by Barry O’Sullivan
The 2010 annual workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Constraints was held on 25-26 November 2010 in Berlin, at Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST. The workshop series on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming is now in its fifteenth year. This year's workshop chairs were Armin Wolf (Fraunhofer FIRST) and Barry O'Sullivan (4C, University College Cork, Ireland).
The first session of the two half-day event began with an invited talk given by J. Christopher Beck (University of Toronto) on a tour "From Constraint Programming to Logic-Based Benders Decomposition (and back!)". This was an illustrative and educational presentation of experiences with decomposition methods for solving hard combinatorial optimisation problems. This was followed by a report of a practical application on “Solving the Rotation Assignment Problem for Airlines Using Constraint Programming” - a piece of work undertaken by Son Tung Nguyen and Roman Barták from the Charles University in Prague. A more theoretical piece of work on “An Adaptation of Path Consistency for Boolean Satisfiability” was presented by Pavel Surynek, also from the Charles University. The final talk of the first workshop day was given by Rémy Haemmerlé, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid on “(Co)inductive Semantics for Constraint Handling Rules”.
The second day of the workshop began with an overview by Armin Wolf of a number of CP applications developed at Fraunhofer FIRST. These applications ranged from areas such as production scheduling, workload distribution in maintenance, and energy management to partition scheduling for multi-core architectures. This overview was followed by two presentations of some scientific work performed at 4C at University College Cork (an ERCIM member institution) on “Almost Square Packing” by Helmut Simonis and Barry O'Sullivan, showing the influence of effective problem modelling on the solution process. The other work on “Creating Tests for a Family of Cost Aware Resource Constraints” was by Tarik Hadzic and Helmut Simonis, and addressed a new family of cost constraints that are very relevant in energy management with time and consumption dependent costs.
The participants of the workshop were from Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, and Spain. The proceedings of the workshop and some presentations are available on the CSCLP 2010 website. The 2011 CSCLP Workshop will be held at the University of York in April 2011, and will be chaired by Alan Frisch and Barry O'Sullivan.
Link: http://www.constraint-programming.de/csclp2010/
Please contact:
Barry O'Sullivan
Constraints Working Group Coordinator
Cork Co nstraint Computation Centre (4C), Ireland
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
