Name: Principles of constraint programming
ISBN: 9780521125499

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cervedMar 2020

I'm glad to see the domain of constraint programming and operational research in general generate interest so I thought I would take the opportunity to share some links and resources I have found useful. Personally, I've spent most of my time on the routing (TSP, VRP, VRPTW) side of things using CP (OscaR-CP).

Discrete optimization and constraint programming can be a bit difficult to get into. There are two great free online courses on Coursera that do a good job at introducing the topic.

Discrete Optimization

https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization

I don't remember the exact content of this course but I believe it covers the basics in a few different methodologies.

Basic Modeling for Discrete Optimization

https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic-modeling

This is a great course by Peter Stuckey that uses MiniZinc. The MiniZinc programming language is a great starting point that teaches you to think of solving discrete optimization problems only in terms of modelling the problem.

Håkan Kjellerstrands blog is another great resource

http://www.hakank.org/

It contains hundreds of different models for a large variety of different solvers. Chances are that he has created a model for your solver for a similar problem.

Two books worth mentioning are:

Handbook of Constraint Programming

Principles of Constraint Programming

Other solvers/frameworks:

The OscaR library

https://bitbucket.org/oscarlib/oscar/wiki/Home

My personal favorite. An OR framework written entirely in Scala. As such it's an absolute joy to work with and the internals are (relatively speaking) easier to understand.

GeCode

https://www.gecode.org/

Another extremely potent solver. Exclusively CP based.

Mini-CP

https://minicp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

An extremly lightweight CP solver, designed for educational purposed to expose how a CP solver works without obfuscating performance optimizations found in research/production solvers.

MiniZinc

https://www.minizinc.org/

A solver agnostic constraint modelling languages, designed to interface a given optimization model with different solvers.

A few notable researches:

Phil Kilby

Pascal Van Hentenryck

Paul Shaw

Laurent Perron - OR-tools

Peter Stuckey - MiniZinc

Pierre Schaus - OscaR, Mini-CP

Renaud Hartert - OscaR

I also want to make a plug for the work of the Uppsala University optimization group

http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/optimisation/

Especially the work of Pierre Flener, Gustav Björdal and Justin Pearson who I've had the pleasure to work with during my masters thesis on vehicle routing using CP.

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beerbajayDec 2015

I wrote my master's thesis in Constraint Programming. The textbook for my CP course was Apt's "Principles of Constraint Programming"[1], but I have to admit to barely using it. Most of the books and "introductions" to CP which I've read have been lacking in either rigor or clarity; many important details are glossed over, partly I think, because of CP's development from other kinds of optimization/satisfaction programming. When learning, I mostly used lecture notes from Christian Schulte (from KTH in Sweden) and Pierre Flener (from Uppsala University, also in Sweden). I can unfortunately not find these accessible online at the moment.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Constraint-Programming-Krzy...

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