This is a family of problems that includes numerous examples which appear on a daily basis in all administrative and productive sectors. Generally speaking, it consists in organising a set of activities subject to a set of time and resource-usage constraints. The aim is usually to maximise some quality measure which is not always fully specified. In general these are problems of high computational complexity so exact resolution strategies are impracticable. Thus they constitute a field of application of many artificial intelligence techniques such as genetic algorithms and heuristic search.

This is the paradigm of problems our group is interested in. First, we are interested in academic or formal problems, since they allow to evaluate the developed techniques through experimentation on benchmark problems from repositories used by the research community. We are also very interested in developing solutions to actual problems of this kind, which as we have said are pervasive in the real world.