Projects & contracts

Angels: ANGuilliform robot with ELectric Sense

STREP - FP7 program

2008-2011

partners

EPFL, SSSA (Pisa), IIBCE, UDELAR (Urugya), USTUTT (Stuttgart), UBO (Bonn), CNRS-UNIC

persons

Gilles Chabert

contributions

localization and mapping with set-membership approach.

The aim of the ANGELS project is to investigate interactions between body morphology and behaviour by designing and building a prototype for a reconfigurable anguilliform swimming robotic system. The robot will be able to function either as an eel-like whole entity, or may split into smaller agents (and vice-versa). These two different morphological forms will use a bio-inspired "electric sense", both for recognition of objects and obstacles, and for communication between agents, and will explore and exploit the different swimming and electro-sensing strategies used by gymnotid and mormyrid electric fish

Net-WMS: Networked businesses in Warehouse Management Systems

STREP - FP6 program

2006-2009

partners

ERCIM, INRIA, CEA, SICS, KLS, PSA, Fiat, Mind2Biz, Wide Scope

persons

Nicolas Beldiceanu, Emmanuel Poder, Rida Sadek, Mohamed Sbihi, Sophie Demassey, Xavier Lorca, Stéphane Zampelli

contributions

geometric kernel for generalised multi-dimensional problems, geometric constraint geost (including non-overlapping, visibility,...), heuristics, visualisation and case studies of geometric problems.

The NetWMS project is a STREP of the sixth PCRD. The project deals with the development of tools mixing at the same time constraint programming and virtual reality for the management of the warehouses. The Contraintes team develops in this project generic geometrical constraints as well as business rules constraints from the field of warehouses management and logistics.

BOOLE: Quantifying Boolean Frameworks

ANR-blanc 2009 project (non thematic)

2009-2012

partners

UVSQ, U. Caen, U. Paris 8, U. Aix-Marseille I, U. Aix-Marseille II, U. Paris Nord, U. Paris 11, ENS Ulm

person

Charlotte Truchet

Boolean functions, a mathematical structure relying on boolean logic, are ubiquitous in computer science (microprocessors, DSPs, etc). Most of the problems arising from boolean functions are computationally hard: the whole SAT family for instance. Constraints satisfaction problems can be viewed as a simple extension of the boolean paradigm. The goal of the BOOLE project is to study the boolean logic framework from the probabilistic point of view, in order to provide a mathematical toolbox with which to measure and quantify statistical properties on these formulae.

SelfXL: autonomous administration of large scale complex systems

ANR-ARPEGE 2009 project (Embedded Systems and Large Infrastructures)

2009-2011

partners

LINA/ASCOLA (coordinator), IRIT, France Telecom RD, Bull, Adèle/LIG, Scalagent

persons

Nicolas Beldiceanu

The SelfXL project aims at investigating abstractions and implementation techniques for autonomic systems with a high software complexity (distributed, size of code, etc.), and large-scaled in terms of size and heterogeneity of resources and softwares. Two main issues are addressed: How to implement administration policies (self-repair, self-optimization, self-protection) for complex systems and how to coordinate administration policies in a complex system? Regarding the first issue, SelfXL proposes to explore domain specific languages (DSL) for defining and ensure the correctness of specific kinds of administration policies. Regarding the second issue, we propose to design a decision module based on Constraint Programming (CP). As the Rules Based Systems (RBS) or the Event Condition Action (ECA) approach, CP belongs to the declarative paradigm but does not share the major drawback of the other approaches when some rules are simultaneously asserted. This is the case when there is an overlap between the domain or the target of rules.

CANAR: Constraint Acquisition aNd Automatic Reformulation

ANR-blanc 2006 project (non thematic)

2006-2009

partners

LIRMM/Montpellier, LIFO/Orléans, Caen

persons

Thierry Petit (coordinator), Philippe David, Nicolas Beldiceanu, Julien Vion

This project deals with constraint learning as well as automatic reformulation of constraints. This is a critical challenge, specially for answering the question of the applicability of constraint programming by non-experts in the field.

SEISM: Scenario Editing Interactive State Machine

ANR-RIAM 2005 project (Research and Innovation in Audio-visual and Multimedia)

2006-2008

partners

Succubus Interactive, École du Design de Nantes

persons

Emmanuel Poder, Nicolas Beldiceanu

Innovative software for editing and visualizing complex video-game conception and production scenarios. Project conducted in collaboration with Succubus Interactive and supported by the ANR (French National Research Agency) as part of the RIAM (Research and Innovation in Audio-visual and Multimedia) activities. The objective of the project is to use constraint programming in the context of 3D visualisation. The concrete application concerns an editor of games scenarios developed by Succubus Interactive.

OADyMPPac: Tools for dynamic analysis of constraint programs

RNTL project

2000-2003

partners

Ilog, Cosytec, INRIA/CONTRAINTES, IRISA/LANDE, LIFO

persons

Narendra Jussien, Romuald Debruyne, Samir Ouis, Guillaume Rochart

contributions

VISEXP: a tool for visualising explanations.

The European project DiSCiPl (Debugging Systems for Constraint Programming) sought to facilitate the diffusion of constraint programming to a wide audience. For that, the DiSCiPl project focusses on several aspects such as error diagnosis, identification of performance bottlenecks, and interactive debugging tools design. Two major difficulties were identified at the end of the DiSCiPl project: On the one hand the lack of a shared generic format for the trace of all internal events of a solver, on the other hand the problem of automatic extraction of the relevant information. The main objective of the OADyMPPac project was to contribute to the definition of such a generic trace format being able to be produced by all current solvers and exploited by various analysis and debugging tools.

Google: Explanations for constraint programming

focused research award

2010

partners

Google

persons

Narendra Jussien, Charles Prud'homme

Recent work in the constraint programming tend to demonstrate that providing explanation-based user-oriented features can be done quite easily in modern constraint solvers. The objective of the proposed line of work is to specify a user-oriented explanation module for flexible solver architectures. It relies on the experience of the team on developing explanation-based constraint solvers (including PaLM which was integrated in Choco v1).

UNIT: pedagogic modules on constraint programming

projet UNIT

2010

partners

Fondation Université Numérique Ingénierie et Technologie, GEM

person

Nicolas Beldiceanu

The goal of the project is the development of a set of digital pedagogic modules on constraint programming, including a set of interactive resources, a generator of modeling exercices, and semantic search tools for the global constraint catalog.

LigéRO: Ligérian Group in Operational Research

collective emergence - Région Pays de la Loire

2009-2012

partners

LISA/MSD, IRCCyN/SLP, LERIA/MOA, LINA/ROOM

persons

Sophie Demassey, Xavier Lorca, Charles Prud'homme

RUBIS: Unified Local Search and Instance Benchmarks

Atlanstic project

2010

partner

LERIA/MOA

persons

Charlotte Truchet, Marie Pelleau

The goal of this project is to formalize several local search algorithms in a common framework, using the abstract model from the Algorithm Selection Problem. The different combinations of these components will then be tested on a large set of benchmarks. The parameter tuning will also be statistically investigated. As local search methods often appear as ad hoc algorithms, and are also often tuned by hand, such a knowledge base should be of interest to the whole scientific community.

LMD: Sustainable shared logistics

ADEME project

2008-2009

partners

Euromed Textile, Bénédicta, UTT, LIP6

persons

Fabien Le Huédé (IRCCyN/SLP), Claire Pavageau (IRCCyN/SLP), Charles Prud'homme, Narendra Jussien

contributions

prototype of validation for project of shared logistics.

The objective of this project is to show the feasibility of constraint programming based solutions in the context of project of shared logistics for SME.

MILES-SIAD WP3: Transport Optimization in logistic systems

MILES project - Région Pays de la Loire

2007-2009

partners

IRCCyN/SLP, ROOM/LINA, LISA, LERIA

persons

Nicolas Beldiceanu, Narendra Jussien

development of OR/CP methods for vehicle routing problems with packing constraints.

Mission Planning

contract

2008

partner

SAGEM

persons

Nicolas Beldiceanu, Xavier Lorca

CONS-PACK 2: bin-packing with constraints

project GDR RO

2008

partners

LIFL, Heudiasyc, LAMIH, IRCCyN/SLP

persons

Nicolas Beldiceanu

study of cutting and packing problems: placement of rectangles.

ROC-TV: OR and CP for Vehicle Routing

project GDR RO

2007

partners

IRCCyN/SLP, CREAM/OSPL

persons

Christelle Guéret (SLP), Sophie Demassey, Narendra Jussien

initiate collaborative works on hybrid OR/CP methods for solving vehicle routing problems.

Assignment and scheduling for real time systems

Atlanstic project

2006-2007

partner

IRCCyN/Real Time System team

persons

Narendra Jussien, Hadrien Cambazard, Pierre-Emmanuel Hladik

The project objective is to develop a constraint solver for a scheduling and assignment problem within the context of real time systems.

Camera control : hybrid approaches and applications

project Atlanstic

2006-2007

partner

IRCCyN

participants

Marc Christie, Jean-Marie Normand

Hybrid methods for vehicle routing problems

project Atlanstic

2006-2007

partners

IRCCyN/SLP, CRT Montréal

participants

Narendra Jussien, Hadrien Cambazard, Xavier Lorca

Scheduling Constraints

contract

2005

partner

Bouygues e-lab

persons

Narendra Jussien, Hadrien Cambazard, Émilie Grellier

The project objective is to provide an explained global constraint for handling network of temporal constraints.

Explanations for flow algorithms

contract

2004

partner

Bouygues e-lab

persons

Narendra Jussien, Guillaume Rochart

The project objective is to provide analysis and debugging tools for a set of global constraints for which the filtering algorithms are all based on flow algorithms.