CS410/510SS: Search and Scheduling
Lecture 1
Introduction To Scheduling, Combinatorial Search, and Constraint Satisfaction

• What you must know
• Programming languages and tools
• Homework, project, deadlines, and grading
• How to reach me

• Review: Trees and Graphs
  • Properties of binary trees
  • Properties of general trees
  • Tree search algorithms
  • Properties of graphs
  • Graph search algorithms
• Combinatorial Search
  • What does ``combinatorial'' mean?
  • What are some example problems?
  • What is a combinatorial ``search space''?
    • Search trees
    • Search graphs
  • What are the ``variables'' and ``values''?
  • Searching search trees and graphs
    • Variable selection
    • Expansion
    • Value ordering
    • Termination
  • Why combinatorial search needs better algorithms
    • Soundness
    • Completeness
    • Systematicity (strong or weak)
    • Memory requirements
• Constraint Satisfaction
  • Very general framework
  • Described in terms of
    • variables
    • value constraints
  • Problem-specific vs. general methods
• Scheduling
  • Assigning times to tasks...
  • ...under constraints...
  • ...optimally.
  • Some simple kinds of constraints:
    • Operations and jobs (and batches)
    • Machines / resources
    • Precedence / structure
  • Scheduling as combinatorial search
    • times to tasks space
    • precedence space

• NP-completeness
• Search algorithms
• Bin packing