[agents] [jobs] Funded 3-year Post-Doc position (work contract) at IMT Lille Douai, France: Combinatorial Optimization and Multi-Agent Systems applied to the agriculture robot fleet coordination

[Marin Lujak]

AGRIFLEETS: Distributed Route Guidance System for Autonomous Coordination of Agriculture Robot Fleets 



The Post-Doc researcher will work in a research team with a PhD student to be contracted within the AGRIFLEETS research project (funded by French National Research Agency - ANR) led by Prof. Marin Lujak (IMT Lille Douai) in close collaboration with Prof. Frederic Semet from the Ecole Centrale de Lille and various renowned national and European academic partners from Italy, Spain, and the UK. The Post-Doc research position is open at the Department of Digital Systems at IMT Lille Douai, University of Lille in France. 



Context. The need for sustainable agriculture has led to the recent introduction of Agriculture Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Precision Agriculture (PA) that makes the practice of farming more accurate and efficient. The AMR research so far has focused on a single robot and its agriculture-specific capabilities. Very little work has been done in the domain of distributed, efficient, and scalable real-time agriculture vehicle fleet coordination in general and AMR fleet coordination in particular, considering the overall fleet performance as well as tactical and operational real-time vehicle, implement, raw material, and crop cultivating constraints. This topic is of utmost importance in the case of corporate agriculture where conglomerates with heterogeneous agriculture vehicle fleets operate large lands with precision farming. Fully autonomous farming, with multiple AMRs running and coordinating simultaneously with one another in the same farm, is still an open challenge. Advances in ICT and agriculture technologies allow for a higher level of autonomy of AMR fleets where integrated decision-making potential at present is unrealised. With the objective to increase the opportunity for autonomy in agriculture fleets, in the AGRIFLEETS project, we study dynamic and decentralized coordination of agriculture fleets and develop a distributed route guidance system for autonomous coordination of AMR fleets. The expected outcome of the research will be the development of distributed and scalable algorithms for dynamic and decentralized agriculture fleet vehicle routing and coordination followed by the development of a multi-agent based decentralized vehicle fleet coordination architecture and the integration of the dynamic AMR allocation and routing modules into the architecture and the overall simulation testing. 



The work contract should start as soon as possible, preferably in November 2020 and should last for three years with an internationally competitive salary. 



Eligibility criteria 

The candidate is expected to have a PhD Degree in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, or a related field with a strong academic background in Combinatorial Optimization and programming (preferably in IBM ILOG Cplex Studio, MATLAB and Java). A good knowledge of written and spoken English are required. 



How to apply 

If you wish to apply for this Post-Doc researcher work contract, you are kindly asked to send the following in the same order: 1) motivation letter with research interests and goals, 2) CV, 3) three recommendation letters with respective contacts, 4) copies of your diplomas and transcripts, 5) certificates, and 6) three relevant publications in one PDF file at the following e-mail: [ marin dot lujak at imt-lille-douai dot fr ] preferably by October 26th 2020. The applications are considered on a rolling basis. 







Best regards, 




Marin Lujak 

Associate Professor 

IMT Lille Douai 

http://marinlujak.eu 



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