Scheduling is one of the most successful application areas of constraint programming and, recently, many scheduling problems were modelled and solved by means of constraints. Most of these models confine to a conventional formulation of a constraint satisfaction problem that requires all the variables and the constraints to be specified in advance. However, many application areas like complex p...

This paper describes the radiotherapy patient scheduling problem of minimising waiting times. Like many other service industry problems, radiotherapy patient scheduling may be solved by first modelling and formulating it into a shop scheduling problem. Over the years, these shop scheduling models have been researched and solved using various approaches. This paper typifies radiotherapy patient ...

The aim of this paper is not to offer any definite proposal for the scheduling competition, but to discuss some of the key issues to be considered in such an endeavour. The discussion will refer to three types of scheduling problems: production scheduling, employee scheduling (the discussion will be focused on nurse rostering being a very complex and highly constrained scheduling problem) and u...

the continuous spread of distributed energy resources (ders) such as combined heating and power (chp), diesel generators, boilers and renewable energy sources provide an effective solution to energy related problems to serve the power and heat demands with minimum cost. moreover, the ders may play a significant role for supplying power and heat in rural areas, where grid electricity is not avai...

In many real-world scheduling problems (eg. machine scheduling, educational timetabling, personnel scheduling, etc.) several criteria must be considered simultaneously when evaluating the quality of the solution or schedule. Among these criteria there are: length of the schedule, utilisation of resources, satisfaction of people’s preferences and compliance with regulations. Traditionally, these...

Nowadays, customer demand for order variety, short lead time, and fast delivery have created a great impact on manufacturing problems such as production scheduling, job sequencing, vehicle routing, bin-packing, and loading. The related problems of manufacturing scheduling and logistics support are even more crucial than ever. Traditional approaches are incapable of dealing with the challenges o...

Real-life problems typically include both planning and scheduling components. In some areas, like manufacturing, the planning task is not very complicated but what makes the problem hard is integration with scheduling. Traditional schedulers cannot handle such problems because of the planning component and traditional planners are not interested because planning is easy there. The paper describ...

Scheduling is a knowledge-intensive task spanning over many activities in day-to-day life. It deals with the temporallybound assignment of jobs to resources. Although scheduling has been extensively researched in the AI community for the past 30 years, efforts have primarily focused on specific applications, algorithms, or 'scheduling shells' and no comprehensive analysis exists on the nature o...

This paper addresses the crew scheduling problem for a mass rapid transit (MRT) system. The problem is to find aminimum number of duties to cover all tasks while satisfying all the hard and soft scheduling rules. Such rules are complicated in real-world operations and difficult to follow through optimization methods alone. In this paper, we propose a constraint programming (CP)-based approach t...