave a presentation on the research the company is doing on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for train shunting. He explained what models are being developed and used for train shunting, and which methods work well on this challenge. NS is a company involved in long-term R&D cooperation with several universities.
Animal Health Improves Bio-Manufacturing Efficiency
The last presentation of the conference was given by Dr. Tugce Martagan, an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her presentation ‘Animal Health improves Bio-Manufacturing Efficiency’ was focused on the collaboration with MSD Animal Health towards developing optimization models and decision support tools to improve biomanufacturing efficiency.
An extensive report on the AI Conference is available here.