Subject: Representation and reformulation of ...

From: Saleh Elmohamed <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 02:57:36 -0400

Hi Toby,

The other day I came across the research page of APES. One
of the topics mentioned there is the representation and
reformulation of CSPs perhaps into other "easier" problems
or forms to tackle...
>From past experience this approach to some extent can
be fruitful but just like everthing else, it comes
with some limitations. Few years ago one of my colleagues
and I encoded or reformulated a medium size case of 
university course scheduling into graph colouring and 
tackled the latter in terms of the former. We hit the limitation
wall when trying a much larger case - involoving student
prefs as well... I'm trying to re-visit the problem again since
we do have real data for the entire university. 

Any idea of good pointers on how to go about reformulating 
large scale problems of this kind? We've been somewhat successful
in tackling them in a multi-phase approach but even that it has
own limitation.

Any suggestions, comments, pointers to useful publications, etc.
are quite appreciated.

Many thanks.

best wishes,
Saleh

---

From: Toby Walsh <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 18:09:50 +0100

> Any suggestions, comments, pointers to useful publications, etc.

You might look around at the Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and
Approximation (go to Tom Ellman's home page at Rutgers for more leads on
this). Reformulation is a much neglected area so there is little more
that I can offer in the way of leads. Sorry,

toby walsh