Constraint Programming Next Challenge: Simplicity of Use

Abstract

Constraint Programming (CP) is a healthy research area in the academic community. The growing number of participants to the CP conference series, as well as the number of workshops around CP is a good evidence of it. Many major conferences have a CP track, both in artificial intelligence, and in operations research. The existence of several commercial companies that offer CP tools and services is a further evidence of the value of CP as an industrial technology. ILOG is one of such companies. One of our uniqueness, as far as CP is concerned, is that the research and development team that produces our CP products is also responsible for the development of our mathematical programming (MP) tool, namely ILOG CPLEX. This provides a unique opportunity to contrast the way these products are developed, marketed and used.

In this paper we argue that current CP technology is much too complex to use for the average engineer. Worse, we believe that much of the research occurring in the CP academic community makes this even worse every year. The rest of the paper provides evidence for this claim, and suggests ways to address the issue of simplicity of use by looking at how a similar issue has been addressed in the mathematical programming community.