A hybrid approach to decision support for resource-constrained scheduling problems

Resource-constrained scheduling problems are commonly found in various areas, such as project management, manufacturing, transportation, software engineering, computer networks, and supply chain management. Its problem models involve a large number of constraints and discrete decision variables, including binary and integer. In effect, the representation of resource allocation, for instance, is often expressed using binary or integer decision variables to form several constraints according to the respective scheduling problem. It significantly increases the number of decision variables and constraints as the problem scales; such kind of traditional approaches based on operations research is insufficient. Therefore, a hybrid approach to decision support for resource-constrained scheduling problems which combines operation research (OR) and constraint logic programming (CLP) is proposed. Unlike OR-based approaches, declarative CLP provides a natural representation of different types of constraints. This approach provides: (a) decision support through the answers to the general and specific questions, (b) specification of the problem based on a set of facts and constraints, (c) reduction to the combinatorial solution space. To evaluate efficiency and applicability of the proposed hybrid approach and implementation platform, implementation examples of job-shop scheduling problem are presented separately for the three environments, i.e., Mathematical Programming (MP), CLP, and hybrid implementation platform.