Industrial Applications at SICS

The SICS compulog node performs research in computational logic. This involves real world applications of logic programming, (concurrent) constraint programming and also of semantic techniques based on logic. The projects in the area of computational logic use both SICStus Prolog and Oz (version 2), with their constraint solvers (mainly FD), and also Erlang and Prologia-Univ de Marseille products.

Some relevant projects are:

• The TUFF project studies decision support for planning railway production in cooperation with SJ, the Swedish State Railway. The software deliverables, which are unfortunately not publically available, include several demonstrators and prototypes emphasizing different aspects of constraint based planning in the railway domain.
• The TACIT project of the Complex Operations Laboratory at SICS is an Esprit financed cooperation between the group and Ovako Steel in Sweden, PrologIA in France and IQSoft and Caterpillar in Hungary. The aim is to apply constraint techniques (mainly in the context of CLP e.g. Prolog 4 and Sicstus Prolog) to a set of real world industrial problems. The swedish part of the project will model and implement a decision support system for planning the main material flow in the Ovako special steel plan in Hofors Sweden. The project will run for 18 month from the beginning of 1997.
• The MITOS project studies decision support for strategic production planning in cooperation with Ovako Steel AB. The software deliverables include several demonstrators and prototypes emphasizing different aspects of production planning and decision support.
• MISC a SICS frame program project largely based on cooperation with Ovako Steel AB. The MISC project of the Complex Operations Laboratory at SICS attempts to isolate and investigate some typical problems occurring in production planning. In related projects the group has accumulated a significant body knowledge of one particular domain (steel manufacturing). This domain is now modelled using constraint techniques (mainly the finite domain libraries in the CCP language Oz from DFKI) to reduce estimated costs of a simulated manufacturing process. The main focus of the project is currently to identify a suitable framework for simultaneously solving the allocation and scheduling problems typically occurring in domains of this kind. Many of the techniques sofar identified appear to be applicable also in the transportation domain investigated in other projects.

• CONFIGURATION in cooperation with Swedish Industry.
• PANG, a project on personal assistants, in cooperation with Ericsson Radio.
• VOCAL on constraint applications in cooperation with ASTEC Software Technologies.
• A project on formal verification of Erlang programs in cooperation with the Computer Science Laboratory of Ericsson.