Leveraging Constraint Scheduling: A Case Study to the Textile Industry

Abstract: Despite the significant progress made in scheduling in the past years, industrial problems with several hundred tasks remain intractable for some variants of the scheduling problems. We present techniques that can be used to leverage the power of constraint programming to solve an industrial problem with 800 non-preemptive tasks, 90 resources, and sequence-dependent setup times. Our method involves solving the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) as a simplification of the scheduling problem and using the simplified solution to guide the branching heuristics. We also explore large neighborhood search. Experiments conducted on a dataset provided by our partner from the textile industry show that we obtain non-optimal but satisfactory solutions.

Video

Authors

Alexandre Mercier-Aubin, Jonathan Gaudreault and Claude-Guy Quimper

Copyrights and Data

Sadly Claude-Guy is still in the process of releasing the code for this paper. We will hopefully be able to provide it at some point, but this is out of my hands at the moment.

Bibtex

@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-58942-4_22,
author="Mercier-Aubin, Alexandre
and Gaudreault, Jonathan
and Quimper, Claude-Guy",
editor="Hebrard, Emmanuel
and Musliu, Nysret",
title="Leveraging Constraint Scheduling: A Case Study to the Textile Industry",
booktitle="Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research",
year="2020",
publisher="Springer International Publishing",
address="Cham",
pages="334--346",
abstract="Despite the significant progress made in scheduling in the past years, industrial problems with several hundred tasks remain intractable for some variants of the scheduling problems. We present techniques that can be used to leverage the power of constraint programming to solve an industrial problem with 800 non-preemptive tasks, 90 resources, and sequence-dependent setup times. Our method involves solving the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) as a simplification of the scheduling problem and using the simplified solution to guide the branching heuristics. We also explore large neighborhood search. Experiments conducted on a dataset provided by our partner from the textile industry show that we obtain non-optimal but satisfactory solutions.",
isbn="978-3-030-58942-4"
}