Section: New Results

Optimization and Soft Problems

Participant : Thierry Petit.

Many optimization problems involve business constraints, which are complementary to an objective function that aggregates cost variables. These constraints involve the same cost variables. They are generally non linear. In the literature, several approaches were proposed for balancing constraints. We address the reverse concept, that is, concentrating high cost values in a restricted number of areas. This concept is motivated by several concrete examples, such as resource constrained scheduling problems with machine rentals. We present a new global constraint called focus. We provide a complete and optimum time complexity filtering algorithm for our constraint.

The corresponding paper Focus : A Constraint for Concentrating High Costs [27] was published at the 18th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2012 ).