Helmut Simonis has been working in the area of Constraint Programming for over thirty years. He was one of the main developers of the CHIP system at ECRC in Munich during 1986-1990, then (1990-2000) co-founder and technical director of Cosytec SA in France, responsible for further development of CHIP and many industrial applications of constraints. From 2000-2007, he was working at Imperial College London, and at start-up companies Parc Technologies Ltd and CrossCore Optimisation. He joined the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C) at University College Cork in 2008. In 2009 and 2013, he won Best Application Paper awards at the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming conference. He served on the Executive Committee of the Association for Constraint Programming, and was its President in 2012 and 2013. He is co-inventor on four patents in the area of network optimization.
