Thales Research & Technology (TRT), a network of corporate research laboratories of the Thales group, coordinates the research activities at the global level. TRT’s primary mission is to forge links between the company and leading scientific bodies in order to monitor the latest advances, develop disruptive technologies and expertise in new areas, attract talented science graduates and provide a platform for innovation. The corporate research laboratory in France is located on the campus of the École Polytechnique – one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools – and forms part of a complex of world-class research establishments located just south of Paris.

The AI activity at TRT is concerned in the treatment of information chain from its analysis to decision. The analysis of the current situation starts by Natural Language Understanding and the representation of the domain by ontologies. The so-obtained information, possibly contradictory and missing, is synthesized and fused. We then analyze the dynamic evolution of the situation in order to predict the future state thanks to complex event processing or causal reasoning. The previous analysis allows the stakeholders to make a decision, which is to assess the possible options. This assessment can be performed with respect to various and possible conflicting criteria (multi-criteria decision aiding) and with respect to different agents (multi-agent systems). These assessments are used to find the best alternatives using some optimization techniques, such as combinatorial optimization, (motion) planning or black-box optimization. Explainability and validation are key in all these domains.