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Best of the Best: ILOG JSolver
ILOG makes top constraint optimization technology available in pure Java

In optimization today, ILOG Solver is the software component of choice for embedding constraint programming into mission-critical enterprise solutions. Its wide range of applications has led to ILOG Solver's being used for planning, scheduling and resource allocation in almost every industry: manufacturing, transportation, communications, aerospace, defense.

Receiving much wider popularity is Java. As Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems describes it in the Java Developer's Journal, Java is now the "platform of choice." It runs with a vast variety of operating systems, including Windows, UNIX and Linux, supports a wide range of equipment, and can produce multiple implementations, freeing the user to select the best one for the job. Moreover, Java has matured into a programming language for writing enterprise-level applications.

ILOG has melded these two top performers into its latest offering: ILOG JSolver 1.0. With the "write once, use anywhere" ability of Java, developers can now use ILOG JSolver to embed optimization software that can be accessed from just about anywhere, primarily through server-based applications.

With ILOG JSolver, ILOG's industry-leading constraint technology can be used with the biggest computers and most popular desktops, and has the potential of being used with the vast variety of new Java-enabled client devices, including mobile phones, personal data assistants and network equipment.

For example, as many as 700 million Java mobile phones may be in circulation by the year 2005. With interactive wireless services becoming increasingly available, companies managing large teams of field personnel will be able to give their employees remote access to ILOG JSolver-driven scheduling applications through their mobile phones.

ILOG JSolver technology
ILOG JSolver brings the highly successful C++ constraint programming technology of ILOG Solver to the world of Java for powering planning, scheduling, sequencing, timetabling, configuration, dispatching and resource-allocation applications.

Constraint programming is used to solve complex combinatorial problems. Data representing a problem are described by variables, and each variable has an associated domain, which is the set of its feasible values. Constraints describe the different relationships that must be met within a set of variables in order to solve a problem.

A search process allows users to compute one, several, the best or all of the solutions to a problem. Before and during the search, a domain reduction process dynamically and efficiently reduces the number of potential solutions, shrinking the size of the problem.

ILOG JSolver's key features include:

• Written in Java, for support of the complete range of client or server architectures within the Java platform
• ILOG Concert Technology for Java, providing natural objects and expressions to represent the conditions that characterize the optimized solution
• Constraint propagation and domain reduction, algorithms that efficiently eliminate infeasibilities during the solution search, reducing the size of the search space and improving computational speed
• Search framework, for incorporating your insight into the problem structure to find good feasible solutions quickly
• Model-algorithm separation, for unlinking the optimization algorithm from the constraints, making it easy to adapt your model to business changes