Industrial-size scheduling with ASP+CP

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) combines a powerful, theoretically principled knowledge representation formalism and powerful solvers. To improve efficiency of computation on certain classes of problems, researchers have recently developed hybrid languages and solvers, combining ASP with language constructs and solving techniques from Constraint Programming (CP). The resulting ASP+CP solvers exhibit remarkable performance on "toy" problems. To the best of our knowledge, however, no hybrid ASP+CP language and solver have been used in practical, industrial-size applications. In this paper, we report on the first such successful application, consisting of the use of the hybrid ASP+CP system ezcsp to solve sophisticated industrial-size scheduling problems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.