Multi-Criteria Soft Constraints in Timetabling (extendedabstract)
Hana Rudová, Miroslav Vlk · 2005
Multi-criteria optimization is an important issue in many scheduling problems. The goal of this paper is to show how such an optimization may be incorporated into constraint programming. We propose a new approach which allows the inclusion of multiple criteria in a declarative style with the help of weighted soft constraints. These soft constraints are integrated with hard constraints in a standard CLP(FD) library. Our approach addresses the requirements of a large scale timetabling problem at Purdue University. We describe representative criteria from this problem and propose inference rules to be implemented using soft constraints.