Application of Constraint Programming in Business Process Optimisation

摘要

Constraint Programming (CP) is a relatively young technology appeared at the end of 80's, especially in Europe. It brings together techniques from Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and Discrete Mathematics. Originally developed as a generalisation of Logic Programming (LP) by introducing, besides basic logical inference mechanisms, more mathematical and algorithmic techniques, it has gained after some years its entire autonomy. Constraint Programming is now considered as an alternative to more traditional Operations Research techniques like Mixed-Integer Programming for solving Planning, Scheduling and Resource Optimisation problems. Constraint Programming is especially well suited for solving complex "constraint search problems" where there are several types of constraints. From the beginning, Constraint Programming was successfully applied to solve hard combinatorial problems encountered in different industrial environments (e.g. job-shop scheduling in manufacturing, crew assignment in transports). Several industrial applications are currently operational all around the world, especially in the areas of business process optimisation (e.g. production scheduling in oil refineries, supply chain management in food industry, personnel planning in TV-Broadcast companies).