Constraint Programming Basics And Trends

"This book contains thoroughly revised versions of the papers presented at the 1994 Châtillon Spring School held in May 1994. This spring school was the 22nd event in a series of advanced seminars presenting important new areas of research to the theoretical computer science community. The interdisciplinary area of constraint (logic) programming and constraint-based systems has recently developed a discernible identity, which is promising both in terms of simple and general foundations and in terms of significant practical applications. The 15 papers presented in this volume make the new area accessible to all interested computer scientists and report the state of the art in this exciting new field, particularly in the subfield of constraint logic programming."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.

This title brings together the best papers on a range of topics raised at the annual International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. This conference provides papers and workshops which produce new insights, concepts and results which can then be used by those involved in this area to develop their own work.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/Compulog-Net Workshop on New Trends in Constraints held in Paphos, Cyprus, Greece in October 1999. The 12 revised full research papers presented together with four surveys by leading researchers were carefully reviewed. The book is divided in topical sections on constraint propagation and manipulation, constraint programming, and rule-based constraint programming.

The use of constraints had its scientific and commercial breakthrough in the 1990s. Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and specify problems with uncertain, incomplete information and to solve combi natorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design, and analysis. This book is a short, concise, and complete presentation of constraint programming and reasoning, covering theoretical foundations, algorithms, implementations, examples, and applications. It is based on more than a decade of experience in teaching and research about this subject. This book is intended primarily for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in diverse areas of computer science and related fields, including programming languages, computational logic, symbolic computation, and ar tificial intelligence. The book is complemented by a web-page with teaching material, software, links, and more. We take the reader on a step-by-step journey through the world of constraint-based programming and constraint reasoning. Feel free to join in ... Acknowledgements Thorn thanks his wife Andrea and his daughter Anna - for everything. He dedicates his contribution to the book to the memory of his mother, Grete. Slim thanks his wife N abila and his daughters Shirine and Amira for their ongoing support and patience.

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics.The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area.The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas.The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming. - Covers the whole field of constraint programming- Survey-style chapters- Five chapters on applications

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, CPAIOR 2010, held in Bologna, Italy, in June 2010. The 18 revised full papers and 17 revised short papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The papers are focused on both theoretical and practical, application-oriented issues and present current research with a special focus on the integration and hybridization of the approaches of constraint programming, artificial intelligence, and operations research technologies for solving large scale and complex real life combinatorial optimization problems.