To cope with its development, a French operator of mobile telephone network
must periodically plan the purchase and the installation of new hardware,
in such a way that a hierarchy of constraints (required and preferred) is s
atisfied. This paper presents the "constructive repair" method we used to s
olve this problem within the allowed computing time (1 min). This method re
pairs the planning during its construction. A sequence of repair procedures
is defined: if a given repair cannot be achieved on a partial solution, a
stronger repair (possibly relaxing more important constraints) is called up
on. We tested our method on ten (both hand-made and real) problems. All our
solutions were at least as good as thoses computed by hand by the engineer
in charge with the planning.