I attended the CPML (Constraint Programming/Machine Learning) bridge event at this year’s AAAI 2024 conference in Vancouver BC, Canada, and presented some work on “Scheduling Examples for Constraint Acquisition” at the event. Unfortunately, the weather was rather mixed, as the image below shows.
The event consisted of ten presentations, slides and abstracts can be found at http://osullivan.ucc.ie/CPML2024/schedule.html
My own presentation looked at finding examples of scheduling problems as benchmarks for Constraint Acquisition tools.
In the talk we consider different sources of the scheduling problems, starting from teaching examples in books and courses on Constraint Programming, to problems described in the literature (with data provided as supplementary materials for papers and articles), and more complex datasets coming from industrial applications. One of the problems encountered is that the data formats of the different problems are quite ad-hoc, and very often cannot be easily interpreted by the Constraint Acquisition tools. We will talk more about this in the future.
Constraint Applications Blog by Helmut Simonis 