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From: andrewd@ie.utoronto.ca (Andrew James Davenport)
Subject: Workshop on Industrial Constraint-Directed Scheduling
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Organization: Dept. Of Industrial Engineering, University Of Toronto
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 21:08:05 GMT
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                              CALL FOR PAPERS

           Workshop on Industrial Constraint-Directed Scheduling

                Schloss Hagenberg, Austria, 1 November 1997


The workshop will be held  in conjunction with the Third International
Conference on  Principles  and  Practice  of  Constraint   Programming
(CP97), October 29 - November 1, 1997

SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP

In recent years constraint-directed scheduling techniques have matured
to a  point  where they   have found their   way into  many industrial
applications, in particular  through constraint programming  languages
such   as ILOG Solver   and  Scheduler,  CHIP,  and  projects  such as
GreenTrip and NumODO. In this workshop we wish to  provide a forum for
work relating to applying constraint-directed techniques to industrial
scheduling and resource  allocation  problems. In particular, we  seek
research  which addresses (but which is  not limited to) the following
issues:

   * adapting constraint techniques to industrial requirements e.g
        o hard/soft constraints, fuzzy constraints;
        o preferences and costs;
        o rescheduling;
        o multi-initiative scheduling (user interfaces and user
          interactions);
        o partial constraint satisfaction;
        o scheduling under uncertainty;
        o robustness of solutions;
        o retraction techniques;
   * extending constraint-directed techniques beyond the job shop model,
     e.g.
        o alternative/multiple resources;
        o resources with time-varying capacity;
        o continuous and discrete inventory;
        o pre-emptive scheduling;
        o sequence-dependent changeovers;
   * solution techniques for industrial problems, e.g.
        o constraint relaxation techniques;
        o constraint propagation techniques;
        o heuristics for scheduling;
        o distributed and multi-agent scheduling;
        o approximate scheduling.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Submission deadline is 15 August 1997.  Authors  are invited to submit
original papers  written in English and approximately  10  A4 pages to
Andrew Davenport at the contact address below. We encourage authors to
submit    by   electronic    mail    in   self-contained    Postscript
format. Alternatively five paper copies may be submitted.

Decisions on acceptance will be sent to authors by 15 September 1997.

PUBLICATION

An   informal proceedings of  the  workshop will  be  available to the
workshop participants. Final copies will be due by 1 October 1997.

ORGANISATION

     Andrew Davenport and Chris Beck (co-chairs)
     Enterprise Integration Laboratory,
     University of Toronto,
     4 Taddle Creek Road,
     Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G9,
     CANADA

     andrewd@ie.utoronto.ca
     chris@cs.utoronto.ca

PROGRAM COMMITEE

   * Mark Fox		University of Toronto
   * Geir Hasle         SINTEF   
   * Claude Le Pape	Bouygues - Direction Scientifique
   * Wim Nuijten	ILOG
   * Patrick Prosser	University of Strathclyde
   * Barbara Smith	University of Leeds
   * Edward Tsang	University of Essex

INVITED TALK

"On becoming industrially relevant"
Ed Sitarski, Vice-President Research and Development, Numetrix Ltd.

Edward Sitarski   is  vice-president of  research and   development at
Numetrix  Ltd  where  he  is  responsible for   all  research, product
development and    technical direction. Over   the   last  8 years  at
Numetrix, he has released    a number of integrated  decision  support
products for the Supply  Chain Optimization market. These products are
used  to commercially    solve   many diverse  business   planning and
scheduling problems   from  high-level   inter-enterprise analysis  to
short-term production/distribution coordination  to   second-by-second
production scheduling  and  vehicle loading at   the plant and loading
dock. The  software  incorporates research  from  many areas including
large  scale constraint  visualization, representation,    mathmatical
programming,  constraint-directed  search,    simulation and  portable
integration.  Dozens   of multi-national companies  rely   on Numetrix
products worldwide. In 1993 he   was granted a patent (US  #5,237,497)
for a     technique   to  perform   large-scale    visualization   and
optimization.  He   received  a B.  Math  in   Graph Theory   from the
University of Waterloo in 1988.

IMPORTANT DATES

     15 August 1997:	Paper submissions
     15 September 1997: Acceptance decisions
     1 October 1997:	Final copy due
     1 November 1997:	Workshop

FURTHER INFORMATION

Additional information will be available at the CP97 web site:
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/conferences/CP97/
