Constraint Programming Links with Math Programming

Although operations research (OR) and constraint programming (CP) have different roots, the links between the two communities have grown stronger in recent years. For solving combinatorial optimization problems, the techniques of CP and OR will become so interdependent that the two research communities could eventually merge. In this article, we first describe CP basic concepts, and then we show different ways of integrating CP and mathematical programming (MP). This article presents a CP perspective: MP is seen as a support to the CP decision process, even if existing approaches from the OR literatures consider a cooperation of CP and MP on an equal basis, but they are out of the scope of this article.