This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Planning, ECP'99, held in Durham, UK, in September 1999. The 27 revised full papers presented together with one invited survey were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They address all current aspects of AI planning and scheduling. Several prominent planning paradigms are represented, including planning as satisfiability and other model checking strategies, planning as heuristic state-space search, and Graph-plan-based approaches. Moreover, various new scheduling approaches and combinations of planning and scheduling methods are introduced.

KI2004wasthe27theditionoftheannualGermanConferenceonArti?cialInt- ligence, which traditionally brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of AI and which enjoys increasing international attendance. KI 2004 received 103 submissions from 26 countries. This volume contains the 30 papers that were?nally selected for presentation at the conference. The papers cover quite a broad spectrum of "classical" subareas of AI, like na- ral language processing, neural networks, knowledge representation, reasoning, planning, and search. When looking at this year's contributions, it was exciting to observe that there was a strong trend towards actual real-world applications of AI technology. A majority of contributions resulted from or were motivated by applications in a variety of areas. Examples include applications of pl- ning, where the technology is being exploited for taxiway tra?c control and game playing; natural language processing and knowledge representation are enabling advanced Web-based information processing; and the integration of - sults from automated reasoning, neural networks and machine perception into robotics leads to signi?cantly improved capabilities of autonomous systems. The technical programme of KI 2004 was highlighted by invited talks from outstanding researchers in the areas of automated reasoning, robot planning, constraintreasoning, machinelearning, andsemanticWeb:Jorg · Siekmann(DFKI andUniversityofSaarland, Saarbruc · ken), MalikGhallab(LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse), Franco ı is Fages (INRIA Rocquencourt), Martin Riedmiller (University of - nabru ·ck), andWolfgangWahlster(DFKIandUniversityofSaarland, Saarbruc · ken). Their invited papers are also presented in this volume

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of the 7th Ibero-American Conference on AI and the 15th Brazilian Symposium on AI, IBERAMIA-SBIA 2000, held in Atibaia, Brazil in November 2000. The 48 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 156 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge engineering and case-based reasoning, planning and scheduling, distributed AI and multi-agent systems, AI in education and intelligent tutoring systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and knowledge acquisition, knowledge discovery and data mining, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, uncertainty and fuzzy systems, and genetic algorithms and neural networks.

For many years, Arti?cial Intelligence technology has served in a great variety of successful applications. AI researchand researchershave contributed much to the vision of the so-called Information Society. As early as the 1980s, some of us imagined distributed knowledge bases containing the explicable knowledge of a company or any other organization. Today, such systems are becoming reality. In the process, other technologies have had to be developed and AI-technology has blended with them, and companies are now sensitive to this topic. TheInternetandWWWhaveprovidedtheglobalinfrastructure,whileatthe same time companies have become global in nearly every aspect of enterprise. This process has just started, a little experience has been gained, and therefore it is tempting to re?ect and try to forecast, what the next steps may be. This has given us one of the two main topics of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-99)held at the University of Bonn: The Knowledge Society. Two of our invited speakers, Helmut Willke, Bielefeld, and Hans-Peter Kriegel, Munich, dwell on di?erent aspects with di?erent perspectives. Helmut Willke deals with the concept of virtual organizations, while Hans-Peter Kriegel applies data mining concepts to pattern recognitiontasks.The three application forums are also part of the Knowledge Society topic: “IT-based innovation for environment and development”, “Knowledge management in enterprises”, and “Knowledgemanagementinvillageandcityplanningoftheinformationsociety”.

One of the most important functions of artificial intelligence, automated problem solving, consists mainly of the development of software systems designed to find solutions to problems. These systems utilize a search space and algorithms in order to reach a solution. Artificial Intelligence for Advanced Problem Solving Techniques offers scholars and practitioners cutting-edge research on algorithms and techniques such as search, domain independent heuristics, scheduling, constraint satisfaction, optimization, configuration, and planning, and highlights the relationship between the search categories and the various ways a specific application can be modeled and solved using advanced problem solving techniques.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started the evolution in computer science. It is in good health, as many companies qualify their novelties as ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’. The term ‘society of knowledge’ draws society nearer to the future and is a symbol of breakthrough. From this perspective, AI has reached maturity and has exploded into an endless set of sub-areas, getting in touch with all other disciplines, such as situation assessment, analysis and interpretation of music, management of environmental and biological systems, planning trains, routing of communication networks, assisting medical diagnosis or powering auctions. The wide variety of Artificial Intelligence application areas has meant that AI researchers often become scattered in different micro specialized fields. There are few occasions where the AI research community joins together, while computer scientists and engineers can find a lot of interesting ideas from the cross fertilization of results coming from all of these application areas. This book provides a representative selection of papers promoting synergies in the research community and includes papers on: Neural Networks, Computer Vision, Applications, Machine Learning, Reasoning, Planning and Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems. All of the papers collected in this volume would be of interest to any computer scientist or engineer interested in AI.

First, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Qiang Shen for all his help, advice and friendship throughout. Many thanks also to my second supervisor Dr Peter Jarvis for his enthusiasm, help and friendship. I would also like to thank the other members of the Approximate and Qualitative Reasoning group at Edinburgh who have also helped and inspired me. This project has been funded by an EPSRC studentship, award num ber 97305803. I would like, therefore, to extend my gratitude to EPSRC for supporting this work. Many thanks to the staff at Edinburgh University for all their help and support and for promptly fixing any technical problems that I have had . My whole family have been both encouraging and supportive throughout the completion of this book, for which I am forever indebted. York, April 2003 Ian Miguel Contents List of Figures XV 1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. 1 Solving Classical CSPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1. 2 Applicat ions of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1. 3 Limitations of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. 3. 1 Flexible CSP 6 1. 3. 2 Dynamic CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 4 Dynamic Flexible CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 5 Flexible Planning: a DFCSP Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. 6 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1. 7 Contributions and their Significance 11 2 The Constraint Satisfaction Problem 13 2. 1 Constraints and Constraint Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2. 2 Tree Search Solution Techniques for Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . 16 2. 2. 1 Backtrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2. 2. 2 Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2. 2. 3 Conflict-Directed Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2. 2. 4 Backmarking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, ICMLC 2005, held in Guangzhou, China in August 2005. The 114 revised full papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on agents and distributed artificial intelligence, control, data mining and knowledge discovery, fuzzy information processing, learning and reasoning, machine learning applications, neural networks and statistical learning methods, pattern recognition, vision and image processing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/CologNet International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, held in Cork, Ireland in June 2002. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book during two rounds of reviewing and revision. Among the topics addressed are verification and debugging of constraint logic programs, modeling and solving CSPs, explanation generation, inference and inconsistency processing, SAT and 0/1 encodings of CSPs, soft constraints and constraint relaxation, real-world applications, and distributed constraint solving.