Coordinating production across a supply chain, designing a new VLSI chip, allocating classrooms or scheduling maintenance crews at an airport are just a few examples of complex (combinatorial) problems that can be modeled as a set of decision variables whose values are subject to a set of constraints. The decision variables may be the time when production of a particular lot will start or the plane that a maintenance crew will be working on at a given time. Constraints may range from the number of students you can ?t in a given classroom to the time it takes to transfer a lot from one plant to another.Despiteadvancesincomputingpower,manyformsoftheseandother combinatorial problems have continued to defy conventional programming approaches. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) ?rst emerged in the mid-eighties as a programming technique with the potential of signi?cantly reducing the time it takes to develop practical solutions to many of these problems, by combining the expressiveness of languages such as Prolog with the compu- tional power of constrained search. While the roots of CLP can be traced to Monash University in Australia, it is without any doubt in Europe that this new software technology has gained the most prominence, bene?ting, among other things, from sustained funding from both industry and public R&D programs over the past dozen years. These investments have already paid o?, resulting in a number of popular commercial solutions as well as the creation of several successful European startups.

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 is an approach for modeling and solving combi- torial problems that has proven successful in many applications. It builds on techniques developed in Arti?cial Intelligence, Logic Programming, and - erations Research. Key techniques are constraint propagation and heuristic search. Constraint Programming is based on an abstraction that decomposes a problem solver into a reusable constraint engine and a declarative program modeling the problem. The constraint engine implements the required pr- agation and search algorithms. It can be realized as a library for a general purpose programming language (e.g. C++), as an extension of an existing language (e.g. Prolog), or as a system with its own dedicated language. The present book is concerned with the architecture and implementation of constraint engines. It presents a new, concurrent architecture that is far superior to the sequential architecture underlying Prolog. The new archit- ture is based on concurrent search with copying and recomputation rather than sequential search with trailing and backtracking. One advantage of the concurrent approach is that it accommodates any search strategy. Furth- more, it considerably simpli?es the implementation of constraint propagation algorithms since it eliminates the need to account for trailing and backtra- ing. The book investigates an expressive generalization of the concurrent - chitecture that accommodates propagation-preserving combinators (known as deep guard combinators) for negation, disjunction, implication, and re- cation of constraint propagators. Such combinators are beyond the scope of Prolog’s technology. In the concurrent approach they can be obtained with a re?ective encapsulation primitive.

The books in this series present leading-edge research in the field of computer research, technology and applications. Each contribution has been carefully selected for inclusion based on the significance of the research to the field. Summaries of all chapters are gathered at the beginning of the book and an in-depth index is presented to facilitate access.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2020, held in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in September 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 55 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 122 submissions. They deal with all aspects of computing with constraints including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource allocation, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers were organized according to the following topics/tracks: technical track; application track; and CP and data science and machine learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2001, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in November/December 2001. The 37 revised full papers, 9 innovative applications presentations, and 14 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 135 submissions. All current issues in constraint processing are addressed, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to advanced and innovative applications in a variety of fields.

Constraint programming is the fruit of several decades of research carried out in mathematical logic, automated deduction, operations research and arti?cial intelligence. The tools and programming languages arising from this research ?eldhaveenjoyedrealsuccessintheindustrialworldastheycontributetosolving hard combinatorial problems in diverse domains such as production planning, communication networks, robotics and bioinformatics. This volume contains the extended and reviewed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming (CSCLP2003), which was held from June 30 to July 2, 2003. The venue chosen for the seventh edition of this annual workshop was the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) in Budapest, Hungary. This institute is one of the 20 members of the Working Group on Constraints of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). For many participants this workshop provided the ?rst opportunity to visit their ERCIM partner in Budapest. CoLogNET is the European-funded network of excellence dedicated to s- porting and enhancing cooperation and research on all areas of computational logic, and continues the work done previously by the Compulog Net. In part- ular, the aim of the logic and constraint logic programming area of CoLogNET is to foster and support all research activities related to logic programming and constraint logic programming. The editors would like to take the opportunity and thank all the authors who submitted papers to this volume, as well as the reviewers for their helpful work.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2002, held in Malaga, Spain, in July 2002.The 83 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 269 submissions. All current aspects of theoretical computer science are addressed and major new results are presented.

Constraints provide a declarative way of representing infinite sets of data. They are well suited for combining different logical or programming paradigms as has been known for constraint logic programming since the 1980s and more recently for functional programming. The use of constraints in automated deduction is more recent and has proved to be very successful, moving the control from the meta-level to the constraints, which are now first-class objects. This monograph-like book presents six thoroughly reviewed and revised lectures given by leading researchers at the summer school organized by the ESPRIT CCL Working Group in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, in September 1999. The book offers coherently written chapters on constraints and constraint solving, constraint solving on terms, combining constraint solving, constraints and theorem proving, functional and constraint logic programming, and building industrial applications.