Annals of Operations Research - Special issue on Tabu search
Using global constraints for local search
DIMACS workshop on on Constraint programming and large scale discrete optimization
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
A constraint-based architecture for local search
OOPSLA '02 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
A Constraint Programming Framework for Local Search Methods
Journal of Heuristics
Principles of Constraint Programming
Principles of Constraint Programming
Local search for mixed-integer nonlinear optimization: a methodology and an application
EvoCOP'11 Proceedings of the 11th European conference on Evolutionary computation in combinatorial optimization
A 0---1 integer linear programming approach to schedule outages of nuclear power plants
Journal of Scheduling
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The French nuclear park comprises 58 nuclear reactors distributed through the national territory on 19 geographical sites. They must be repeatedly stopped, for refueling and maintenance. The scheduling of these outages has to comply with various constraints, regarding safety, maintenance logistic, and plant operation, whilst it must contribute to the producer profit maximization. This industrial problem appears to be a hard combinatorial problem that conventional methods used up to now by Electricité de France (mainly based on Mixed Integer Programming) fail to solve properly. We present in this paper a new approach for modeling and solving this problem, combining Constraint Programming (CP) and Local Search. CP is used to find solutions to the outage scheduling problem, while Local Search is used to improve solutions with respect to a heuristic cost criterion. It leads to find solutions as good as with the conventional approaches, but taking into account all the constraints and in very reduced computing time.