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.
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
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.
The 16th annual International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2010) was held in St. Andrews, Scotland, during September 6–10, 2010. We would like to thank our sponsors for their generous support of this event. This conference is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints, including:theory,algorithms,applications,environments,languages,modelsand systems. We received a wide variety of submissions, each of which was reviewed by at least three referees. Referees were chosen for each submission by an initial bidding process where Program Committee members chose papers from their area of interest. The range of expertise represented by the large Program C- mittee meant that almost all submissions were reviewed by subject experts on the Program Committee, or by colleagues chosen by members of the Program Committee for their particular expertise. Papers weresolicitedeither as long (15 page), or short (8 page) submissions. Short-paper submissions were refereed to exactly the same high standards as long-paper submissions but naturally were expected to contain a smaller quantity of new material. Thus there is no disti- tion in these proceedings between short and long papers. I used the excellent EasyChair conference management system to support this process of reviewing, and for the collation and organization of these proceedings. Submissions were made either to the applications track or to the research track. Therewere101(23short)researchtracksubmissionsofwhich36(8short) wereaccepted,whichisa36%(35%ofshort)acceptancerate. Applicationstrack submissions received special consideration and the acceptance rate was sign- cantly higher than for the research track.
This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2016, held in Toulouse, France, in September 2016. The 63 revised regular papers presented together with 4 short papers and the abstracts of 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 157 submissions. The scope of CP 2016 includes 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 are grouped into the following tracks: technical track; application track; computational sustainability track; CP and biology track; music track; preference, social choice, and optimization track; testing and verification track; and journal-first and sister conferences track.
This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2000, held in Singapore in September 2000. The 31 revised full papers and 13 posters presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. All current issues of constraint processing, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to applications in various fields are addressed.
