Easy, adaptable and high-quality Modelling with domain-specific Constraint Patterns

TL;DR

This paper introduces domain-specific constraint patterns for constraint programming, simplifying modeling, improving adaptability, and ensuring high-quality solutions by leveraging expert knowledge and best practices.

Contribution

It presents a novel set of domain-specific constraint patterns for job shop and flow shop problems, enhancing modeling efficiency and quality.

Findings

Patterns facilitate easier and more adaptable modeling.

Automatic pattern occurrence checking in event logs is possible.

Patterns improve model correctness and quality.

Abstract

Domain-specific constraint patterns are introduced, which form the counterpart to design patterns in software engineering for the constraint programming setting. These patterns describe the expert knowledge and best-practice solution to recurring problems and include example implementations. We aim to reach a stage where, for common problems, the modelling process consists of simply picking the applicable patterns from a library of patterns and combining them in a model. This vastly simplifies the modelling process and makes the models simple to adapt. By making the patterns domain-specific we can further include problem-specific modelling ideas, including specific global constraints and search strategies that are known for the problem, into the pattern description. This ensures that the model we obtain from patterns is not only correct but also of high quality. We introduce domain-specific constraint patterns on the example of job shop and flow shop, discuss their advantages and show how the occurrence of patterns can automatically be checked in an event log.