A personal perspective on problem solving by general purpose solvers

To solve the problems that abound in real-world applications, we are proposing an approach of using general-purpose solvers, as we cannot afford to develop special-purpose algorithms for all individual problems. The existing general-purpose solvers such as linear programming and integer programming are very useful but not sufficient. To improve the situation, we have developed solvers for other standard problems such as the constraint satisfaction problem and the resource-constrained project scheduling problem among others. In this article, we describe why general-purpose solvers are needed, what kinds of solvers we considered, how they were developed and where they have been applied.