Scheduling through logic-based tools

Abstract

A scheduling problem can be defined in a nutshell as the problem of determining when and how the activities of a project have to be run, according to some project requirements. Such problems are ubiquitous nowadays since they frequently appear in industry and services. In most cases the computation of solutions of scheduling problems is hard, especially when some objective, such as the duration of the project, has to be optimised. The recent performance advances on solving the problems of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) and SAT Modulo Theories (SMT) have risen the interest in formulating hard combinatorial problems as SAT or SMT formulas, which are then solved with efficient algorithms. One of the principal advantages of such logic-based techniques is that they can certify optimality of solutions.