In this meeting of the AI Seminar Series, Dr. Andrea Rendl will give a short talk on modelling stochastic problems with MiniZinc.

Title: Stochastic MiniZinc

Speaker: Dr. Andrea Rendl

When: Tuesday, 29th April 11 AM - 12 NOON

Where: Doug McDonnell-10.05

Abstract:
Combinatorial optimisation problems often contain uncertainty that has to be taken into account to produce realistic solutions. However, existing modelling systems either do not support uncertainty, or do not support combinatorial features, such as integer variables and non-linear constraints. In this talk, we present an extension of the MiniZinc modelling language that supports uncertainty. Stochastic MiniZinc enables modellers to express combinatorial stochastic problems at a high level of abstraction, independent of the stochastic solving approach. These models are translated automatically into different solver-level representations. Stochastic MiniZinc provides the first solving technology agnostic approach to stochastic modelling we are aware of.

Bio:
Andrea is a researcher in NICTA's Optimisation Research Group (ORG) since November 2013, where she is focussing on integrating uncertainty into the ORG optimization platform. From 2010-2013, Andrea worked on applied research- projects dealing with problems from transportation and logistics at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna, Austria. She received her PhD in Constraint Programming from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK in 2010 on automatically enhancing constraint model formulations.

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