ASTRA Group on Constraint Programming

• Pierre Flener serves on the senior programme committee of CP'12, the 18th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, held in Québec City (Canada) in October 2012. Justin Pearson (main track) and Pierre Flener (application track) serve on the programme committee of CP'12.

• Justin Pearson serves on the programme committee of ECAI'12, the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Montpellier (France) in August 2012.

• Pierre Flener serves on the programme committee of AAAI'12, the 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Toronto (Canada) in July 2012.

• We co-organise CP meets CAV, an advanced seminar on identifying synergies between the constraint programming and computer-aided verification communities, held in Turunç (Turkey) in June 2012.

• Jean-Noël Monette serves on the programme committee of JFPC'12, les 8ièmes Journées Francophones de Programmation par Contraintes, held in Toulouse (France) in May 2012.

• Prof. Nicolas Beldiceanu of the École des Mines de Nantes (France) visited us 18 - 22 December 2011, 25 October to 4 November 2011, 1 - 31 August 2011, and 4 - 15 May 2011.

• Jean-Noël Monette gave the talk Solving Scheduling Problems from High-Level Models on 1 December 2011 at Uppsala University.

• Henning Hellkvist and William Sjöstedt defended their MSc thesis on university timetabling via constraint programming on 23 November 2011.

• Josef Kvist obtained his MSc with a confidential thesis on high-school timetabling via constraint programming in September 2011.

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

• Older News

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)