ESPRIT Project No 23365
The aim of this Trial Application is to enable exploitation of Constraint Programming (CP) technology by companies from manufacturing and process industrial sectors, and to show that the resulting applications can be fully integrated within their corporate information system.
In this project we will develop three scheduling applications based on models of real production processes and to evaluate the practical usefulness of such tools in everyday planning of the industrial partners. The application domains vary from steel manufacturing (Ovako) and gas production (Air Liquide) to manufacturing of plastics for electrical equipment (IQSOFT and its industrial partner Prodax).
Using conventional programming techniques, it is very difficult to solve highly combinatorial problems, like scheduling, resource allocation and planning. Constraint Programming (CP) is an emerging technology which provides a general framework for efficient and flexible solving of complex problems, through combined implementation of various constraint solvers. There are no tools available to solve long-term planning problems, and we believe that CP technology can achieve this goal. We do not conceal the fact that the major risk concerns the performance of the resulting product. But we have a good experience of many implementation of exact or approximate solvers to be confident. PrologIA and SICS have valuable experience in applying CP to industrial problem. IQSOFT brings into the project both its vast experience in logic programming and its experience in the customization and distribution of traditional CIM products in the Hungarian market.
The three industrial partners are all involved in industry segment where the successful application of constraint techniques should provide significant reductions in cost (transportation, size of the inventory, ...) around 10%. Air Liquide SA Division Belge manages the northern production network of Air Liquide and distributes oxygen, nitrogen and argon with pipes for gases and with classical transports for liquid gases, Ovako Steel is the leading European producer of bearing steel and a prominent manufacturer of special engineering steel, while IQSOFT together with its sub-contractor, Prodax, represents the fast developing manufacturing industry of Central European countries.
The results will be directly exploited by the industrial partners who will use the developed tool to manage their production plans. The results of this project can be directly used in similar industries, where many different products are produced from a small number of raw materials. For PrologIA, the goal is to produce a significant example that demonstrates the advantages of using CP technology in managing manufacturing processes. For SICS the aim is to contribute to the competitive strength of Swedish industry by carrying out advanced research in CP and other selected areas of Computer Science and through technology transfer actively promote the use of new ideas and results in industry. IQSOFT aims to prove the usability of the CP approach in building powerful optimization extensions to traditional CIM systems. IQSOFT also aims to expand the scope of the project to include aspects relevant to the transitional economies of Central and Eastern European countries.
Send comments and suggestions to emil@sics.se