Related papers: Generalized Support and Formal Development of Cons…
When a system commits to a hypothesis, much of the evidential structure behind that commitment is lost to compression. Standard accounts assume that selected content and scalar confidence suffice for downstream control. This paper argues…
We show that global constraints on finite domains like all-different can be reformulated into answer set programs on which we achieve arc, bound or range consistency. These reformulations offer a number of other advantages beyond providing…
A widely adopted approach to solving constraint satisfaction problems combines systematic tree search with constraint propagation for pruning the search space. Constraint propagation is performed by propagators implementing a certain notion…
A wide range of problems can be modelled as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), that is, a set of constraints that must be satisfied simultaneously. Constraints can either be represented extensionally, by explicitly listing allowed…
The past decade has witnessed substantial developments in string solving. Motivated by the complexity of string solving strategies adopted in existing string solvers, we investigate a simple and generic method for solving string…
In this paper, we propose a new language, called AR ({\it Action Rules}), and describe how various propagators for finite-domain constraints can be implemented in it. An action rule specifies a pattern for agents, an action that the agents…
Constraint programming is a general and exact method based on constraint propagation and backtracking search. We provide a function decomposing a constraint network into a ternary constraint network (TCN) with a reduced number of operators.…
A wide range of constraints can be compactly specified using automata or formal languages. In a sequence of recent papers, we have shown that an effective means to reason with such specifications is to decompose them into primitive…
Constraint propagation is one of the basic forms of inference in many logic-based reasoning systems. In this paper, we investigate constraint propagation for first-order logic (FO), a suitable language to express a wide variety of…
Global constraints proved themselves to be an efficient tool for modelling and solving large-scale real-life combinatorial problems. They encapsulate a set of binary constraints and using global reasoning about this set they filter the…
When implementing a propagator for a constraint, one must decide about variants: When implementing min, should one also implement max? Should one implement linear equations both with and without coefficients? Constraint variants are…
We discuss here constraint programming (CP) by using a proof-theoretic perspective. To this end we identify three levels of abstraction. Each level sheds light on the essence of CP. In particular, the highest level allows us to bring CP…
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established declarative paradigm. One of the successes of ASP is the availability of efficient systems. State-of-the-art systems are based on the ground+solve approach. In some applications this…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables (which we can set) and stochastic variables…
This paper draws on diverse areas of computer science to develop a unified view of computation: (1) Optimization in operations research, where a numerical objective function is maximized under constraints, is generalized from the numerical…
We present a new approach to enhancing Answer Set Programming (ASP) with Constraint Processing techniques which allows for solving interesting Constraint Satisfaction Problems in ASP. We show how constraints on finite domains can be…
We study here constraint satisfaction problems that are based on predefined, explicitly given finite constraints. To solve them we propose a notion of rule consistency that can be expressed in terms of rules derived from the explicit…
The paper proposes a theoretical approach of the debugging of constraint programs based on a notion of explanation tree. The proposed approach is an attempt to adapt algorithmic debugging to constraint programming. In this theoretical…
Many real world problems naturally appear as constraints satisfaction problems (CSP), for which very efficient algorithms are known. Most of these involve the combination of two techniques: some direct propagation of constraints between…
Programs with constraints are hard to debug. In this paper, we describe a general architecture to help develop new debugging tools for constraint programming. The possible tools are fed by a single general-purpose tracer. A tracer-driver is…