Applying a Distributed CLP Platform to a Workforce Management Problem

I. Sakellariou, F. Kokkoras, I. Vlahavas, “Applying a Distributed CLP Platform to a Workforce Management Problem”, Proc. 12th Conference on Intelligent Systems Application to Power Systems (ISAP '03), (electronic proceedings), Greece, 2003.

Proc. 12th Conference on Intelligent Systems Application to Power Systems (ISAP '03), (electronic proceedings), Greece, 2003.

The work presented in this paper concerns the application of CSPCONS, a distributed constraint logic programming platform to a workforce management problem, namely the BT-250-118 problem instance. The latter is a well-studied problem instance in which the requirement is to create sequences of job locations for the technicians to visit (tours), so as to serve as many jobs as possible, minimizing at the same time the travel duration. CSPCONS is a logic programming platform that supports program execution over multiple Prolog processes with constraints. It offers channel-based communicating processes and TCP/IP communication and is based on the CSP model introduced by Hoare. This paper demonstrates its applicability to such complex Distributed Constraint Satisfaction problems.