Integration of Constraint Programming and Integer Programming for Combinatorial Optimization
Greger Ottosson · 2000
The last several years have seen an increasing interest in combining the models and methods of optimization with those of constraint programming. Integration of the two was initially impeded by their different cultural origins, one having developed largely in the operations research community and the other in the computer science and artificial intelligence communities. The advantages of merger, however, are rapidly overcoming this barrier. The main objective for an integration of Constraint Programming over finite domains (CP) and Integer Programming (IP) is to take advantage of both the inference through constraint propagation and the (continuous) relaxations through Linear Programming (LP), in order to reduce the search needed to find feasible, good and optimal solutions. The key...