Peter Van Beek

Since graduating in 1990, Professor Peter Van Beek has had several applied research projects.

In a past project, Professor Van Beek and his students investigated constraint programming techniques for the sequencing and scheduling of manufacturing assembly lines, using car assembly lines as the test-bed application. The car assembly line sequencing problem arose from a collaboration with Shiva Soft Inc. (now Matrikon) of Edmonton, Alberta. A system developed by Shiva Soft using expert-system technology currently schedules the production of cars on assembly lines in two North American assembly plants of a major car company. Using a constraint programming approach, Professor Van Beek and his students were able to significantly improve the production schedules as measured on real data.

More recently, Professor Van Beek and his students have pursued a project with IBM Canada which investigated constraint programming techniques for instruction scheduling. Modern architectures allow instruction level parallelism and it is the job of the compiler to generate code that takes advantage of this parallelism. This task can be viewed as a scheduling task,where instructions are appropriately scheduled to start at a time step on a particular functional unit. Current compilers use non-optimal methods to solve the scheduling task. Professor Van Beek and his students developed optimal approaches to the problem for realistic architectures, improving on previous approaches as measured on widely used industrial benchmarks.