The main objective of lectures is to cover the required theoretical content of the course, illustrated by as many examples as possible. Lecture attendance is highly recommended in general, and sometimes mandatory (see below). The essential aspects, in the eyes of the head teacher, will be pointed out. Common misunderstandings will be discussed. The slides are not self-contained at all: they are only a support for the lectures, but not equivalent to their much more detailed content, so you ought to take notes. If you miss a lecture, then find other sources, such as the recommended extra material mentioned below or the Coursera on-line courses mentioned under Resources.
There is no planned correspondence between the scheduled lectures and the topics of the course: topic starts and ends need not be aligned with lecture starts and ends, as it all depends on the questions asked during the lectures. Revised slides (change log) may be uploaded any time, with an announcement in Studium. The models and data linked to within the slides are available collectively as the file allModelsData.zip and individually, together with the slides, in the folder models.
See my M4CO course.
| Topic | Slides, Theoretical Questions, Programming Exercises | Extra Material (recommended) | Lecturer |
|---|---|---|---|
| CP and MiniCP |
slides numbered 82-91 & 93 of
T01.pdf; T12.pdf |
Pierre Flener | |
| TinyCSP | Module 1 (see edX course "Constraint Programming" for videos, but use our updated slides, which are not pushed to edX yet) | paper on MiniCP (preprint) (delta) | Pierre Flener |
| MiniCP Solver | Module 2 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Sum and Element Constraints | Module 3 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Table Constraint | Module 4 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| AllDifferent Constraint | Module 5 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Circuit Constraint, TSP, VRP, Optimisation, and LNS | Module 6 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Cumulative Scheduling | Module 7 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Disjunctive Scheduling | Module 8 (ditto) (whiteboard notes) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Tue 17 Dec 2024 at 11:15: mandatory guest lecture (normal lecture from 10:15 to 11:00) | CP for Product Configuration at Tacton | Jean-Noël Monette of Tacton Systems AB | |
| Black-Box Search | Module 9 (ditto) | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Modelling (not to be seen in autumn 2024) | Module 10 (ditto), but we will not cover it, as it is redundant with the MiniZinc part of our course | see above | Pierre Flener |
| Conclusion | T18.pdf | Pierre Flener |
A missed guest lecture (in case of no force majeure) can be compensated for by a summary of a research paper chosen by the head teacher.
There are no textbooks for these courses. Links to particularly good tutorials on some topics are given in the Extra Material columns of the tables above.
For the bigger picture of part 1, we recommend the following reference book:
In the voluntary case where you want a deeper understanding of the theory behind consistency and propagation in part 2, we recommend the following reference book: