Constraint-based reasoning is a paradigm for formulating knowledge as a set of constraints without specifying the method by which these constraints are to be satisfied. A variety of techniques have been developed for finding partial or complete solutions for different kinds of constraint expressions. These have been successfully applied to diverse tasks such as design, diagnosis, truth maintenance, scheduling, spatiotemporal reasoning, logic programming and user interface. Constraint networks are graphical representations used to guide strategies for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs).

. A constraint satisfaction problem involves finding values for variables subject to constraints on which combinations of values are allowed. In some cases it may be impossible or impractical to solve these problems completely. We may seek to partially solve the problem, in particular by satisfying a maximal number of constraints. Standard backtracking and local consistency techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems can be adapted to cope with, and take advantage of, the differences between partial and complete constraint satisfaction. Extensive experimentation on maximal satisfaction problems illuminates the relative and absolute effectiveness of these methods. A general model of partial constraint satisfaction is proposed. 1 Introduction Constraint satisfaction involves finding values for problem variables subject to constraints on acceptable combinations of values. Constraint satisfaction has wide application in artificial intelligence, in areas ranging from temporal r...

Qualitative simulation predicts the set of possible behaviors...

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) are our proposal to allow more flexibility and application-oriented customization of constraint systems. CHR are a declarative language extension especially designed for writing user-defined constraints. CHR are essentially a committed-choice language consisting of multi-headed guarded rules that rewrite constraints into simpler ones until they are solved. In this broad survey we aim at covering all aspects of CHR as they currently present themselves. Going from theory to practice, we will define syntax and semantics for CHR, introduce an important decidable property, confluence, of CHR programs and define a tight integration of CHR with constraint logic programming languages. This survey then describes implementations of the language before we review several constraint solvers - both traditional and non- standard ones - written in the CHR language. Finally we introduce two innovative applications that benefited from using CHR.

A large variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence and other areas of computer science can be viewed as a special case of the constraint satisfaction problem. Some examples are machine vision, belief maintenance, scheduling, temporal reasoning, graph problems, floor plan design, planning genetic experiments, and the satisfiability problem. A number of different approaches have been developed for solving these problems. Some of them use constraint propagation to simplify the original problem. Others use backtracking to directly search for possible solutions. Some are a combination of these two techniques. This paper presents a brief overview of many of these approaches in a tutorial fashion.

Consistency techniques have been studied extensively in the past as a way of tackling constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). In particular, various arc-consistency algorithms have been proposed, originating from Waltz's filtering algorithm [26] and culminating in the optimal algorithm AC-4 of Mohr and Henderson [15]. AC-4 runs in O(ed 2 ) in the worst case, where e is the number of arcs (or constraints) and d is the size of the largest domain. Being applicable to the whole class of (binary) CSP, these algorithms do not take into account the semantics of constraints. In this paper, we present a new generic arc-consistency algorithm AC-5. This algorithm is parametrized on two specified procedures and can be instantiated to reduce to AC-3 and AC-4. More important, AC-5 can be instantiated to produce an O(ed) algorithm for a number of important classes of constraints: functional, anti-functional, monotonic and their generalization to (functional, anti-functional, and monotonic) piecewise constraints. We also show that AC-5 has an important application in constraint logic programming over finite domains [23]. The kernel of the constraint solver for such a programming language is an arc-consistency algorithm for a set of basic constraints. We prove that AC-5, in conjunction with node consistency, provides a decision procedure for these constraints running in time O(ed).

Many problems can be expressed in terms of a numeric constraint satisfaction problem over finite or continuous domains (numeric CSP). The purpose of this paper is to show that the consistency techniques that have been developed for CSPs can be adapted to numeric CSPs. Since the numeric domains are ordered the underlying idea is to handle domains only by their bounds. The semantics that have been elaborated, plus the complexity analysis and good experimental results, confirm that these techniques can be used in real applications. 1

We introduce a new subclass of Allen's interval algebra we call "ORDHorn subclass," which is a strict superset of the "pointisable subclass." We prove that reasoning in the ORD-Horn subclass is a polynomial-time problem and show that the path-consistency method is sufficient for deciding satisfiability. Further, using an extensive machine-generated case analysis, we show that the ORD-Horn subclass is a maximal tractable subclass of the full algebra (assuming<F NaN> P6=NP). In fact, it is the unique greatest tractable subclass amongst the subclasses that contain all basic relations. This work has been supported by the German Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) under grant ITW 8901 8 as part of the WIP project and under grant ITW 9201 as part of the TACOS project. 1 1 Introduction Temporal information is often conveyed qualitatively by specifying the relative positions of time intervals such as ". . . point to the figure while explaining the performance of the system . . . "...

Introduction Many science and engineering applications require the user to find solutions to systems of nonlinear constraints over real numbers or to optimize a nonlinear function subject to nonlinear constraints. This includes applications such the modeling of chemical engineering processes and of electrical circuits, robot kinematics, chemical equilibrium problems, and design problems (e.g., nuclear reactor design). The field of global optimization is the study of methods to find all solutions to systems of nonlinear constraints and all global optima to optimization problems. Nonlinear problems raise many issues from a computation standpoint. On the one hand, deciding if a set of polynomial constraints has a solution is NP-hard. In fact, Canny [ Canny, 1988 ] and Renegar [ Renegar, 1988 ] have shown that the problem is in PSPACE and it is not known whether the problem lies in NP. Nonlinear programming problems can be so hard that some methods are designed only to solve probl

This paper presents a general model for temporal reasoning that is capable of handling both qualitative and quantitative information. This model allows the representation and processing of many types of constraints discussed in the literature to date, including metric constraints (restricting the distance between time points) and qualitative, disjunctive constraints (specifying the relative position of temporal objects). Reasoning tasks in this unified framework are formulated as constraint satisfaction problems and are solved by traditional constraint satisfaction techniques, such as backtracking and path consistency. New classes of tractable problems are characterized, involving qualitative networks augmented by quantitative domain constraints, some of which can be solved in polynomial time using arc and path consistency. This work was supported in part by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, AFOSR 900136, and the National Science Foundation, IRI 8815522...