Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP97

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP'97, held in Linz, Austria in October/November 1997.
The volume presents 37 revised full papers carefully selected from a total of 132 submissions; also included are the abstracts of two invited talks and three tutorials. The papers address all current aspects of constraint programming. Among the topics covered are constraint matching, constraint languages, set constraints, constraint search, constraint satisfaction problems, scheduling, constraint routing, temporal constraints, constraint graphs, local search, object-oriented constraint programming, etc.

Autorentext
Gert Smolka ist seit 1990 Professor für Informatik an der Universität des Saarlandes, wo er in Saarbrücken den Lehrstuhl für Programmiersysteme leitet. Zusammen mit seinen Schülern hat er die Programmiersprachen Oz und Alice entwickelt. Informatik studiert hat Gert Smolka an der Universität Karlsruhe und an der Cornell University, promoviert hat er an der Universität Kaiserslautern. Im Zentrum seiner Forschungsarbeiten stehen Logik und Berechnung, mit Anwendungen bei Programmiersprachen, in der Künstlichen Intelligenz und in der Computerlinguistik.

Inhalt
Visual Solver A modeling language for constraint programming.- Narrowing a 2n-block of sortings in O (n logn).- Solving various weighted matching problems with constraints.- A filtering algorithm for global sequencing constraints.- Semantics and expressive power of a timed concurrent constraint language.- Solving classes of set constraints with tree automata.- The logic of search algorithms: Theory and applications.- Verification of parallel systems using constraint programming.- Random constraint satisfaction: A more accurate picture.- Heavy-tailed distributions in combinatorial search.- Counting, structure identification and maximum consistency for binary constraint satisfaction problems.- Statistical analysis of backtracking on inconsistent CSPs.- Using constraint propagation for complex scheduling problems: Managing size, complex resources and travel.- Understanding and improving the MAC algorithm.- Modelling exceptionally hard constraint satisfaction problems.- Tabu search for maximal constraint satisfaction problems.- Reconfigurable architectures: A new vision for optimization problems.- Distributed partial constraint satisfaction problem.- Localizer A modeling language for local search.- Operational semantics and confluence of constraint propagation rules.- AC-unification of higher-order patterns.- On the complexity of unification and disunification in commutative idempotent semigroups.- Ordering constraints over feature trees.- From restricted path consistency to max-restricted path consistency.- The constrainedness of Arc consistency.- Look-ahead versus look-back for satisfiability problems.- Why adding more constraints makes a problem easier for hill-climbing algorithms: Analyzing landscapes of CSPs.- Interval methods for non-linear constraints.- Configurablesolvers: Tailoring general methods to specific applications.- Constraint propagation and decomposition techniques for highly disjunctive and highly cumulative project scheduling problems.- Five pitfalls of empirical scheduling research.- Bounding the optimum of constraint optimization problems.- GENIUS-CP: A generic single-vehicle routing algorithm.- Satisfiability of quantitative temporal constraints with multiple granularities.- Tractable recursion over geometric data.- Finding solvable subsets of constraint graphs.- Tractable disjunctive constraints.- Compiling constraint solving using projection.- Oscillation, heuristic ordering and pruning in neighborhood search.- Programming constraint inference engines.- NeMo+: Object-oriented constraint programming environment based on subdefinite models.- Set constraints: A pearl in research on constraints.