Extending Object-Oriented Programming to Address Hard Optimization Problems

Many problems in the telecommunication business and elsewhere seem to resist an object-oriented approach. Although objects and classes are easily identified and requirements can be mapped into methods, the object-oriented paradigm does not shed much light on how to solve problems with combinatorial computational complexity. On the other hand, these problems often occur in large projects that require reuse of data and methodologies for which the objectoriented programming paradigm can help significantly. In this paper we present two successful applications of a new language, called LAURE, which extends the object-oriented programming with high-level constructs such as rules and constraints that apply to objects and interoperate with other object-oriented tools. The applications discussed are examples of mixed optimization problems which combine individual optimization problems for which a number of sophisticated techniques have been developed, but whose combination seems to elude many o..