Heterogeneous scheduling and rotation

Abstract

This article highlights an application in the area of decision support for planning transports in a railway company utilising constraint logic programming and a flexible design which has been successfully tested on real world data. We discuss the problem formulation for the co-ordination of distinct subproblems, the allocation of track resources to transports, the allocation of vehicles to transports, and the allocation of personnel to perform the transportation tasks in a railway company and the development of a heterogeneous constraint model which is usable also for other production planning problems. Using constraints as the key technology, we discuss approaches to find interfacing principles to combine several solvers. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.