Constraint Programming and Large Scale Discrete Optimization

Book excerpt: Constraint programming has become an important general approach for solving hard combinatorial problems that occur in a number of application domains, such as scheduling and configuration. This volume contains selected papers from the workshop on Constraint Programming and Large Scale Discrete Optimization held at DIMACS. It gives a sense of state-of-the-art research in this field, touching on many of the important issues that are emerging and giving an idea of the major current trends. Topics include new strategies for local search, multithreaded constraint programming, specialized constraints that enhance consistency processing, fuzzy representations, hybrid approaches involving both constraint programming and integer programming, and applications to scheduling problems in domains such as sports scheduling and satellite scheduling.