In our everyday lives, we all face decisions where we ask ourselves questions about the best way to do something.  For example:

• “How much of this item should I buy?”
• “What is the best time to do this task?”
• “What is the best way to get from point A to point B?”

These types of decision-making questions, or problems, are known as optimisation problems. For businesses or industries, these types of problems are much more complicated.

In this episode, we explore certain types of optimisation problems known as discrete optimisation problems and how industries and companies use discrete optimisation to make decisions for complex problems.

Our guest is Monash University Professor Peter Stuckey, a pioneer in constraint programming (CP) which is a powerful approach to solving discrete optimisation problems. Professor Stuckey explains why he believes optimisation is the intelligence behind artificial intelligence.

Our host is Dr Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi, a Senior Research Scientist and Team Leader with CSIRO.

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MiniZinc: https://www.minizinc.org/

Publications on MiniZinc by Prof Stuckey: https://www.minizinc.org/people/02_peter.html

VIDEO: OPTIMA Seminar – Combinatorial Optimisation for Multi-Agent Path Finding