Parallel Construction Heuristic Combined with Constraint Propagation for the Car Sequencing Problem

For the car sequencing（CS） problem, the draw-backs of the ＂sliding windows＂ technique used in the objective function have not been rectified, and no high quality initial solution has been acquired to accelerate the improvement of the solution quality. Firstly, the objective function is improved to solve the double and bias counting of violations broadly discussed. Then, a new method combining heuristic with constraint propagation is proposed which constructs initial solutions under a parallel framework. Based on constraint propagation, three filtering rules are designed to intersecting with three greedy functions, so the variable domain is narrowed in the process of the construction. The parallel framework is served to show its robustness in terms of the quality of the solution since it greatly increases the performance of obtaining the best solution. In the computational experiments, 109 instances of 3 sets from the CSPLib＇ s benchmarks are used to test the performance of the proposed method. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms others in acquiring the best-known results for 85 best-known results of 109 are obtained with only one construction. The proposed research provides an avenue to remedy the deficiencies of ＂sliding windows＂ technique and construct high quality initial solutions.

Query Translation on the Fly in Deep Web Integration

To facilitate users to access the desired information, many researches have dedicated to the Deep Web （i.e. Web databases） integration. We focus on query translation which is an important part of the Deep Web integration. Our aim is to construct automatically a set of constraints mapping rules so that the system can translate the query from the integrated interface to the Web database interfaces based on them. We construct a concept hierarchy for the attributes of the query interfaces, especially, store the synonyms and the types （e.g. Number, Text, etc.） for every concept At the same time, we construct the data hierarchies for some concepts if necessary. Then we present an algorithm to generate the constraint mapping rules based on these hierarchies. The approach is suitable for the scalability of such application and can be extended easily from one domain to another for its domain independent feature. The results of experiment show its effectiveness and efficiency.