Constraint programming approach to a bilevel scheduling problem

Abstract

Bilevel optimization problems involve two decision makers who make their choices sequentially, either one according to its own objective function. Many problems arising in economy and management science can be modeled as bilevel optimization problems. Several special cases of bilevel problem have been studied in the literature, e.g., linear bilevel problems. However, up to now, very little is known about solution techniques of discrete bilevel problems. In this paper we show that constraint programming can be used to model and solve such problems. We demonstrate our first results on a simple bilevel scheduling problem.