The Comet™ Story
Comet™ represents the life's work of Pascal Van Hentenryck, director of Brown University's Optimization Laboratory, and Dynadec's founder. The author of five text books and over 170 technical papers, Van Hentenryck has spent his entire career redefining optimization technology. As a member of the CHIP development team at the European Computer Science Research Center (ECRC), he was at the forefront of modern constraint programming. His continued research and development led to two major technological breakthroughs in the late 1990s: the development of the Numerica programming language and OPL (Optimization Programming Language). These groundbreaking technologies were commercialized by ILOG(IBM) during that time.
The formation of Dynadec marks the completion of Van Hentenryck's vision of the wider adoption of constraint programming, thanks to its inherent ability to generate high quality solutions for highly constrained problems quickly. For the last half of this decade, he has accelerated this vision by incorporating constraint-based local search, which merges ideas from constraint programming and local search, and dynamic stochastic optimization into a true hybrid optimization platform. Van Hentenryck has refused to believe the conventional wisdom that says constraint programming is too difficult for real world applications, and created Comet to prove the point. The end result is a flexible and extensible environment that can be used to solve enterprise-wide problems once thought unsolvable.
