HYBRID PROBLEM SOLVING IN ECLiPSe

Recent advances in merging Operations Research (OR) models and methods in Constraint Programming (CP) have stressed the need for programming language implementations which support and facilitate the development ofhybrid solvers for combinatorial optimization problems. An important requirement on these im­ plementations is that they distinguish the solver-independent conceptual model (one model for multiple solvers) from a design model which delegates subprob­ lems to tailored solvers. ECLiPSe is a platform for building hybrid algorithms where different co-operative solvers are used in combination. The first part of this chapter presents some of the language ingredients which support CP-OR hybridization and how they can benefit the integration ofheterogeneous solvers . The second part ofthe chapter illustrates ECLiPSe through an implementation of a generic hybrid algorithm applied on a general resource-constrained scheduling problem with a widely applicable objective function. We show how the hybrid search can be elegantly programmed in ECLiPSe.

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