The Opl Optimization Programming Language

with contributions by Irvin Lustig, Laurent Michel, and Jean-Francois Puget


Linear programming, integer programming, and combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in areas such as planning, scheduling, sequencing, resource allocation, design, and configuration, yet they are still challenging to formulate and express. OPL (Optimization Programming Language) is a new modeling language for combinatorial optimization that simplifies the formulation and solution of optimization problems. Perhaps the most significant dimension of OPL is the support for constraint programming, including sophisticated search specifications, logical and higher order constraints, and support for scheduling and resource allocation applications.

This book, written by the developer of OPL, is a comprehensive introduction to the OPL programming language and its application to problems in linear and integer programming, constraint programming, and scheduling. Readers should be familiar with combinatorial optimization, at least from an application standpoint.

An industrial implementation of OPL is available from the international software company Ilog.

Pascal Van Hentenryck is Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is a coauthor of Numerica: A Modeling Language for Global Optimization (MIT Press, 1997).