Filtering techniques in planning and scheduling
A half-day tutorial at ICAPS 2006

Constraint satisfaction technology plays an important role in solving
real-life scheduling problems. As time and resources become more important in
nowadays planning, the role of constraint satisfaction is increasing there
too. One of the key aspects of constraint satisfaction is using constraints
actively to remove infeasible values from domains of variables and hence to
prune the search space. This is called domain filtering. The goal of the
tutorial is to explain in detail domain filtering techniques used in the
context of constraint-based planning and scheduling.

The tutorial is targeted to researchers and practitioners that would like to
use constraint satisfaction technology efficiently in solving planning and
scheduling problems. Basics of constraint satisfaction and in particular
constraint propagation will be explained so no prior knowledge of constraint
satisfaction is required. The focus of the tutorial is on existing filtering
algorithms for constraints used in modelling time and resource
restrictions. The implementation of new filtering algorithms will also be
explained. The audience will take away a basic understanding of how constraint
propagation works with more details on filtering techniques for planning and
scheduling constraints.