Multivalued Decision Diagrams for Sequencing Problems

Sequencing problems are among the most prominent problems studied in operations research, with primary application in, e.g., scheduling and routing. We propose a novel approach to solving generic sequencing problems using multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs). Because an MDD representation may grow e...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Operations research 2013-11, Vol.61 (6), p.1411-1428
Main Authors:	Cire, Andre A., van Hoeve, Willem-Jan
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Analysis Boolean constraint programming Decision analysis decision diagrams Employment Graph theory Integer programming METHODS Multiple criteria decision making networks/graphs Operations research Optimization Routing Scheduling Scheduling (Management) sequencing Sequential scheduling single machine scheduling Studies Traveling salesman problem
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	Sequencing problems are among the most prominent problems studied in operations research, with primary application in, e.g., scheduling and routing. We propose a novel approach to solving generic sequencing problems using multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs). Because an MDD representation may grow exponentially large, we apply MDDs of limited size as a discrete relaxation to the problem. We show that MDDs can be used to represent a wide range of sequencing problems with various side constraints and objective functions, and we demonstrate how MDDs can be added to existing constraint-based scheduling systems. Our computational results indicate that the additional inference obtained by our MDDs can speed up a state-of-the art solver by several orders of magnitude, for a range of different problem classes.
ISSN:	0030-364X 1526-5463