This paper describes unimodular probing { a new technique that has been used to solve a class of dynamic scheduling problems. In benchmarks a unimodular probing algorithm has outperformed two well-established approaches: backtrack search with local consistency and spe-cialised heuristics, and mixed integer programming (MIP). The problems amenable to unimodular probing involve disjunctive constr...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) are of capital importance for the industry since the first assembly line for the Ford T by Henry Ford. Their objective is to optimize the design of production lines while satisfying the various constraints. Precedence constraints among the tasks are always present in ALBP. The objective is then to place the tasks among various workstations such that the p...

The concept of Virtual Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (VCIM) has been proposed for one and a half decade with purpose of overcoming the limitation of traditional Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) as it only works within an enterprise. VCIM system is a promising solution for enterprises to survive in the globally competitive market because it can exploit effectively locally as well as g...

In this paper computational results are presented with a very general, yet powerful backtracking procedure for solving the duration minimization and net present value maximization problems in a precedence and resource-constrained network. These networks are generally of the PERT/CPM variety, although it is not required that they be so. Among the advantages cited for our approach are low compute...

Constraint-based scheduling is an approach for solving real-life scheduling problems by stating constraints over the problem variables. By providing generic constraint satisfaction techniques on one side and specialised constraints on the other side, constraint programming achieves a very good generality and efficiency and thus it becomes very popular in solving real-life combinatorial (optimis...

Constraint-based techniques are frequently used in solving real-life scheduling problems thanks to natural modeling capabilities and strong constraint propagation techniques encoded within global constraints. In this paper we present new incremental propagation rules for shrinking time windows of activities allocated to a disjunctive resource. These rules use information about precedence constr...

ÐGiven a set of precedence constrained parallel tasks with their processor requirements and execution times, the problem of scheduling precedence constrained parallel tasks on multicomputers with contiguous processor allocation is to find a nonpreemptive schedule of the tasks on a multicomputer such that the schedule length is minimized. This scheduling problem is substantially more difficult t...

The public health system is plagued by inefficient use of resources. Frequently, the results are lengthy patient treatment waiting times. While many solutions for patient scheduling in health systems exist, few address the problem of coordination between independent autonomous departments. In this study, we describe the use of a distributed dynamic constraint optimisation algorithm (Support Bas...

We consider the problem of removing a given disk from a collection of unit disks in the plane. At each step, we allow a disk to be removed by a collision-free translation to infinity, and the goal is to access a given disk using as few steps as possible. This Disks problem is a version of a common task in assembly sequencing, namely removing a given part from a fully assembled product. Recently...