Objective Some everyday tasks faced by industrial applications involve hard, highly combinatorial problems, like scheduling, resource allocation and planning. Their difficulty stems not only from their intrinsic complexity, but also from the need of being able to easily model and quickly change them as the environment and the market conditions evolve, while ensuring the correctness of the model and its suitability for the goals of the company. These problems are difficult to address correctly using conventional programming techniques. Constraint Programming (CP) is an emerging technology which provides a general framework for efficient and flexible solving of complex problems, through combined implementation of various constraint solvers. The VOCAL Trial Application aims at proving that CP technology can be exploited by companies from all industrial sectors, and that the resulting applications can be fully integrated within their corporate information system. This goal may be further divided into two main objectives: first, based on a logistic problem encountered by a large utility company, the CP technology will be introduced into their global information system through a local software development company, and will be used to solve it; second, the expertise acquired during the design, development and integration process will be used by the partners to improve the previous training seminars. This will produce a final result which, in the form of guidelines for industrial-oriented constraint programming and training seminars, will be used to disseminate the experience gained within the project to ease the introduction of CP technologies in other software companies. The application dealt with in this project comes from the field of maintenance logistics for utility companies (more specifically for the distribution of electricity). The main problem is here to allocate the available resources (both human and technical) to the various maintenance operations to be performed on the network. In particular, the project will focus on the handling of planned preventive maintenance together with more urgent maintenance. CP is appropriate for the resolution of such problems, in particular since it provides a simple and general framework for the modelling of the application. The work is divided into three major stages, following the CP development cycle: specifications of the application, design and prototyping, and integration. The consortium includes four partners: - Iberdrola (E), the largest utility company in Spain, who aims at improving one of its main applications in relation to the maintenance logistic system. - SAGE (E), the Spanish subsidiary of Software A.G. one of the largest software companies in Europe, who aims at improving its knowledge on CP and including it in its technological offer.- PrologIA (F), the technology provider, who aims at validating its CP technology through the development of the Trial Application.- UPM (E), who already participated in the development of PrologIA's CP products, and who aims at improving the tutoring process for CP technologies.Iberdrola will act as the end-user, SAGE as the emerging technology user and software developer, PrologIA as a technology provider, and UPM as a consultant and leader of the training part of the project. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware development Programme(s) FP4-ESPRIT 4 - Specific research and technological development programme in the field of information technologies, 1994-1998 Topic(s) 1.7 - Emerging Software Technologies Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme CSC - Cost-sharing contracts Coordinator Software Ag Espana EU contribution No data Address Ronda De La Luna 4 E - 28760 Tres Cantos Spain See on map Total cost No data Participants (3) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all Iberdrola Spain EU contribution No data Address Cardenal Gardoqui 8 48008 Bilbao See on map Total cost No data Prologia France EU contribution No data Address Parc Technologique Luminy 0 13288 Marseille See on map Total cost No data UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID Spain EU contribution No data Address Ramiro de Maeztu, 7 28040 MADRID See on map Total cost No data
