Solving a job scheduling problem with CLP

Problems in various application areas can be formulated as scheduling problems. Therefore many efforts have been spent to find successful and efficient methods for solving this type of problems. The paper shows that a scheduling problem can be simply described as a set of constraints within which an optimal schedule solution must be found. Therefore a Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) approach is one of the most natural and promising ways of solving the scheduling problem. A difficult real-life example problem of job scheduling was successfully solved using CLP. The optimal problem solution was obtained by exhaustive search in a substantially constrainted space of admissible solutions.