Technology and system of constraint programming for industry production scheduling — Part I: A brief survey and potential directions

Abstract

The use of techniques and system of constraint programming enables the implementation of precise, flexible, efficient, and extensible scheduling systems. It has been identified as a strategic direction and dominant form for the application into planning and scheduling of industrial production. This paper systematically introduces the constraint modeling and solving technology for production scheduling problems, including various real-world industrial applications based on the Chip system of Cosytec Company. We trend of some concrete technology, such as modeling, search, constraint propagation, consistency, and optimization of constraint programming for scheduling problems. As a result of the application analysis, a generic application framework for real-life scheduling based on commercial constraint propagation (CP) systems is proposed.

Key words： constraint programming; production scheduling; constraint propagation; search; consistency; optimization

Acknowledgments

This research work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 70772056 and 50825503), the State Hi-Tech R&D Program of China (No. 2007AA04Z110), and the Science and Technology Plan Project of Wenzhou (G20090038)

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