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The Comet Programming Language and System
Comet is an award-winning tool for solving complex combinatorial optimization problems in areas such as resource allocation and scheduling. It may dramatically simplify the design and implementation of (stochastic) local search algorithms, while preserving the efficiency of low-level, problem-specific, implementations.Comet is described in the book "Constraint-Based Local Search" published by MIT Press.
Comet's underlying computational paradigm is Constraint-based Local Search, the idea of specifying local search algorithms as two components: a high-level model describing the applications in terms of constraints, constraint combinators, and objective functions; a search procedure expressed in terms of the model at a high abstraction level.
Constraint-based local search makes it possible to build local search algorithms compositionally, to separate modeling from search, to promote genericity and reusability across many applications, and to exploit problem structure to achieve high performance.
Comet is an object-oriented language featuring novel modeling and control abstractions to support constraint-based local search. Some of its modeling and control abstractions are described in two papers which won a best paper award at CP'03 and a distinguished paper award at CP'04.
Project status: Active
Project Home Page: http://www.comet-online.org/
Research Areas
People
| Pascal Van Hentenryck |
Publications
Van Hentenryck, P., and Michel, L. Nondeterministic Control for Hybrid Search. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CP-AI-OR'05) (Prague, May 2005), pp. 380-395. [ pdf ]
Van Hentenryck, P., and Michel, L. Control Abstractions for Local Search. Constraints 10, 2 (Apr 2005), 137-157. [ pdf ]
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L., and Liu, L. Constraint-Based Combinators for Local Search. Constraints 10, 4 (Apr 2005). [ pdf ]
Van Hentenryck, P., and Michel, L. Constraint-Based Local Search. The MIT Press, 2005.
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L., and Liu, L. Constraint-Based Combinators for Local Search. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Constraint Programming (CP-2004) (Toronto, Canada, Sep 2004), pp. 47-61.
Van Hentenryck, P., and Michel, L. Scheduling Abstractions for Local Search. In Proceeding of the First International Conference on the Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CP-AI-OR-04) (Nice, France, Apr 2004), pp. 319-334. [ pdf ]
Michel, L., and Van Hentenryck, P. Comet in Context. In Principles of Computing and Knowledge: Proceedings of the Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Workshop (San Diego, CA, Jun 2003), pp. 95-107. [ pdf ]
Van Hentenryck, P., and Michel, L. Control Abstractions for Local Search. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Constraint Programming (CP-2003) (Kinsale, Ireland, Sep 2003), pp. 65-80. [ pdf ]
Michel, L., and Van Hentenryck, P. A Constraint-Based Architecture for Local Search. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'2002) (Seattle, WA, 2002), pp. 101-110. [ pdf ]
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