I think a lot of folks have figured out it's easier to do these problems using a DSL inside a general purpose language than to try to use something like Prolog

I think a lot of folks have figured out it's easier to do these problems using a DSL inside a general purpose language than to try to use something like Prolog to do both. For example, to optimize the grid, you might have a Python app that imports the GUROBI solver module and tells GUROBI to optimize. The advantage is all the file IO, directory, and database stuff gets to be handled with Python (easy easy).