Patent ID: 8055600

Claim:
A method implemented using a computer hardware device, the method comprising: selecting, using the computer hardware device, a value corresponding to a decision variable having a domain of potential values from a set of values corresponding to a set of decision variables in a problem, selecting, using the computer hardware device, an assignment value for the decision variable from a set of values corresponding to the selected variable's domain of potential values, selecting, using the computer hardware device, a preferred processing priority from a plurality of values, and defining, using the computer hardware device, a potential assignment of the selected assignment value to the selected value corresponding to the decision variable, wherein the potential assignment comprises a representation of the selected value corresponding to the decision variable, a representation of the selected assignment value, and a representation of the selected preferred processing priority, the representation of the selected assignment value comprises an integer corresponding to the selected assignment value; wherein a genome represents a collection of variable assignment preferences encoded as genes, each gene being defined as follows: for a set of variables X D modeled with the same domain D, genes are of the form: {x,p,v}∈{X×[1,N v ]×D} where: x denotes the variable to be assigned which is part of the set X, p is the assignment priority of variable x which is in the range 1 to N v , and v is the value to which x will be assigned from the domain D.