ISA Workshop "Innovative Scheduling and scheduling Applications using CP-AI-OR"

The focus of this workshop are any CP-AI-OR innovative techniques related to scheduling problems and applications.

This includes but is not restricted to:

New challenging scheduling problems, instances, benchmarks
New modeling concepts for scheduling (library, language, abstractions, API, etc)
Pruning for scheduling (global constraints, explanations, lower bounds computations, dominance rules, etc)
New search algorithms for scheduling
Heuristic approaches for scheduling (LS, LNS, VLNS, etc)
Hybrid problem models, hybrid scheduling solvers
Scheduling problems decompositions
Approximation algorithms for scheduling
Implementation details, algorithm comparisons, etc, related to scheduling

Registration via CPAIOR website.

Important Dates.

May 4, 2015: Submission deadline
May 12, 2015: Notifications
May 14, 2015: Camera-ready deadline
May 18, 2015: Workshop

Program

09:00 Scheduling the Port of Newcastle with CP (Peter Stuckey,University of Melbourne/Nicta )

The Port of Newcastle in Australia is one of the busiest bulk coal export ports in the world, over 1700 ships are loaded in the port each year.

The port consists of 3 terminals which share a narrow channel of entry. The coal arrives on trains from over 35 coal mines, that are connected by a very restricted track network.

In this talk we will explain how we were able to rapidly construct a stockyard centric optimization model of the Port of Newcastle coal logistics using CP modelling language MiniZinc and effectively solve it with lazy clause generation solver Opturion CPX.

The approach models the port terminal operations in fine detail, but also models rail track capacity and channel constraints to give a complete picture of the coal logistics problem.

09:40 Coffee Break

10:10 Making of a commercial constraint based scheduling solver (Petr Vilím,IBM )

Four years ago I had a talk on this workshop where I mentioned an imaginary "ideal solver": a kind of dream solver and target that we have for the next decade(s). In this talk I would like return to this topic and see the advances that CP Optimizer has made in this direction.

In particular, I would like to mention features such as presolve, automatic search, modeling aids (such as warnings and failure explanations), cpo file format, optimization as a service in a cloud environment or isomorphism scheduling constraint.

The talk will concentrate on business needs imposed on the solver by solution developers but also on the design and internals of the solver that made answering some of those needs possible.

11:00: Leverage operational complexity of steel plants using optimisation algorithms (Sébastien Mouthuy,n-Side )

This talk is about the scheduling of equipments on a steel making site. This application has been raised by a world leader in the steel industry to be smarter in managing the transport of hot metal from the blast furnaces to oxygen converters. This process was getting harder and harder to manage due to requirement of increased flexibility in the steel production. We developped an application that schedules all the equipments and provides a forecast of what would happen in the next 8 hours. This application uses a hybrid optimization algorithm to schedule all the equipments taking into account a large set of operational constraints.

This talk will describe the problem, its challenges, the overall architecture of the hybrid optimization algorithm and the methodology followed to solve this problem successfully. We will focus on how human knowledge has been leveraged by using different optimization techniques, from Constraint Programming to Mathematical Programming and heuristics.

We will end by presenting the benefits of such optimization algorithms to steel making industries and to supply chain management in general.

Organizers

Steven Gay, UCLouvain
Arnaud Malapert, University Nice Sophia Antipolis
Jean-Charles Régin, University Nice Sophia Antipolis
Pierre Schaus, UCLouvain

Program Committee

Petr Vilim, IBM
Andreas Schutt, NICTA
Philippe Laborie, IBM
Roger Kameugne, University de Maroua
Angelo Oddi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
Helmut Simonis, 4C
Alban Derrien, Univ-Nantes

ISA: Innovative Scheduling &
scheduling Applications using CP-AI-OR

May 18, CPAIOR-2015 Workshop

The focus of this workshop are any CP-AI-OR innovative techniques related to scheduling problems and applications.

This includes but is not restricted to:

Registration via CPAIOR website.

Important Dates.