Article ID: | iaor20032982 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 14 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 387 |
End Page Number: | 402 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2002 |
Journal: | INFORMS Journal On Computing |
Authors: | Milano Michela, Thorsteinsson Erlendur S., Ottosson Greger, Refalo Philippe |
Keywords: | constraint programming |
Efforts aimed at combining operations research and constraint programming have become increasingly prominent and successful in the last few years. It is now widely recognized that integration, e.g., inference in the form of constraint propagation and relaxation in the form of linear programming, can yield substaintial results. In this paper, we argue the benefits of constraint programming's global constraints as a basis for such an integration and discuss the advantages along with some examples. We illustrate the integration on the global cardinality structure, on piecewise linear functions, on variable subscripts, on the cycle structure and on resource constraints. Each example is completed with a case study.