Constraint Optimization
Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.
Robert Byrne
Real-life problems frequently involve both hard and soft constraints. For example, in time-tabling problems, while a resource constraint such as “a teacher can teach only one class at a time” must be satisfied, a teacher’s request to have her “schedule concentrated in just two days” is only a preference, not essential.
When we formalize problems that have both hard and soft constraints, we get a constraint network augmented with a global cost function (also called criterion function or objective function) over all the variables. Constraint optimization problems (COPs) find a complete assignment of values to all the variables, satisfying the hard constraints ...
Get Constraint Processing now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
