Considering the cost of a cellular wireless infrastructure, network planning and optimization are important issues for networks operators if they wish to remain competitive. In this paper, we first propose a constraint programming model for the design problem of cellular wireless communication networks. It consists of selecting the location of the base station controllers (BSCs) and mobile service switching centers (MSCs), selecting their types, designing the network topology and selecting the link types, and considering the location of base transceiver stations (BTSs). The objective is to find the minimum cost network subject to the design constraints. Since this problem is NP-hard, it is unlikely that real-size instances of the problem can be solved to optimality within a reasonable amount of time. As a result, we propose a heuristic to find a good solution of the model based on a local search combined with constraint programming techniques.

This presentation addresses a particular class of the Real Time Vehicle Dispatching Problems where it is necessary to service some customers with multiple resources subject to synchronization constraints. Real world applications are presented and flexible solution methods, based on Constraint Programming, are proposed. In order to facilitate future comparisons, benchmark problems are derived from well-known vehicle routing benchmark problems and a transformation method is detailed. Results on these problems show that solutions are sensitive to the number of synchronization constraints as well as the requests arrival rate.

We propose a constraint-based model for a wide variety of medical staff scheduling problems (nurses or physicians; different units). The approach uses constraint programming and focuses on robustness and speed rather than optimisation. This talk concentrates on search strategies. We provide comparative experimental results and discuss conditions under which our algorihm produces high quality schedules.