We present as a real-life example the scheduling of networked reprographic machines. Given a specified output document, the scheduler's task is to determine the input times of sheets and images. The pages of the document are received incrementally, and while the scheduler tries to look ahead to find optimal schedules, it usually does not have time to wait until the entire document is known.
While concurrent constraint languages seem well suited for such reactive applications, existing implementations do not support the combination of optimal control and deferred commitment. In this paper, we propose and analyze the use of projected optimization to handle this problem. We also explain its implementation in AKL(FD) and CLP(FD) and discuss experimental results.
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