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, AMR, implement, 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.
The doctoral research position is open at the Department of Digital Systems at IMT Lille Douai, University of Lille in France within the Research Project "AGRIFLEETS: Distributed Route Guidance System for Autonomous Coordination of Agriculture Robot Fleets" funded by French National Research Agency (ANR) and including various national and European academic partners from Italy, Spain, and the UK.
The PhD student project is led by Prof. Marin Lujak (IMT Lille Douai) in close collaboration with Prof. Frederic Semet, Deputy Director of CRIStAL (Research center in Computer Science, Signal and Automatic Control of Lille) from the École Centrale de Lille. The expected outcome of the research is a PhD dissertation concerning the development of mathematical models and distributed and scalable multi-agent coordination algorithms for the agriculture fleet vehicle routing problem, a new dynamic and decentralized variant of the vehicle routing problem.
The work contract should start as soon as possible, preferably in November 2020 and should last for three years. The selected PhD student will receive an internationally competitive salary and will be exempt from post-graduate tuition fees.
Eligibility criteria
The candidate is expected to have a Master's Degree or an equivalent in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, or a related field with a strong academic background in Combinatorial Optimization. Furthermore, good programming skills (preferably in IBM ILOG Cplex Studio, MATLAB, and Java) and a good knowledge of written and spoken English are requested.
How to apply
If you wish to apply for this 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) relevant publications (if any) in one PDF file at the following e-mail address: [ marin dot lujak at imt-lille-douai dot fr ] preferably by October 25th 2020. The applications are considered on a rolling basis.
Best regards,
Marin Lujak
Associate Professor
IMT Lille Douai
Phone: +33(0)3 27 71 25 86
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