Comet is an object-oriented programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 used to solve complex combinatorial optimization problems in areas such as resource allocation

Resource allocation

Resource allocation is used to assign the available resources in an economic way. It is part of resource management. In project management, resource allocation is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource...

 and scheduling. It offers a wide range of optimization algorithms: from mathematical programming

Mathematical Programming

Mathematical Programming, established in 1971, and published by Springer Science+Business Media, is the official scientific journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society. It currently consists of two series: A and B. The "A" series contains general publications. The "B" series focuses on topical...

 to constraint programming

Constraint satisfaction

In artificial intelligence and operations research, constraint satisfaction is the process of finding a solution to a set of constraints that impose conditions that the variables must satisfy. A solution is therefore a vector of variables that satisfies all constraints.The techniques used in...

, local search algorithm

Local search (constraint satisfaction)

In constraint satisfaction, local search is an incomplete method for finding a solution to a problem. It is based on iteratively improving an assignment of the variables until all constraints are satisfied. In particular, local search algorithms typically modify the value of a variable in an...

 and "dynamic stochastic combinatorial optimization."

Comet programs specify local search algorithms as two components:

• a high-level model describing the applications in terms of constraints
  Constraint (mathematics)
  In mathematics, a constraint is a condition that a solution to an optimization problem must satisfy. There are two types of constraints: equality constraints and inequality constraints...
  
  , constraint combinators, and objective functions;
• a search procedure expressed in terms of the model at a high abstraction level.

This approach promotes reusability

Reusability

In computer science and software engineering, reusability is the likelihood a segment of source code that can be used again to add new functionalities with slight or no modification...

 across applications.

Its API allows it to be used as a software library. Comet also features high-level abstractions for parallel

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...

 and distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

, based on loop scheduling

Loop scheduling

In parallel computing, loop scheduling is the problem of assigning proper iterations of parallelizable loops among n processors to achieve load balancing and maintain data locality with minimum dispatch overhead.Typical loop scheduling methods are:...

, interruptions, and work stealing.