Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR NetWMS2

Participants : Nicolas Beldiceanu, Gilles Chabert.

• Title: Networked Warehouse Management Systems 2: packing with complex shapes.

• Duration: 2011-2014.

• Type: cosinus research program.

• Budget: 189909 Euros.

• Others partners: KLS Optim and CONTRAINTES (Inria Rocquencourt).

This project builds on the former European FP6 Net-WMS Strep project that has shown that constraint-based optimisation techniques can considerably improve industrial practice for box packing problems, while identifying hard instances that cannot be solved optimally, especially in industrial 3D packing problems with rotations, the needs for dealing with more complex shapes (e.g. wheels, silencers) involving continuous values. This project aims at generalizing the geometric kernel geost for handling non-overlapping constraints for complex two and three dimensional curved shapes as well as domain specific heuristics. This will be done within the continuous solver IBEX , where discrete variables will be added for handling polymorphism (i.e., the fact that an object can take one shape out of a finite set of given shapes). In 2013 a filtering algorithm has been devised in the case of objects described by nonlinear inequalities and is now under testing with the Ibex library. This work has been presented in a workshop on interval methods & geometry in ENSTA Bretagne .