Developing Constraint-Based Applications With Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are in wide-spread industrial use for light-weight business applications, whereby the broad acceptance is both founded on the underlying intuitive interaction style with immediate feedback and a "programming model" comprehensible for non-programmers. In this paper we show how the spreadsheet development paradigm can be extended to model and solve a special class of search and optimization problems that occur in many application domains and would otherwise require the involvement of specialized knowledge engineers. We presen