Constraint Processing
for Planning and Scheduling
Constraint satisfaction emerged from AI research and nowadays it contributes to many fields such as planning, scheduling, and assignment problems, circuit design, network management and configuration, interactive graphics, molecular biology etc. The goal of the tutorial is to explain mainstream algorithms behind constraint satisfaction. The emphasis is put to modelling planning and scheduling problems with constraints and to special filtering and search techniques developed for these areas.
The tutorial is divided into two main parts. First, the constraint satisfaction technology is explained in general. The mainstream search and propagation algorithms are presented in an incremental nature showing how more advanced algorithms are built up on improvements of the simpler algorithms. The second part is specialised to planning and scheduling problems. The constraint models of these problems will be described together with several filtering and search techniques developed for these models.
The tutorial is targeted to a broad planning and scheduling community, in particular to those who are not familiar with details of constraint satisfaction. The audience will take away a basic understanding of how constraints work with more details on special constraints for planning and scheduling. No prior knowledge of Constraint Programming is required. .