1,654 research outputs found
Timetabling in constraint logic programming
In this paper we describe the timetabling problem and its solvability in a Constraint Logic
Programming Language. A solution to the problem has been developed and implemented in
ECLiPSe, since it deals with finite domains, it has well-defined interfaces between basic
building blocks and supports good debugging facilities. The implemented timetable was
based on the existing, currently used, timetables at the School of Informatics at out
university. It integrates constraints concerning room and period availability
Combining Relational Algebra, SQL, Constraint Modelling, and Local Search
The goal of this paper is to provide a strong integration between constraint
modelling and relational DBMSs. To this end we propose extensions of standard
query languages such as relational algebra and SQL, by adding constraint
modelling capabilities to them. In particular, we propose non-deterministic
extensions of both languages, which are specially suited for combinatorial
problems. Non-determinism is introduced by means of a guessing operator, which
declares a set of relations to have an arbitrary extension. This new operator
results in languages with higher expressive power, able to express all problems
in the complexity class NP. Some syntactical restrictions which make data
complexity polynomial are shown. The effectiveness of both extensions is
demonstrated by means of several examples. The current implementation, written
in Java using local search techniques, is described. To appear in Theory and
Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure
An XML format for benchmarks in High School Timetabling
The High School Timetabling Problem is amongst the most widely used timetabling problems. This problem has varying structures in different high schools even within the same country or educational system. Due to lack of standard benchmarks and data formats this problem has been studied less than other timetabling problems in the literature. In this paper we describe the High School Timetabling Problem in several countries in order to find a common set of constraints and objectives. Our main goal is to provide exchangeable benchmarks for this problem. To achieve this we propose a standard data format suitable for different countries and educational systems, defined by an XML schema. The schema and datasets are available online
Operational Research in Education
Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions
Learning Weak Constraints in Answer Set Programming
This paper contributes to the area of inductive logic programming by
presenting a new learning framework that allows the learning of weak
constraints in Answer Set Programming (ASP). The framework, called Learning
from Ordered Answer Sets, generalises our previous work on learning ASP
programs without weak constraints, by considering a new notion of examples as
ordered pairs of partial answer sets that exemplify which answer sets of a
learned hypothesis (together with a given background knowledge) are preferred
to others. In this new learning task inductive solutions are searched within a
hypothesis space of normal rules, choice rules, and hard and weak constraints.
We propose a new algorithm, ILASP2, which is sound and complete with respect to
our new learning framework. We investigate its applicability to learning
preferences in an interview scheduling problem and also demonstrate that when
restricted to the task of learning ASP programs without weak constraints,
ILASP2 can be much more efficient than our previously proposed system.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP),
Proceedings of ICLP 201
Feature-based tuning of simulated annealing applied to the curriculum-based course timetabling problem
We consider the university course timetabling problem, which is one of the
most studied problems in educational timetabling. In particular, we focus our
attention on the formulation known as the curriculum-based course timetabling
problem, which has been tackled by many researchers and for which there are
many available benchmarks.
The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose an effective and
robust single-stage simulated annealing method for solving the problem.
Secondly, we design and apply an extensive and statistically-principled
methodology for the parameter tuning procedure. The outcome of this analysis is
a methodology for modeling the relationship between search method parameters
and instance features that allows us to set the parameters for unseen instances
on the basis of a simple inspection of the instance itself. Using this
methodology, our algorithm, despite its apparent simplicity, has been able to
achieve high quality results on a set of popular benchmarks.
A final contribution of the paper is a novel set of real-world instances,
which could be used as a benchmark for future comparison
Logic Programming with Max-Clique and its Application to Graph Coloring (Tool Description)
This paper presents pl-cliquer, a Prolog interface to the
cliquer tool for the maximum clique problem.
Using pl-cliquer facilitates a programming style that allows logic programs to integrate with other tools such as: Boolean
satisfiability solvers, finite domain constraint solvers, and graph isomorphism tools.
We illustrate this programming style to solve the Graph Coloring problem, applying a symmetry break that derives from finding a maximum clique in the input graph.
We present an experimentation of the resulting Graph Coloring solver on two benchmarks, one from the graph coloring community and the other from the examination timetabling community.
The implementation of pl-cliquer consists of two components: A lightweight C interface, connecting cliquer\u27s C library and
Prolog, and a Prolog module which loads the library.
The complete tool is available as a SWI-Prolog module
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