CALL FOR PAPERS

CP97 Workshop on

Industrial Constraint-Directed

Scheduling

Schloss Hagenberg, Austria

November 1st, 1997

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP97), October 29th - November 1st, 1997

SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP

In recent years constraint-directed scheduling techniques have matured to a point where they have found their way into many industrial applications, in particular through constraint programming languages such as ILOG Solver and Scheduler, CHIP, and projects such as GreenTrip and NumODO. In this workshop we wish to provide a forum for work relating to applying constraint-directed techniques to industrial scheduling and resource allocation problems. In particular, we seek research which addresses (but which is not limited to) the following issues:

adapting constraint techniques to industrial requirements e.g
- hard/soft constraints, fuzzy constraints;
- preferences and costs;
- rescheduling;
- multi-initiative scheduling (user interfaces and user interactions);
- partial constraint satisfaction;
- scheduling under uncertainty;
- robustness of solutions;
- retraction techniques;
extending constraint-directed techniques beyond the job shop model, e.g.
- alternative/multiple resources;
- resources with time-varying capacity;
- continuous and discrete inventory;
- pre-emptive scheduling;
- sequence-dependent changeovers;
solution techniques for industrial problems, e.g.
- constraint relaxation techniques;
- constraint propagation techniques;
- heuristics for scheduling;
- distributed and multi-agent scheduling;
- approximate scheduling.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Submission deadline is 15th August 1997. Authors are invited to submit original papers written in English and approximately 10 A4 pages to Andrew Davenport at the contact address below. We encourage authors to submit by electronic mail in self-contained Postscript format. Alternatively five paper copies may be submitted.

Decisions on acceptance will be sent to authors by 15th September 1997.

ACCEPTED PAPERS

A list of accepted papers and postscript source can be found here

PUBLICATION

A proceedings of the workshop will be available to the workshop participants. A camera-ready copy will be due by 1st October 1997.

ORGANISATION

Andrew Davenport and Chris Beck (co-chairs)
Enterprise Integration Laboratory,
University of Toronto,
4 Taddle Creek Road,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G9,
CANADA
andrewd@ie.utoronto.ca
chris@cs.utoronto.ca

PROGRAM COMMITEE

Mark Fox University of Toronto
Geir Hasle SINTEF
Claude Le Pape Bouygues - Direction Scientifique
Wim Nuijten ILOG
Patrick Prosser University of Strathclyde
Barbara Smith University of Leeds
Edward Tsang University of Essex

INVITED TALK

"On becoming industrially relevant"
Ed Sitarski, Vice-President Research and Development, Numetrix Ltd.

Edward Sitarski is vice-president of research and development at Numetrix Ltd where he is responsible for all research, product development and technical direction. Over the last 8 years at Numetrix, he has released a number of integrated decision support products for the Supply Chain Optimization market. These products are used to commercially solve many diverse business planning and scheduling problems from high-level inter-enterprise analysis to short-term production/distribution coordination to second-by-second production scheduling and vehicle loading at the plant and loading dock. The software incorporates research from many areas including large scale constraint visualization, representation, mathmatical programming, constraint-directed search, simulation and portable integration. Dozens of multi-national companies rely on Numetrix products worldwide. In 1993 he was granted a patent (US #5,237,497) for a technique to perform large-scale visualization and optimization. He received a B. Math in Graph Theory from the University of Waterloo in 1988.

IMPORTANT DATES

FURTHER INFORMATION

Additional information will be available at the CP97 web site: http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/conferences/CP97/