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A Warpstock '98 Special Report
From The Vendor Floor
Have you ever heard of the "traveling salesman" problem? A salesman has to visit five cities --- what's the best route to take? That's a real simple scenario, of course, but suppose you've got 18 delivery trucks and 200 daily deliveries. Are you really going to try that in C? Prolog was designed for this type of problem. Give it the problem's constraints and press start, and back comes the answer. Maybe you're borrowing plant expansion money and need a robust model of bank rates, economic demand and housing starts versus construction costs. Perhaps you've got 29 machining workstations and need to schedule your jobs, and each job requires different machines and in a different sequence. Prolog handles these situations, and saves you money because you're not paying somebody a daily wage to do it by hand. Prolog does simulation, deduction, and enumeration from known facts. Tell it what you know and the solution, if it exists, will be found. Leo and Carsten were handing out free CD-ROM copies of their DOS/Win3.x version of Prolog (it runs in a Win-OS/2 or DOS window) and I picked one up. Leo gave me a demonstration of a transportation problem, showing how a company with a number of trucks, a number of delivery points, a number of factories and a number of warehouses can determine which factories and warehouses can be closed to save money. These are real problems that companies pay consultants big bucks to solve, and Prolog sure seems like the way to go.
For other Warpstock '98 articles see the
Warpstock '98 Article Index.
PDC Prolog Development Center,
http://www.visual-prolog.com/,
http://www.pdc.dk/
Copyright 1998 the Southern California OS/2 User Group. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED.
SCOUG is a trademark of the Southern California OS/2 User Group.
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