Chers collègues,
Veuillez trouver ci-joint une offre de thèse financée par l’école doctorale Systèmes de Toulouse qui pourrait intéresser vos étudiants. Il s’agit d’une collaboration entre le centre de Génie Industriel de Mines Albi (E. Vareilles) et l’Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (H. Fargier) : https://www.adum.fr/as/ed/voirproposition.pl?site=adumfr&matricule_prop=15028
PhD Context:
Who has never wanted to own a particular product, such as shoes, smart-phone, cosmetic, car, etc., specially designed for him/her, perfectly suited to his/her desires, and affordable ?
For several decades now, customers want to bring a personal touch to their products to make them special and unique. To meet this demand of personalization, companies nowadays no longer offer standard products, but more and more personalizable ones. Thanks to the Web technologies, this personalization is done directly and interactively online. Customers can play with the range of choices and options offered by companies: they can assemble, cut, color, choose, … visualize the result of their desires and ultimately order it, in a few minutes with a few clicks.
This concept of personalization or configuration of products consists in assembling modules or predefined components, to produce a unique and specific product. For businesses, this is a way to offer personalized products to stand out from the competition and build customers’ loyalty through more accurately reflecting their tastes and needs. The major difficulty of personalization or configuration of products lies in managing the diversity offered to customers: how to be sure that all the combinations of choices, variants and options offered to the customers are achievable in a reasonable time and affordable price ?
Work to be done during the PhD:
Product configuration relies on a generic model gathering knowledge about:
— customers requirements and desires on product definition,
— product components including their compatibility and / or incompatibilities (defining the generic bill-of-material),
— product production or manufacturing process.
Constraint satisfaction problems or CSP are very often used to formalize product configuration problems in both research and industry. CSP formalize relevant knowledge through variables, each one associated to a definition domain, linked by constraints, limiting the combinations of their permissible values. Thus, CSP makes it possible to describe exhaustively the solution space, corresponding to a set of all possible products. Two different methods of processing CSP allow to exploit the generic models in an interactive way:
1. problem filtering methods (reasoning directly on the CSP network and removing inconsistent values)
2. solution filtering methods (reasoning on a representation of the solution space in the form of a compiled graph).
Knowing this context, the aim of the PhD is therefore to:
— define a typology of configuration problems and their suitability to the two mentioned interactive methods,
— design, develop and test a joint use of filtering and compilation methods in the same configuration problem,
— validate the proposals on several industrial cases mainly from the automotive sector.
PhD Applicant Profile and General Information:
The candidate with the following interests are welcome:
— knowledge or interest in Operation Research / Constraint Programming
— knowledge or interest in programming (design and implementation),
— interest in knowledge-based systems and design-aiding systems,
— willingness to combine theoretical with practical work,
— good spoken and written communication skills (French and/or English).
An accepted article in a conference on Artificial Intelligence or Industrial Engineering topics would be an advantage.
The PhD student will be directly employed by Mines Albi for 3 years. The salary is approximately 1600 euros per month (net salary), including 64 hours of teaching per year. The PhD thesis is conducted between two teams: the ORKID research team of the Industrial Engineering Lab of Mines Albi and the ADRIA research team of IRIT Toulouse. Therefore, the PhD student’s time will be split between Toulouse and Albi (around 1/3 – 2/3).
Procedure and Contact:
Send your detailed Curriculum Vitae and references to Élise Vareilles and Hélène Fargier highlighting your assets before the end of May 2017. You will be informed rapidly whether you have been selected for an oral presentation, which will take place either in Toulouse or by Skype. The Phd starts at the beginning of October 2017.
Please contact us for more information:
1- Élise Vareilles (ORKID):
— email: elise.vareilles@mines-albi.fr,
— phone: +33.563.493.092
— website: perso.mines-albi.fr/~vareille/
2- Hélène Fargier (ADRIA):
— email: fargier@irit.fr,
— phone: +33.561.558.297
— website: https://www.irit.fr/~Helene.Fargier/
N’hésitez pas à relayer notre offre sur vos réseaux. Deadline : 29 mai 2017
Je suis à votre disposition pour tout complément d’information.
Cordialement,
Élise Vareilles