Publications - Applications

Table Talk Tuning is a table-assignment problem drawn from a real wedding seating case. Alongside capacities, grouping and separation requests, table slack, and balance constraints, the model asks that every guest have at least one topic with enough support at their table to sustain a conversation.

The paper presents a MiniZinc model, three synthetic instance families from 10 to 150 guests, a reproducible benchmark pipeline, and a native Gecode model for comparing objective-aware search. The experiments show that the conversation terms still change the returned seatings in the paired ablation cases. The native experiments show that scalar, lexicographic, and sequential handling of the same objective hierarchy changes search behaviour.

This paper introduces the Work Task Variation (WTV) problem, a novel scheduling post-processing challenge focused on improving worker shift quality by rearranging tasks within their assigned time slots. The objective is to avoid excessively short or long durations of specific task types, creating smoother and more ergonomic work patterns.

We present RosterLogic Variation, a constraint-based local search (CBLS) inspired solver originally developed at Optischedule and successfully deployed in real-world retail settings. This solver rapidly improves existing schedules using tailored invariants and heuristics. We also provide a complete MiniZinc model and a set of generated realistic publicly available benchmark instances.

We compare our solver’s performance with that of modern CP solvers using the MiniZinc model. Contemporary state-of-the-art CP solvers are approaching the interactive performance of our CBLS solver for coarse planning, representing a significant advancement since the original design and implementation of our solver.

Sheet metal cutting using lasers is ubiquitous in the industry, and is used to produce everything from home decorations to excavator scoops. Metal waste is costly for the industry, both in terms of money, but also in terms of an increased environmental footprint. Tomologic develops a unique optimisation system that can reduce this waste drastically. This paper presents a CP approach to the Laser Cutting Path Planning Problem (LCPPP), a very hard important sub problem within the Tomologic optimisation system. A solution to the LCPPP is, given a packing of some details on a metal sheet, an ordering of the cuts necessary to separate the details from the sheet. The problem is complicated by physical factors such as heat from the laser beam, or details moving or flexing. In the paper, we explain the problem in detail and present our CP approach that we developed for solving the problem. The possibility (in CP) of custom search heuristics turned out to be crucial to be able to solve the problem efficiently, as these could be made to guide the search to good first solutions.