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 volume is the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, held at Rosario, Orcas Island, Washington, USA in May 1994 in cooperation with AAAI and ALP. The volume contains 27 full revised papers selected from 87 submissions as well as a summary of a panel session on commercial applications of constraint programming. The contributions cover a broad range of topics including constraint programming languages, algorithms for constraint satisfaction and entailment, and constraints and their relation to fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, operations research, problem solving, and user interfaces.

Upper-division textbook covering foundations of constraint programming and applications to scheduling, optimisation etc.

Constraint programming is like an octopus spreading its tentacles into databases, operations research, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. The concept of constraint programming was introduced in artificial intelligence and graphics in the 1960s and 1970s. Now the related techniques are used and studied in many fields of computing. Different aspects of constraint processing are investigated in theoretical computer science, logic programming, knowledge representation, operations research, and related application domains. Constraint programming has been included in the lists of related topics of many conferences. Nevertheless, only in 1993 were the first forums held, devoted as a whole to this field of knowledge. These were the First Workshop on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (PPCP'93) which was held in Newport, Rhode Island, USA, April 28-30, the International Workshop on Constraint Processing (at CSAM'93) held in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 20-21, and the NATO Advanced Study Institute (NATO AS!) on Constraint Programming held in Parnu, Estonia, August 13-24. NATO A Sis are aimed to be schools bringing together leading researchers and practitioners from industry and academia in some area of knowledge to provide a concise picture of the work done and results obtained by different groups. This is intended for dissemination of advanced knowledge not yet taught regularly in of new topics university. However, ASis must also encourage the introduction into university curricula as well as foster international scientific contacts.

Programming languages are often classified according to their paradigms, e.g. imperative, functional, logic, constraint-based, object-oriented, or aspect-oriented. A paradigm characterizes the style, concepts, and methods of the language for describing situations and processes and for solving problems, and each paradigm serves best for programming in particular application areas. Real-world problems, however, are often best implemented by a combination of concepts from different paradigms, because they comprise aspects from several realms, and this combination is more comfortably realized using multiparadigm programming languages. This book deals with the theory and practice of multiparadigm constraint programming languages. The author first elaborates on programming paradigms and languages, constraints, and the merging of programming concepts which yields multiparadigm (constraint) programming languages. In the second part the author inspects two concrete approaches on multiparadigm constraint programming – the concurrent constraint functional language CCFL, which combines the functional and the constraint-based paradigms and allows the description of concurrent processes; and a general framework for multiparadigm constraint programming and its implementation, Meta-S. The book is appropriate for researchers and graduate students in the areas of programming and artificial intelligence.

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 refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2007. It contains 51 revised full papers and 14 revised short papers presented together with eight application papers and the abstracts of two invited lectures. All current issues of computing with constraints are addressed, ranging from methodological and foundational aspects to solving real-world problems in various application fields.

Constraint programming aims at supporting a wide range of complex applications, which are often modeled naturally in terms of constraints. Early work, in the 1960s and 1970s, made use of constraints in computer graphics, user interfaces, and artificial intelligence. Such work introduced a declarative component in otherwise-procedural systems to reduce the development effort.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2008) held in Sydney, Australia, September 14–18, 2008. The conference was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2008) and the International Conference on Knowledge Representation and R- soning (KR 2008). Information about the conference can be found at the w- sitehttp://www. unimelb. edu. au/cp2008/. Held annually, the CP conference series is the premier international conference on constraint programming. The conference focuses on all aspects of computing with constraints. The CP conf- ence series is organized by the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP). Information about the conferences in the series can be found on the Web at http://www. cs. ualberta. ca/~ai/cp/. Information about ACP can be found athttp://www. a4cp. org/. CP 2008 included two calls for contributions: a call for research papers, - scribing novel contributions in the ?eld, and a call for application papers, - scribing applications of constraint technology. For the ?rst time authors could directly submit short papers for consideration by the committee. The research track received 84 long submissions and 21 short submissions and the application track received 15 long submissions. Each paper received at least three reviews, which the authors had the opportunity to see and to react to, before the papers and their reviews were discussed extensively by the members of the Program Committee.

Constraint programming has become an important general approach for solving hard combinatorial problems that occur in a number of application domains, such as scheduling and configuration. This volume contains selected papers from the workshop on Constraint Programming and Large Scale Discrete Optimization held at DIMACS. It gives a sense of state-of-the-art research in this field, touching on many of the important issues that are emerging and giving an idea of the major current trends. Topics include new strategies for local search, multithreaded constraint programming, specialized constraints that enhance consistency processing, fuzzy representations, hybrid approaches involving both constraint programming and integer programming, and applications to scheduling problems in domains such as sports scheduling and satellite scheduling.