The ODO project: Toward a unified basis for constraint-directed scheduling

The ODO project is an inquiry into constraint-directed scheduling with the primary motivation of the development of a unified foundation for constraint-directed search techniques. Central to this foundation is the exploitation of the knowledge in the constraint representation, the use of commitment assertion and retraction as search operators, a generic model of scheduling strategies, and the use of texture measurements to distill constraint information for search guidance. Each of these components is discussed in-depth. The ODO framework, a commitment-based model of constraint-directed search with which many existing scheduling techniques can be modelled and implemented, is presented along with a selection of past, current, and future research using the framework.