Building Industrial Applications With Constraint Programming

In this tutorial we will give an overview of real-life applications developed with constraint logic programming. Constraint logic programming (CLP) combines declarative logic based programming with specialized constraint solving methods from artificial intelligence, Operations Research and mathematics. It allows clear and concise expression of a wide class of combinatorial problems together with their efficient solution. In parallel with ongoing research in this field, CLP is now increasingly used to tackle real world decision making problems. In a first part of the talk, we will briefly present the methods and tools used for CLP and describe typical application areas. We introduce the concepts of global constraints, meta-heuristics and constraint visualization, which are central to large scale constraint solving..

A second part of the presentation will give a classification of problem domains suitable for the constraint programming approach and discusses various large scale applications which have been developed using the CHIP CLP system. These applications were co-developed by COSYTEC with specialists in the respective application domain.

• The TACT system is an integrated transport planning and scheduling system developed for a large food-industry company in the UK. The system plans the delivery of raw materials to different processing factories with a fleet of lorries and a variety of other resources.
• The OPTI-PLAN application is used by the French TV/Radio company RFO to plan and control the assignment of hundreds of journalists and technicians to different emissions. The tool is now used world-wide in 8 installations.
• The COBRA system is used to develop working plans and schedules for train drivers and conductors at NWT in the UK. The work plans must cover several ten-thousand activities in a weekly time table, making sure that all working rules and regulations are respected.