A decision support systems shell in Prolog

K.M. van Hee and W.P.M. Nuijten Department of Mathematics and Computing Science Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands Many operational planning problems can be considered as searching for an element in a finite set. Classical approaches lead to sophisticated combinatorial optimization algorithms that exploit a lot of the structure of the decision situation. Often these systems are not easy to adapt to new constraints on solutions imposed by the decision makers. Our approach is to use general search methods that are easy to adapt in case of new constraints. In general they give less good solutions but are more robust for new constraints. A general-purpose search shell based on these search methods is sketched using Prolog. As an illustration two examples are given: the travelling salesman problem and precedence constrained scheduling.