Example of solving RAP in CLIPS using CRO Strategy
The room allocation problem (in the
used definition) is not a very
complex problem. It can be characterised by:
- Domain size of the problem is 9^15 (15
persons have to be assigned and each of them can be
placed into 9 available rooms).
- 18 constraints are and most of them can be violated by
more than one parameter. Altogether 76 different
constraint violations are possible (but some of them are
incompatible).
- The illustrative run of the test problem solution
requires
15 initialization steps within the Complete phase and 21
correction steps within the Revise phase.
Our implementation has used all three programming paradigms offered
by the CLIPS system:
- rule based programming (139 rules);
- procedural programming (11 functions);
- object oriented programming (63 objects).
The aim of the implementation was to build an experimental
application for the solution of the configuration design problem
in
the simplest way in order to verify the applicability of
CLIPS
to
solve configuration design problems. Our attempt has proven that
CLIPS offers a wide range of means to implement such problems in
an easy and comfortable way. Here are several notes on using
CLIPS to solve RAP: