Opening — Why this matters now Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are excellent at recording what has happened. They are far less impressive at deciding what should happen next. When decision-making involves combinatorial explosions—packing furnaces, sequencing machines, allocating scarce inputs—ERP often falls back on brittle heuristics, slow solvers, or human intuition. None scale gracefully. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Everyone wants LLMs to think harder. Enterprises, however, mostly need them to think correctly — especially when optimization models decide real money, real capacity, and real risk. As organizations scale, optimization problems grow beyond toy examples. Data spills into separate tables, constraints multiply, and naïve prompt‑to‑solver pipelines quietly collapse. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Ports are supposed to be automated. In practice, many of their most critical decisions still depend on a small priesthood of optimization specialists, tribal operational knowledge, and painfully slow deployment cycles. Vehicle Dispatching Systems (VDSs) — the logic that tells fleets of AGVs where to go and when — are a prime example. They promise up to 30% efficiency gains, yet stubbornly resist scaling from one terminal to another. ...
Imagine asking, “Why wasn’t Order A scheduled for production yesterday?” and getting not just an answer, but a causal breakdown, an alternative plan, and a visual comparison — all without involving your operations research (OR) consultant. That’s exactly what SMARTAPS delivers. Built by Huawei researchers, SMARTAPS is a tool-augmented LLM interface for interacting with Advanced Planning Systems (APS) using natural language. It doesn’t try to replace optimization solvers — it simply makes them accessible. In doing so, it redefines how planners interact with complex decision-making models. ...