Pukyong National University

Team Reboot, a Faculty Startup of Pukyong National University, Selected for New Project under the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries’ Deep-Tech Transformation Technology Development Program

- Launches development of a project on the future of maritime procurement and supply driven by a Busan-based AI agent

- Industry？academia consortium led by Team Reboot with participation from Pukyong National University and Pusan National University, backed by a total project budget of KRW 2.75 billion

Team Reboot Co., Ltd., an AI startup founded by faculty members of Pukyong National University and led by CEO Sung-Cheol Choi, has been selected for a new project under the 2026 Deep-Tech Transformation Technology Development Program organized by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries (MOF) and the Korea Institute of Marine Science & Technology Promotion (KIMST).

The selected project, titled “Development of an AI Agent-Based Platform for Autonomous Decision-Making in Ship Supply Procurement and Distribution and Integrated Optimization of Maritime Logistics,” will be led by Team Reboot as the principal research and development organization. Research teams led by Professors Yoon-Je Jung and Tae-Sun Yoo of the Division of Systems Management and Engineering at Pukyong National University, along with the research team of Professor Do-Won Kim from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pusan National University, will participate as collaborative research institutions. The project will be carried out for approximately two years and nine months, from April 2026 through December 2028, with a total project budget of KRW 2.75 billion, including KRW 1.925 billion in government funding.

Korea is the world’s fifth-largest maritime nation, operating more than 1,800 oceangoing vessels and supported by over 100 ship management companies. Although the domestic ship supply procurement market is estimated to exceed KRW 1 trillion annually, most small and medium-sized ship management companies still rely on manual processes based on emails and spreadsheets. Due to the limited utilization of data within legacy ERP systems, decisions related to procurement, inventory management, and logistics have largely depended on the experience and intuition of individual managers. As a result, structural issues such as excessive emergency shipments, shortages of critical spare parts, and overstocking have persisted throughout the industry.

Through this project, Team Reboot aims to develop a platform that addresses this “Decision Intelligence Gap.” The goal is to create a Data-to-Decision platform that automatically converts unstructured documents―including emails, Excel files, Word documents, and PDFs―into actionable data for multi-vessel, multi-item ship supply procurement and distribution operations. The platform will integrate demand forecasting, lead-time prediction, estimated time of arrival (ETA) forecasting, and inventory and logistics optimization to automatically recommend when, what, how much, where, and by which transportation mode supplies should be delivered.

CEO Sung-Cheol Choi of Team Reboot stated, “This project marks the starting point of an AI-driven transformation of Busan’s maritime industry. Going beyond simple automation, we aim to build an autonomous procurement system in which AI agents can make decisions and execute tasks independently.”

A key technical component of the project is the development of a multi-layer inventory and logistics optimization engine capable of simultaneously addressing constraints unique to the maritime industry. Ships are treated as “moving warehouses,” creating a complex optimization problem involving multiple factors, including strict time-window constraints that allow supplies to be delivered only when vessels are in port, lead-time uncertainty caused by fluctuations in estimated time of arrival (ETA), and transportation mode selection based on a 30-kilogram threshold.

The Team Reboot consortium plans to implement a series of world-class technologies throughout the project, including △scenario-based stochastic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) △real-time replanning through Rolling Horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC) when ETA information is updated △Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) △autonomous constraint relaxation using multi-agent AI systems.

The research team led by Professor Yoon-Je Yu of Pukyong National University has continuously conducted industry？academia collaborative research with Team Reboot as part of the ICAN Project Group supported by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP). In this project, the team will take primary responsibility for the core research components, including uncertainty modeling (WP2), integrated inventory and logistics optimization (WP3), and real-time replanning (WP4). Professor Yoon-Je Yu stated, “The probabilistic optimization framework based on Port-call Fulfillment has the potential to become a foundational technology not only for the ship supply domain but also for a wide range of mobile asset supply optimization applications, including offshore plants, military logistics, and island transportation systems.” Meanwhile, the research team led by Professor Tae-Sun Yoo at the same university will be responsible for procurement mechanism design (WP5). The team plans to develop technologies such as multi-attribute reverse auctions that account for ETA uncertainty, combinatorial reverse auctions (WDP) for optimizing bundled deliveries, and CVaR-based automated bidding systems designed to mitigate tail-risk exposure. Through these innovations, the project aims to transform conventional procurement practices centered on the lowest bid into a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) optimization framework that incorporates risk considerations.

The research team led by Professor Do-Won Kim of Pusan National University will be responsible for multi-agent AI-based complex service scheduling (WP6). In operations involving vessels linked to Arctic shipping routes, ships often must simultaneously carry out ship supply loading, MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) services, and eco-friendly bunkering within a limited port stay. In such cases, conflicts frequently arise among safety regulations (such as prohibiting hot work within a 50-meter radius of bunkering operations), spatial constraints (including overlapping movements of barges and cranes), and time constraints (such as departure deadlines), creating deadlock situations. The project aims to achieve an autonomous deadlock resolution rate of over 80% while reducing vessel port stay time by more than 20%. To accomplish this, Professor Kim’s team will develop a four-agent pipeline consisting of Command, Repair Modeling, Self-Debugging, and Human-in-the-Loop agents. Unlike conventional optimization solvers that simply return an “infeasible” result and terminate when no feasible solution can be found, this AI-agent framework will autonomously transform certain hard constraints into soft constraints and generate practical compromise solutions that remain executable under real-world operating conditions.

Since its establishment in 2023, Team Reboot has developed and commercialized a range of AI-powered solutions, including askyour.trade, an AI-based trade document automation platform; askyour.work, an AI agent-driven workflow automation platform; and RB-Opt D2O, an industrial optimization platform. The newly selected project represents a large-scale initiative to transfer and expand the core technologies of these three platforms into the maritime domain and is expected to serve as a springboard for entry into major ship management hubs in Northeast Asia, including Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as the broader global market. The global ship management software market is projected to reach USD 1.2 billion by 2033, while a Decision Intelligence solution specialized for ship supply procurement and management has yet to emerge in the global market.

CEO Sung-Cheol Choi stated, “We expect askyour.ship to become a maritime AX (AI Transformation) platform that begins in Busan and expands to the global stage. Through industry？academia collaborative research with Pukyong National University and Pusan National University, we will cultivate at least six master’s- and doctoral-level specialists in AI and optimization convergence technologies, while also contributing to the enhancement of digital capabilities across Busan’s maritime industry cluster.” <Pukyong Today>