Constraint-Based Scheduling

Constraint-Based Scheduling PDF Author: Philippe Baptiste
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461514797
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

Constraint-Based Scheduling

Constraint-Based Scheduling PDF Author: Philippe Baptiste
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461514797
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

Constraint-Based Scheduling

Constraint-Based Scheduling PDF Author: Philippe Baptiste
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792374084
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

Constraint-Based Scheduling

Constraint-Based Scheduling PDF Author: Philippe Baptiste
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9781461355748
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

Constraint-based Reasoning

Constraint-based Reasoning PDF Author: Eugene C. Freuder
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262560757
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint-based reasoning is an important area of automated reasoning in artificial intelligence, with many applications. These include configuration and design problems, planning and scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning, defeasible and causal reasoning, machine vision and language understanding, qualitative and diagnostic reasoning, and expert systems. Constraint-Based Reasoning presents current work in the field at several levels: theory, algorithms, languages, applications, and hardware. Constraint-based reasoning has connections to a wide variety of fields, including formal logic, graph theory, relational databases, combinatorial algorithms, operations research, neural networks, truth maintenance, and logic programming. The ideal of describing a problem domain in natural, declarative terms and then letting general deductive mechanisms synthesize individual solutions has to some extent been realized, and even embodied, in programming languages. Contents Introduction, E. C. Freuder, A. K. Mackworth * The Logic of Constraint Satisfaction, A. K. Mackworth * Partial Constraint Satisfaction, E. C. Freuder, R. J. Wallace * Constraint Reasoning Based on Interval Arithmetic: The Tolerance Propagation Approach, E. Hyvonen * Constraint Satisfaction Using Constraint Logic Programming, P. Van Hentenryck, H. Simonis, M. Dincbas * Minimizing Conflicts: A Heuristic Repair Method for Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems, S. Minton, M. D. Johnston, A. B. Philips, and P. Laird * Arc Consistency: Parallelism and Domain Dependence, P. R. Cooper, M. J. Swain * Structure Identification in Relational Data, R. Dechter, J. Pearl * Learning to Improve Constraint-Based Scheduling, M. Zweben, E. Davis, B. Daun, E. Drascher, M. Deale, M. Eskey * Reasoning about Qualitative Temporal Information, P. van Beek * A Geometric Constraint Engine, G. A. Kramer * A Theory of Conflict Resolution in Planning, Q. Yang A Bradford Book.

Handbook of Constraint Programming

Handbook of Constraint Programming PDF Author: Francesca Rossi
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 9780080463803
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 978

Get Book

Book Description
Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics. The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area. The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas. The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming. - Covers the whole field of constraint programming - Survey-style chapters - Five chapters on applications

Constraint-based Local Search

Constraint-based Local Search PDF Author: Pascal Van Hentenryck
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book

Book Description
The ubiquity of combinatorial optimization problems in our society is illustrated by the novel application areas for optimization technology, which range from supply chain management to sports tournament scheduling. Over the last two decades, constraint programming has emerged as a fundamental methodology to solve a variety of combinatorial problems, and rich constraint programming languages have been developed for expressing and combining constraints and specifying search procedures at a high level of abstraction. Local search approaches to combinatorial optimization are able to isolate optimal or near-optimal solutions within reasonable time constraints. This book introduces a method for solving combinatorial optimization problems that combines constraint programming and local search, using constraints to describe and control local search, and a programming language, COMET, that supports both modeling and search abstractions in the spirit of constraint programming. After an overview of local search including neighborhoods, heuristics, and metaheuristics, the book presents the architecture and modeling and search components of constraint-based local search and describes how constraint-based local search is supported in COMET. The book describes a variety of applications, arranged by meta-heuristics. It presents scheduling applications, along with the background necessary to understand these challenging problems. The book also includes a number of satisfiability problems, illustrating the ability of constraint-based local search approaches to cope with both satisfiability and optimization problems in a uniform fashion.

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling PDF Author: Christian Artigues
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118623703
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book

Book Description
This title presents a large variety of models and algorithms dedicated to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which aims at scheduling at minimal duration a set of activities subject to precedence constraints and limited resource availabilities. In the first part, the standard variant of RCPSP is presented and analyzed as a combinatorial optimization problem. Constraint programming and integer linear programming formulations are given. Relaxations based on these formulations and also on related scheduling problems are presented. Exact methods and heuristics are surveyed. Computational experiments, aiming at providing an empirical insight on the difficulty of the problem, are provided. The second part of the book focuses on several other variants of the RCPSP and on their solution methods. Each variant takes account of real-life characteristics which are not considered in the standard version, such as possible interruptions of activities, production and consumption of resources, cost-based approaches and uncertainty considerations. The last part presents industrial case studies where the RCPSP plays a central part. Applications are presented in various domains such as assembly shop and rolling ingots production scheduling, project management in information technology companies and instruction scheduling for VLIW processor architectures.

Principles of Constraint Programming

Principles of Constraint Programming PDF Author: Krzysztof Apt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139438700
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book

Book Description
Constraints are everywhere: most computational problems can be described in terms of restrictions imposed on the set of possible solutions, and constraint programming is a problem-solving technique that works by incorporating those restrictions in a programming environment. It draws on methods from combinatorial optimisation and artificial intelligence, and has been successfully applied in a number of fields from scheduling, computational biology, finance, electrical engineering and operations research through to numerical analysis. This textbook for upper-division students provides a thorough and structured account of the main aspects of constraint programming. The author provides many worked examples that illustrate the usefulness and versatility of this approach to programming, as well as many exercises throughout the book that illustrate techniques, test skills and extend the text. Pointers to current research, extensive historical and bibliographic notes, and a comprehensive list of references will also be valuable to professionals in computer science and artificial intelligence.

Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming PDF Author: J. Christopher Beck
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319661582
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 724

Get Book

Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2017, held in Melbourne, Australia from August 28, 2017 until September 1, 2017. The conference is colocated with the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017) and the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming. The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The scope of the contributions includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource al location, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers are grouped into the following tracks: technical track; application track; machine learning & CP track; operations research & CP track; satisfiability & CP track, test and verification & CP track; journal & sister conference track.

Foundations of Constraint Satisfaction

Foundations of Constraint Satisfaction PDF Author: Edward Tsang
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3735723667
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book

Book Description
This seminal text of Computer Science, the most cited book on the subject, is now available for the first time in paperback. Constraint satisfaction is a decision problem that involves finite choices. It is ubiquitous. The goal is to find values for a set of variables that will satisfy a given set of constraints. It is the core of many applications in artificial intelligence, and has found its application in many areas, such as planning and scheduling. Because of its generality, most AI researchers should be able to benefit from having good knowledge of techniques in this field. Originally published in 1993, this now classic book was the first attempt to define the scope of constraint satisfaction. It covers both the theoretical and the implementation aspects of the subject. It provides a framework for studying this field, relates different research, and resolves ambiguity in a number of concepts and algorithms in the literature. This seminal text is arguably the most rigorous book in the field. All major concepts were defined in First Order Predicate Calculus. Concepts defined this way are precise and unambiguous.