Problem Solving by General Purpose Solvers

To solve problems abundant in real world applications, we have been proposing an approach of using general purpose solvers, since we cannot afford to develop special purpose algorithms for all individual problems. For this purpose, we have developed solvers for some standard problems such as CSP (constraint satisfaction problem), RCPSP (resource constrained project scheduling problem), GAP (generalized assignment problem) and VRP (vehicle routing problem), among others. These solvers have been successfully applied to many applications. In this talk, we report our recent experience of ITC2007 (International Timetabling Competition), in which we used our general purpose CSP solver to handle the presented benchmarks.