Planning, Scheduling and Constraint Reasoning

ECAI 2002 Workshop
July 23, 2002
Lyon
France

Outline

Many companies have scheduling, assignment, supply chain and other problems that could be solved with a constraint programming (CP) toolkit. Although the solution of these problems is of vital commercial importance, CP toolkits are not widely used because there is insufficient expertise available to model and solve problems as constraint programs.

One major problem is the distance between simple binary constraint networks studied in many (but by no means all) academic papers and the complex constraint models used in practice. Real-world applications include non-binary constraints, specialized constraints, and irregular constraint graphs and domain sizes. In addition, problems are often over-constrained and the user has preferences for which constraints to relax. Finally, whilst much work in algorithm development is for satisfaction problems, many problems met in practice are naturally optimization problems.

When given a real-world application, one has to take two major, and closely related, decisions: how to model the considered problem, and how to solve the proposed model. Problem modelling cannot be separated from problem solving. Many modelling decisions have a direct impact on the kind of techniques that can be used by the solving method. This workshop will therefore address modelling and solving jointly, looking for the most efficient way to solve real-world complex applications.

This is the third workshop in the series. Previous workshops have been held alongside IJCAI 2001 and ECAI 2000. There have also been related workshops at CP 2001, IJCAI 1999 and ECAI 1998. See links for more details.

Miguel A. Salido
msalido@dsic.upv.es