A Constraint-Based Framework for Scheduling Problems

Abstract

Scheduling and resource allocation problems are widespread in many areas of today’s technology and management. Their different forms and structures appear in production, logistics, software engineering, computer networks, etc. In practice, however, classical scheduling problems with fixed structures and only standard constraints (precedence, disjoint etc.) are rare. Practical scheduling problems include also logical and non-linear constraints and use non-standard criteria of schedule evaluations. In many cases, decision makers are interested in the feasibility and/or optimality of a given schedule for specified conditions formulated as questions, for example, Is it possible…?, What is the minimum/maximum…?, What if..? etc. Thus there is a need to develop a programming framework that will facilitate the modeling and solving a variety of diverse scheduling problems. This paper proposes such a constraint-based framework for modeling and solving scheduling problems. It was built with the CLP (Constraint Logic Programming) environment and supported with MP (Mathematical Programming).