CP Lectures & Slides

For administrative reasons, and like in every course, attendance at the first two-hour-lecture is mandatory: you must contact Pierre Flener if you cannot make it for a convincing case of force majeure, ideally in advance. Attendance at all other lectures as well as at the labs and lessons is highly recommended.

The main objective of lectures is to cover the required theoretical content of the course, illustrated by as many examples as possible. Attendance is highly recommended. The essential aspects (in the eyes of the main instructor) of the course 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 and study the extra material mentioned below.

PhD students can study most of the material by themselves after the first few lectures, and are relieved of the assignment and exam duties in exchange for a more sophisticated project (possibly in connection with their PhD research).

There is no planned correspondence between the scheduled lectures and the topics of the course: a lecture may span two topics in the table below. Slides will be put on-line before a lecture (but are not distributed in printed form), hence you can always figure out approximately where we currently are.

Topic	Slides	Extra Material	Teacher
Introduction & Overview	Topic 01		Pierre Flener
Gecode Primer	Topic 02	Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9 of MPG (Read this now!!!)	Pierre Flener
Consistency	Topic 03	Appendix A of Course Notes	Pierre Flener
Propagation	Topic 04	Sections 20.1-20.6, 21.1, 22, 23, and 25 of MPG; Chapter 2 of Course Notes; [Schulte & Carlsson 2006]	Pierre Flener
Search	Topic 05	Chapters 7, 28, and 35 of MPG; Chapter 3 of Course Notes	Pierre Flener
Global Constraints	Topic 06a, Topic 06b	Global Constraint Catalogue, Global Constraint Seeker	Pierre Flener
Modelling	Topic 07a, Topic 07b	Part C (Chapters 10 - 19) of MPG; [VanHentenryck 2002]	Pierre Flener
Symmetry	Topic 08		Pierre Flener
Set Variables and Set Constraints	Topic 09	Chapters 5 and 26 of MPG	Pierre Flener
Propagator for the distinct constraint	Topic 10	[Régin 1994]; [vanHoeve 2001]	Pierre Flener
The regular Constraint	Topic 11		Pierre Flener
Constraint-Based Local Search	Topic 12		Pierre Flener
Case Study: Air Traffic Management	Topic 13		Pierre Flener
29 Nov: Guest Lecture: Constraint-Based Scheduling	Topic 14-revised	Sections 4.4.15 and 4.4.16 of MPG	Joseph Scott
05 Dec: Guest Lecture: Propagation over Continuous Domains	Topic 15		Alexander Danis
Conclusion, Questions & Answers	Topic 16		Pierre Flener