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Author: Pascal Van Hentenryck Publisher: MIT Press (MA) ISBN: Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 456
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.
Author: Pascal Van Hentenryck Publisher: MIT Press (MA) ISBN: Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 456
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.
Author: Holger H. Hoos Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann ISBN: 1558608729 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 678
Book Description
Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most prominent and successful techniques for solving computationally difficult problems. Offering a systematic treatment of SLS algorithms, this book examines the general concepts and specific instances of SLS algorithms and considers their development, analysis and application.
Author: John Hooker Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319983342 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 765
Book Description
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2018, held in Lille, France, in August 2018.The 41 full and 9 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions. They deal with all aspects of computing with constraints including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource allocation, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers were organized according to the following topics/tracks: main technical track; applications track; CP and data science; CP and music; CP and operations research; CP, optimization and power system management; multiagent and parallel CP; and testing and verification.
Author: Rafael Martí Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9783319071237 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 3000
Book Description
Heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, loosely applicable information to control problem solving. Algorithms, for example, are a type of heuristic. By contrast, Metaheuristics are methods used to design Heuristics and may coordinate the usage of several Heuristics toward the formulation of a single method. GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures) is an example of a Metaheuristic. To the layman, heuristics may be thought of as ‘rules of thumb’ but despite its imprecision, heuristics is a very rich field that refers to experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery. Any given solution/heuristic is not guaranteed to be optimal but heuristic methodologies are used to speed up the process of finding satisfactory solutions where optimal solutions are impractical. The introduction to this Handbook provides an overview of the history of Heuristics along with main issues regarding the methodologies covered. This is followed by Chapters containing various examples of local searches, search strategies and Metaheuristics, leading to an analyses of Heuristics and search algorithms. The reference concludes with numerous illustrations of the highly applicable nature and implementation of Heuristics in our daily life. Each chapter of this work includes an abstract/introduction with a short description of the methodology. Key words are also necessary as part of top-matter to each chapter to enable maximum search engine optimization. Next, chapters will include discussion of the adaptation of this methodology to solve a difficult optimization problem, and experiments on a set of representative problems.
Author: Francesca Rossi Publisher: Elsevier ISBN: 9780080463803 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 978
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
Author: Krzysztof Apt Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139438700 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 421
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.
Author: Alexander Nareyek Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3540457461 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Autonomous agents have become a vibrant research and development topic in recent years attracting activity and attention from various areas. The basic agent concept incorporates proactive autonomous units with goal-directed-behaviour and communication capabilities. The book focuses on autonomous agents that can act in a goal directed manner under real time constraints and incomplete knowledge, being situated in a dynamic environment where resources may be restricted. To satisfy such complex requirements, the author improves, combines, and applies results from areas like planning, constraint programming, and local search. The formal framework developed is evaluated by application to the field of computer games, which fit the problem context very well since most of them are played in real time and provide a highly interactive environment where environmental situations are changing rapidly.
Author: Alastair Neil Andrew Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Local Search is a simple and effective approach for solving complex constrained combinatorial problems. To maximise performance, Local Search can utilise problem-specific information and be hybridised with other algorithms in an often intricate fashion. This results in algorithms that are tightly coupled to a single problem and difficult to characterise; experience gained whilst solving one problem may not be applicable in another. Even if it is, the translation can be a non-trivial task offering little opportunity for code reuse. Constraint Programming (CP) and Linear Programming (LP) can be applied to many of the same combinatorial problems as Local Search but do not exhibit these restrictions. They use a different paradigm; one where a problem is captured as a general model and then solved by a independent solver. Improvements to the underlying solver can be harnessed by any model. The CP community show signs of moving Local Search in this direction; Constraint-Based Local Search (CBLS) strives to achieve the CP ideal of "Model + Search". CBLS provides access to the performance benefits of Local Search without paying the price of being specific to a single problem. This thesis explores whether information to improve the performance of CBLS can be automatically extracted and exploited without compromising the independence of the search and model. To achieve these goals, we have created a framework built upon the CBLS language COMET. This framework primarily focusses on the interface between two core components: the constraint model, and the search neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods define the behaviour of a Local Search and how it can traverse the search space. By separating the neighbourhoods from the model, we are able to create an independent analysis component. The first aspect of our work is to uncover information about the interactions between the constraint model and the search neighbourhoods. The second goal is to look at how information about the behaviour of neighbourhoods - with respect to a set of constraints - can be used within the search process. In particular, we concentrate on enhancing a form of Local Search called Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) allowing it to make dynamic decisions based upon the current search state. The resulting system retains the domain independence of model-based solution technologies whilst being able to configure itself automatically to a given problem. This reduces the level of expertise required to adopt CBLS and provides users with another potential tool for tackling their constraint problems.
Author: Philippe Baptiste Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1461514797 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 204
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.
Author: Rina Dechter Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann ISBN: 1558608907 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 504
Book Description
Constraint reasoning has matured over the last three decades with contributions from a diverse community of researchers in artificial intelligence, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics. In Constraint Processing, Rina Dechter synthesizes these contributions, as well as her own significant work, to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms.
Author: Pascal Van Hentenryck
Author: Pascal Van Hentenryck
Author: Holger H. Hoos
Author: John Hooker
Author: Rafael Martí
Author: Francesca Rossi
Author: Krzysztof Apt
Author: Alexander Nareyek
Author: Alastair Neil Andrew
Author: Philippe Baptiste
Author: Rina Dechter