This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2003, held in Kinsale, Ireland in September/October 2003. The 48 revised full papers and 34 revised short papers presented together with 4 invited papers and 40 abstracts of contributions to the CP 2003 doctoral program were carefully reviewed and selected from 181 submissions. A wealth of recent results in computing with constraints is addressed ranging from foundational and methodological issues to solving real-world problems in a variety of application fields.

The 10th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2003) was held in Toronto, Canada, during September 27 – October 1, 2004. Information about the conference can be found on the Web at http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~cp2004/ Constraint programming (CP) is about problem modelling, problem solving, programming, optimization, software engineering, databases, visualization, user interfaces, and anything to do with satisfying complex constraints. It reaches into mathematics, operations research, arti?cial intelligence, algorithms, c- plexity, modelling and programming languages, and many aspects of computer science. Moreover, CP is never far from applications, and its successful use in industry and government goes hand in hand with the success of the CP research community. Constraintprogrammingcontinuesto beanexciting,?ourishingandgrowing research?eld,astheannualCPconferenceproceedingsamplywitness.Thisyear, from 158 submissions, we chose 46 to be published in full in the proceedings. Instead of selecting one overall best paper, we picked out four “distinguished” papers – though we were tempted to select at least 12 such papers. In addition we included 16 short papersin the proceedings– these were presentedas posters at CP 2004. This volume includes summaries of the four invited talks of CP 2004. Two speakers from industry were invited. However these were no ordinary industrial representatives,buttwoofthe leadingresearchersinthe CPcommunity:Helmut Simonis of Parc Technologies, until its recent takeover by Cisco Systems; and Jean Francoi ̧ s Puget, Director of Optimization Technology at ILOG. The other two invited speakers are also big movers and shakers in the researchcommunity.

Constraints are everywhere: most computational problems can be described in terms of restrictions imposed on the set of possible solutions, and constraint programming is a problem-solving technique that works by incorporating those restrictions in a programming environment. It draws on methods from combinatorial optimisation and artificial intelligence, and has been successfully applied in a number of fields from scheduling, computational biology, finance, electrical engineering and operations research through to numerical analysis. This textbook for upper-division students provides a thorough and structured account of the main aspects of constraint programming. The author provides many worked examples that illustrate the usefulness and versatility of this approach to programming, as well as many exercises throughout the book that illustrate techniques, test skills and extend the text. Pointers to current research, extensive historical and bibliographic notes, and a comprehensive list of references will also be valuable to professionals in computer science and artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2005, held in Sitges, Spain, in October 2005. The 48 revised full papers and 22 revised short papers presented together with extended abstracts of 4 invited talks and 40 abstracts of contributions to the doctoral students program as well as 7 abstracts of contributions to a systems demonstration session were carefully reviewed and selected from 164 submissions. 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.

The 16th annual International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2010) was held in St. Andrews, Scotland, during September 6–10, 2010. We would like to thank our sponsors for their generous support of this event. This conference is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints, including:theory,algorithms,applications,environments,languages,modelsand systems. We received a wide variety of submissions, each of which was reviewed by at least three referees. Referees were chosen for each submission by an initial bidding process where Program Committee members chose papers from their area of interest. The range of expertise represented by the large Program C- mittee meant that almost all submissions were reviewed by subject experts on the Program Committee, or by colleagues chosen by members of the Program Committee for their particular expertise. Papers weresolicitedeither as long (15 page), or short (8 page) submissions. Short-paper submissions were refereed to exactly the same high standards as long-paper submissions but naturally were expected to contain a smaller quantity of new material. Thus there is no disti- tion in these proceedings between short and long papers. I used the excellent EasyChair conference management system to support this process of reviewing, and for the collation and organization of these proceedings. Submissions were made either to the applications track or to the research track. Therewere101(23short)researchtracksubmissionsofwhich36(8short) wereaccepted,whichisa36%(35%ofshort)acceptancerate. Applicationstrack submissions received special consideration and the acceptance rate was sign- cantly higher than for the research track.

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 contains the proceedings of the First International Conference on IntegrationofAIandORTechniquesinConstraintProgrammingforCombina- rialOptimisation Problems.This new conferencefollows the seriesof CP-AI-OR International Workshops on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimisation Problems held in Ferrara (1999), Paderborn (2000), Ashford (2001), Le Croisic (2002), and Montreal (2003). The success of the previous workshops has demonstrated that CP-AI-OR is bec- ing a major forum for exchanging ideas and methodologiesfrom both ?elds. The aim of this new conference is to bring together researchersfrom AI and OR, and to give them the opportunity to show how the integration of techniques from AI and OR can lead to interesting results on large scale and complex problems. The integration of techniques from Arti?cial Intelligence and Operations - search has provided e?ective algorithms for tackling complex and large scale combinatorial problems with signi?cant improvements in terms of e?ciency, scalability and optimality. The bene?t of this integration has been shown in applications such as hoist scheduling, rostering, dynamic scheduling and vehicle routing. At the programming and modelling levels, most constraint languages embed OR techniques to reason about collections of constraints, so-calledglobal constraints. Some languages also provide support for hybridization allowing the programmer to build new integrated algorithms. The resulting multi-paradigm programmingframeworkcombines the ?exibility and modelling facilities of C- straint Programming with the special purpose and e?cient methods from - erations Research