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VAN HENTENRYCK, PASCAL 1999, The OPL Optimization Programming Language, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 255 pp., $30.00.
Pascal Van Hentenryck is a pioneer in constraint-satisfaction techniques. His work on the CHIP (constraint handling in Prolog) system integrated constraint handling in a logic programming system [1989] and proved constraint satisfaction to be very effective in solving combinatorial optimization problems.
OPL (optimization programming language) is Van Hentenryck's latest creation, and it provides a natural declarative system to express a variety of optimization problems, including linear and integer programs, scheduling problems, and arbitrary combinatorial problems, ILOG, the French optimization software maker, implements OPL in its OPL Studio development environment.
The author describes OPL as follows (p. ix):
OPL adds several new dimensions to modeling languages beyond traditional support for linear and integer programming.
Perhaps the most significant new dimension of OPL is the support for constraint programming. . . .OPL goes far beyond traditional modeling languages to let users specify search procedures tailored to the problems at hand. Another significant dimension added by OPL is its high-level support for scheduling and resource-allocation applications. . . .
Finally, OPL improves the expressiveness of traditional modeling languages by offering new concepts such as higher-order constraints, logical combinations of constraints, and many...