Strategic directions in constraint programming

Hentenryck, Pascal Van; Saraswat, Vijay

doi:10.1145/242223.242279

Cited by 75 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…CP is becoming a very interesting alternative to the modeling of optimization problems because of its potential to solve hard, real-life problems, and its declarative nature. A problem expressed as a set of constraints is formalized as a contraint satisfaction (optimization) problem (CSP) [5,7,8].…”

Section: Constraint Programming In a Nutshellmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Approach to Temporal-Aware Procurement of Web Services

Martín–Díaz

Ruiz–Cortés

Durán

et al. 2005

Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2007

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Abstract. In the context of web service procurement (WSP), temporal-awareness refers to managing service demands and offers which are subject to validity periods, i.e. their evaluation depends not only on quality of service (QoS) values but also on time. For example, the QoS of some web services can be considered critical in working hours (9:00 to 17:00 from Monday to Friday) and irrelevant at any other moment. Until now, the expressiveness of such temporal-aware specifications has been quite limited. As far as we know, most proposals have considered validity periods to be composed of a single temporal interval. Other proposals, which could allow more expressive time-dependent specifications, have not performed a detailed study about all the underlying complexities of such approach, in spite of the fact that dealing with complex expressions on temporality is not a trivial task at all. As a matter of fact, it requires a special design of the so-called procurement tasks (consistency and conformance checking, and optimal selection). In this paper, we present a constraint-based approach to temporal-aware WSP. Using constraints allows a great deal of expressiveness, so that not only demands and offers can be assigned validity periods but also their conditions can be assigned (possibly multiple) validity temporal subintervals. Apart from revising the semantics of procurement tasks, which we previously presented in the first edition of the ICSOC conferences, we also introduce the notion of the covering set of a demand, a topic which is closely related to temporality.

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Section: Constraint Programming In a Nutshellmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Approach to Temporal-Aware Procurement of Web Services

Martín–Díaz

Ruiz–Cortés

Durán

et al. 2005

Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2007

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“…The model of negotiation we have presented here draws on ideas coming from constraint programming and constraint propagation [13], in particular distributed constraint satisfaction [14] where constraints are viewed as autonomous agents propagating "no-good" information via their shared variables, and cooperative constraint solving [15]. The other major source of inspiration is prooftheory in formal logic, in particular proof-nets in Linear Logic [16] which offer a totally desequentialised representation of logical inferences as a graph, similar to our negotiation graphs (inferences are here negotiation decisions).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiation as a Generic Component Coordination Primitive

Andreoli

Castellani

2003

Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems

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Abstract. In this paper, we claim that negotiation is a powerful abstract notion for the coordination of distributed autonomous components, and is therefore a suitable candidate for the definition of a generic coordination middleware tool, at the same level as transactions or messaging. Although specific negotiation mechanisms have been proposed in various application contexts, there is still a need to define a truely generic concept of negotiation, suitable for a middleware layer. This paper provides some elements towards the definition of such a concept. A salient feature of our proposal is that it introduces a rich representation of the state of a negotiation, inspired by proof-nets in Linear Logic and their game semantics, well beyond the traditional state-transition graphs. Furthermore, this representation is entirely decoupled from the dynamics of the negotiation processes that may use it, and hence avoids to rely on any specific "rule of the game" as to how a negotiation should proceed. It can thus adapt to any such rule, the definition of which is delegated to the negotiating components themselves.

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“…In the past decade, efforts have been made to use linear and integer programming techniques [5,17], largely due to attractive bounds on solution quality. CP has been proposed as a suitable candidate approach for these problems [18,19], however, the application of CP to multi-robot task planning and scheduling is, to the best of our knowledge, limited in the literature. The MACBETH [20] architecture makes use of a combination of hierarchical task networks and CP, where a human user specifies missions to a team of autonomous agents via a playbook graphic user interface.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Constraint Programming Approach to Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling in Retirement Homes

Booth

Nejat

Beck

2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract.We study the application of constraint programming (CP) to the planning and scheduling of multiple social robots interacting with residents in a retirement home. The robots autonomously organize and facilitate group and individual activities among residents. The application is a multi-robot task allocation and scheduling problem in which task plans must be determined that integrate with resident schedules. The problem involves reasoning about disjoint time windows, inter-schedule task dependencies, user and robot travel times, as well as robot energy levels. We propose mixed-integer programming (MIP) and CP approaches for this problem and investigate methods for improving our initial CP approach using symmetry breaking, variable ordering heuristics, and large neighbourhood search. We introduce a relaxed CP model for determining provable bounds on solution quality. Experiments indicate substantial superiority of the initial CP approach over MIP, and subsequent significant improvements in the CP approach through our manipulations. This work is one of the few, of which we are aware, that applies CP to multi-robot task allocation and scheduling problems. Our results demonstrate the promise of CP scheduling technology as a general optimization infrastructure for such problems.

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Strategic directions in constraint programming

Cited by 75 publications

References 70 publications

An Approach to Temporal-Aware Procurement of Web Services

An Approach to Temporal-Aware Procurement of Web Services

Negotiation as a Generic Component Coordination Primitive

A Constraint Programming Approach to Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling in Retirement Homes

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