Constraint-based Time Tabling---A Case Study

Author: Martin Henz and Jörg Würtz

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In this paper, we concentrate on a typical scheduling problem: the computation of a time table for a German college. Like many other scheduling problems, this problem contains a variety of complex constraints and necessitates special-purpose search strategies. Techniques from Operations Research and traditional constraint logic programming are not able to express these constraints and search strategies on a sufficiently high level of abstraction. We show that the higher-order concurrent constraint language Oz provides this high-level expressivity, and can serve as a useful programming tool for college time tabling.