The research team led by Prof. QU Huamin, Dean of the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), has won the 2026 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award for their paper titled “Automated Constraint Specification for Job Scheduling by Regulating Generative Model With Domain-Specific Representation”. The honor marks the first time this highly competitive award has been received by researchers from HKUST or any institution in the Hong Kong SAR.

Established in 2004, the award recognizes the best paper of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) published in the previous calendar year. It typically honors only one paper from more than 1,200 peer-reviewed articles.

The study focuses on smart manufacturing scheduling driven by generative AI. It presents a constraint-centric architecture that regulates Large Language Models to perform reliable automated constraint specification for production scheduling. The paper was authored by CSE PhD student SHI Yuzhe (co-first author), CSE MPhil graduate LI Yanjia, and collaborators from Peking University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

This research received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, as well as support from the PKU-HEC Joint Lab for Industrial Intelligence.