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ASTRA Group on Constraint Programming

Constraint programming (CP) is a rather novel set of methods and tools for modelling and solving constraint problems, in a way orthogonal and complementary to other optimisation technologies (such as ILP, MILP, SAT, etc). Constraint problems arise in many application domains, such as scheduling, rostering, planning, configuration, control, design, biology, finance, transport, logistics, and so on. Decisions have to be made (that is, the values of unknowns have to be determined) so that some constraints are satisfied and, optionally, some cost / benefit is minimised / maximised. (Read more)

News

• Justin Pearson serves on the programme committee of CP'10, the 16th International Conference on Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming, to be held in St Andrews (Scotland, UK) in September 2010.

• Pierre Flener serves on the programme committee of AAAI'10, the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held in Atlanta (Georgia, USA) in July 2010.

• Pierre Flener serves on the programme committee of JFPC'10, les 6ièmes Journées Francophones de Programmation par Contraintes, to be held in Caen (France) in June 2010.

• Pierre Flener lectures at the ACP Summer School 2010 on Constraint Programming, to be held in Aussois (France) in May 2010.

• Magnus Ågren is the programme chair of SweConsNet'10, the 9th workshop of the Network for Sweden-based researchers and practitioners of Constraint programming, which is co-located with SAIS'10 in Uppsala (Sweden) in May 2010; Pierre Flener and Justin Pearson are the local chairs of both events.

• Pierre Flener and Justin Pearson guest-edit the Special Issue on Constraint Programming for Air Traffic Control & Management of the Knowledge Engineering Review.

• Prof. Nicolas Beldiceanu of the École des Mines de Nantes (France) visited us on 13-22 December 2009.

• Pierre Flener served on the programme committee of RCRA'09, the 16th International RCRA Workshop, on experimental evaluation of algorithms for solving problems with combinatorial explosion, held in Reggio Emilia (Italy) in December 2009.

• Farshid Hassani Bijarbooneh defended his MSc thesis on 27 October 2009 and joined us as a PhD student on 1 December 2009.

• Ass't Prof. Toni Mancini of Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy) visited us from mid July 2009 to late October 2009.

• Tomas Axling of Tacton Systems AB gave a talk on "Constraint Technology for Solving Configuration Problems" on 12 October 2009.

• Pan Xiaoyue defended her MSc thesis on 5 October 2009 and joined the UPMARC group as a PhD student.

• Pierre Flener taught a course on constraint programming in autumn 2009 at Uppsala University.