A Declarative Framework for Constrained Search Problems in Manufacturing
Sitek Pawek, Wikarek Jaroslaw · 2008
The proposed approach can be considered to be a contribution to scheduling and especially to scheduling problems with additional/external resources. In many enterprises this kind of resources can have an influence on production and delivery schedules. That is especially important in the context of cheap, fast and user friendly decision support in SMEs. Great flexibility of the presented approach and practically unlimited possibilities of asking questions through creating predicates cannot be overestimated. What is more, the whole decision system can be built in one modeling and programming declarative environment, which lowers costs and adds to the solution effectiveness. The CLP-tools fulfill the need of intelligent production management structures and can be based successfully in cases of scheduling problems with external resources. The proposed approach seems to be a viable alternative option for supporting quite a number of decision making processes. The originality of our approach, which achieves the transition from custom imperative programming to declarative programming in a field of scheduling problems, consists in the data structure and CLP implementation. The presented framework can be implemented in many other constrained search problems apart from scheduling such as planning, routing, placement etc.