| Author | : Kim Marriott |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 496 |
| Release | : 1998 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 9780262133418 |
Constraints; Simplification, optimization and implication; Finite constraint domains; Constraint logic programming; Simple modeling; Using data structures; Controlling search; Modelling with finite domain constraints; Advanced programming techniques; CLP systems; Other constraint programming languages; Constraint databases; Index.
| Author | : Francesca Rossi |
| Publisher | : Elsevier |
| Total Pages | : 977 |
| Release | : 2006-08-18 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 0080463800 |
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
| Author | : Philippe Baptiste |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 204 |
| Release | : 2012-12-06 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 1461514797 |
Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.
| Author | : Krzysztof Apt |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 421 |
| Release | : 2003-08-28 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 1139438700 |
Constraints are everywhere: most computational problems can be described in terms of restrictions imposed on the set of possible solutions, and constraint programming is a problem-solving technique that works by incorporating those restrictions in a programming environment. It draws on methods from combinatorial optimisation and artificial intelligence, and has been successfully applied in a number of fields from scheduling, computational biology, finance, electrical engineering and operations research through to numerical analysis. This textbook for upper-division students provides a thorough and structured account of the main aspects of constraint programming. The author provides many worked examples that illustrate the usefulness and versatility of this approach to programming, as well as many exercises throughout the book that illustrate techniques, test skills and extend the text. Pointers to current research, extensive historical and bibliographic notes, and a comprehensive list of references will also be valuable to professionals in computer science and artificial intelligence.
| Author | : Helmut Simonis |
| Publisher | : Springer Nature |
| Total Pages | : 984 |
| Release | : 2020-09-06 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 3030584755 |
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2020, held in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in September 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 55 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 122 submissions. They deal with all aspects of computing with constraints including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource allocation, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers were organized according to the following topics/tracks: technical track; application track; and CP and data science and machine learning.
| Author | : Marie Pelleau |
| Publisher | : Elsevier |
| Total Pages | : 177 |
| Release | : 2015-05-20 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 0081004648 |
Constraint Programming aims at solving hard combinatorial problems, with a computation time increasing in practice exponentially. The methods are today efficient enough to solve large industrial problems, in a generic framework. However, solvers are dedicated to a single variable type: integer or real. Solving mixed problems relies on ad hoc transformations. In another field, Abstract Interpretation offers tools to prove program properties, by studying an abstraction of their concrete semantics, that is, the set of possible values of the variables during an execution. Various representations for these abstractions have been proposed. They are called abstract domains. Abstract domains can mix any type of variables, and even represent relations between the variables. In this work, we define abstract domains for Constraint Programming, so as to build a generic solving method, dealing with both integer and real variables. We also study the octagons abstract domain, already defined in Abstract Interpretation. Guiding the search by the octagonal relations, we obtain good results on a continuous benchmark. We also define our solving method using Abstract Interpretation techniques, in order to include existing abstract domains. Our solver, AbSolute, is able to solve mixed problems and use relational domains. - Exploits the over-approximation methods to integrate AI tools in the methods of CP - Exploits the relationships captured to solve continuous problems more effectively - Learn from the developers of a solver capable of handling practically all abstract domains
| Author | : Ioannis Vlahavas |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 157 |
| Release | : 2012-12-06 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 1461551196 |
Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), an area of extreme research interest in recent years, extends the semantics of Prolog in such a way that the combinatorial explosion, a characteristic of most problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence, can be tackled efficiently. By employing solvers dedicated to each domain instead of the unification algorithm, CLP drastically reduces the search space of the problem, which leads to increased efficiency in the execution of logic programs. CLP offers the possibility of solving complex combinatorial problems in an efficient way, and at the same time maintains the advantages offered by the declarativeness of logic programming. The aim of this book is to present parallel and constraint logic programming, offering a basic understanding of the two fields to the reader new to the area. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the fundamental aspects of conventional logic programming which is necessary for understanding the parts that follow. The second part includes an introduction to parallel logic programming, architectures and implementations proposed in the area. Finally, the third part presents the principles of constraint logic programming. The last two parts also include descriptions of the supporting facilities for the two paradigms in two popular systems; ECLIPSe and SICStus. These platforms have been selected mainly because they offer both parallel and constraint features. Annotated and explained examples are also included in the relevant parts, offering a valuable guide and a first practical experience to the reader. Finally, applications of the covered paradigms are presented. The authors felt that a book of this kind should provide some theoretical background necessary for the understanding of the covered logic programming paradigms, and a quick start for the reader interested in writing parallel and constraint logic programming programs. However it is outside the scope of this book to provide a deep theoretical background of the two areas. In that sense, this book is addressed to a public interested in obtaining a knowledge of the domain, without spending the time and effort to understand the extensive theoretical work done in the field – namely postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in the area of logic programming. This book fills a gap in the current bibliography, since there is no comprehensive book of this level that covers the areas of conventional, parallel, and constraint logic programming. Parallel and Constraint Logic Programming: An Introduction to Logic, Parallelism and Constraints is appropriate for an advanced level course on Logic Programming or Constraints, and as a reference for practitioners and researchers in industry.
| Author | : Pascal Van Hentenryck |
| Publisher | : MIT Press (MA) |
| Total Pages | : 250 |
| Release | : 1989 |
| Genre | : Constraint programming (Computer science). |
| ISBN | : |
This book tackles classic problems from operations research and circuit design using a logic programming language embedding consistency techniques, a paradigm emerging from artificial intelligence research. Van Hentenryck proposes a new approach to solving discrete combinatorial problems using these techniques.Logic programming serves as a convenient language for stating combinatorial problems, but its "generate and test" paradigm leads to inefficient programs. Van Hentenryck's approach preserves one of the most useful features of logic programming - the duality of its semantics - yet allows a short development time for the programs while preserving most of the efficiency of special purpose programs written in a procedural language.Embedding consistency techniques in logic programming allows for ease and flexibility of programming and short development time because constraint propagation and tree-search programming are abstracted away from the user. It also enables logic programs to be executed efficiently as consistency techniques permit an active use of constraints to remove combinations of values that cannot appear in a solution Van Hentenryck presents a comprehensive overview of this new approach from its theoretical foundations to its design and implementation, including applications to real life combinatorial problems.The ideas introduced in "Constraint Satisfaction in Logic Programming "have been used successfully to solve more than a dozen practical problems in operations research and circuit design, including disjunctive scheduling, warehouse location, cutting stock car sequencing, and microcode labeling problems.Pascal Van Hentenryck is a member of the research staff at the European Computer Industry Research Centre. "Constraint Satisfaction in Logic Programming" is based on research for the Centre's CHIP project. As an outgrowth of this project, a new language (CHIP) that will include consistency techniques has been developed for commercial use. The book is included in the Logic Programming series edited by Ehud Shapiro.
| Author | : J. Christopher Beck |
| Publisher | : Springer |
| Total Pages | : 750 |
| Release | : 2017-08-22 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 3319661582 |
This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2017, held in Melbourne, Australia from August 28, 2017 until September 1, 2017. The conference is colocated with the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017) and the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming. The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The scope of the contributions includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource al location, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers are grouped into the following tracks: technical track; application track; machine learning & CP track; operations research & CP track; satisfiability & CP track, test and verification & CP track; journal & sister conference track.
