University of Basel R&D Center

Our research is focused on the development of algorithms and tools for intelligent problem solving. We are interested in all kinds of combinatorial search and optimization problems, with a particular focus on the area of automated planning, the problem of finding a course of action that changes the current state of the world to one that satisfies the planning agent's goals and objectives.

Planning problems come in many shapes and guises, and planning techniques can be applied to problems as diverse as solving combinatorial puzzles, scheduling ground traffic at an airport, controlling intelligent manufacturing plants, verifying the security of communication protocols or the correctness of software and hardware designs, and computing the evolutionary distance of genomes.

Finding solutions to such problems is computationally hard because of fast-growing state spaces. Therefore, a major challenge in search and optimization is to find intelligent ways to handle large state spaces.