The OPL Studio Modeling System

This chapter describes OPL Studio, a modeling system for combinatorial optimization. OPL Studio features a number of innovative features, including its modeling language OPL, its visualization and debugging facilities, and its integration in larger applications through code generation. In particular, OPL modeling language combines high-level algebraic and set notations from modeling languages with a rich constraint language and the ability to specify search procedures and strategies that is the essence of constraint programming. Its development environment also supports automatic animations of the search space reduction and exploration which are often critical in understanding model behaviors in complex application. The chapter illustrates some of these functionalities using frequency allocation, sport scheduling, scene allocation, and project scheduling applications.