<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>The paper presents a concept and the outline of the implementation of a hybrid approach to modelling and solving constrained problems. Two environments of mathematical programming (in particular, integer programming) and declarative programming (in particular, constraint logic programming) were integrated. The strengths of integer programming and constraint logic programming, in which constraints are treated in a different way and different methods are implemented, were combined to use the strengths of both. The hybrid method is not worse than either of its components used independently. The proposed approach is particularly important for the decision models with an objective function and many discrete decision variables added up in multiple constraints. To validate the proposed approach, two illustrative examples are presented and solved. The first example is the authors’ original model of cost optimisation in the supply chain with multimodal transportation. The second one is the two-echelon variant of the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem.</p></abstract>

The paper presents a concept and the outline of the implementation of a hybrid approach to modelling and solving constrained problems. Two environments of mathematical programming (in particular, integer programming) and declarative programming (in particular, constraint logic programming) were integrated. The strengths of integer programming and constraint logic programming, in which constraints are treated in a different way and different methods are implemented, were combined to use the strengths of both. The hybrid method is not worse than either of its components used independently. The proposed approach is particularly important for the decision models with an objective function and many discrete decision variables added up in multiple constraints. To validate the proposed approach, two illustrative examples are presented and solved. The first example is the authors’ original model of cost optimisation in the supply chain with multimodal transportation. The second one is the two-echelon variant of the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem.

A Hybrid Method for the Modelling and Optimisation of Constrained Search Problems

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Automatics and Computer Science Kielce University of Technology, Kielce, Poland

Foundations of Management

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

The paper presents a concept and the outline of the implementation of a hybrid approach to modelling and solving constrained problems. Two environments of...

A Hybrid Method for the Modelling and Optimisation of Constrained Search Problems

Published Online: Aug 21, 2014

Page range: 7 - 22

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/fman-2014-0016

Keywords
hybrid methods, constrained search problems, discrete optimisation, decision support, logistics

© 2014 Faculty of Management, Warsaw University of Technology

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

A Hybrid Method for the Modelling and Optimisation of Constrained Search Problems

Published Online: Aug 21, 2014

Page range: 7 - 22

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/fman-2014-0016

Keywordshybrid methods, constrained search problems, discrete optimisation, decision support, logistics

© 2014 Faculty of Management, Warsaw University of Technology

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
hybrid methods, constrained search problems, discrete optimisation, decision support, logistics