Implementation And Integration Of Different Classes Of Resource Constraints For Activity Scheduling: Principles And Tradeoffs

fined". It enables flexible use of the scheduling system as constraints can be added or removed at any time (cf. [3] for an example). And it simplifies system extension as new types of constraints can be added to the system without needs for modification of the existing code. Once the choice of using constraint-based techniques is made, there are a number of issues to consider in order to design the best possible representation for the considered problem. Characteristics of the activities and resources to schedule are to be considered first. Three broad families of scheduling problems are distinguishable depending on the degrees of freedom in positioning resource supply and resource demand intervals in time. In pure scheduling problems (e.g., job-shop machine scheduling), the capacity of each resource is defined over a number of time intervals and the problem consists of positioning resource-demanding activities over time, without ever exceeding the available capacity