This book describes new algorithms and ideas for making effective decisions under constraints, including applications in control engineering, manufacturing (how to optimally determine the production level), econometrics (how to better predict stock market behavior), and environmental science and geosciences (how to combine data of different types). It also describes general algorithms and ideas that can be used in other application areas. The book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making (CoProd’XX) from 2013 to 2016. These workshops, held in the US (El Paso, Texas) and in Europe (Würzburg, Germany, and Uppsala, Sweden), have attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world. It is of interest to practitioners who benefit from the new techniques, to researchers who want to extend the ideas from these papers to new application areas and/or further improve the corresponding algorithms, and to graduate students who want to learn more – in short, to anyone who wants to make more effective decisions under constraints.

In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints. Several area-specific techniques are known for such decision problems; however, because these techniques are area-specific, it is not easy to apply each technique to other applications areas. Cross-fertilization between different application areas is one of the main objectives of the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making. Those workshops, held in the US (El Paso, Texas), in Europe (Lyon, France) and in Asia (Novosibirsk, Russia), from 2008 to 2012, have attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world. This volume presents extended versions of selected papers from those workshops. These papers deal with all stages of decision making under constraints: (1) formulating the problem of multi-criteria decision making in precise terms, (2) determining when the corresponding decision problem is algorithmically solvable; (3) finding the corresponding algorithms and making these algorithms as efficient as possible and (4) taking into account interval, probabilistic and fuzzy uncertainty inherent in the corresponding decision making problems. The resulting application areas include environmental studies (selecting the best location for a meteorological tower), biology (selecting the most probable evolution history of a species), and engineering (designing the best control for a magnetic levitation train).

This book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making from 2016 to 2018. The papers address all stages of decision-making under constraints: (1) precisely formulating the problem of multi-criteria decision-making; (2) determining when the corresponding decision problem is algorithmically solvable; (3) finding the corresponding algorithms and making these algorithms as efficient as possible; and (4) taking into account interval, probabilistic, and fuzzy uncertainty inherent in the corresponding decision-making problems. In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints, and there are several area-specific techniques for such decision problems. However, because they are area-specific, it is not easy to apply these techniques in other application areas. As such, the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making focus on cross-fertilization between different areas, attracting researchers and practitioners from around the globe. The book includes numerous papers describing applications, in particular, applications to engineering, such as control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and vehicle protection against improvised explosion devices.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2017, held in Melbourne, Australia from August 28, 2017 until September 1, 2017. The conference is colocated with the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017) and the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming. The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The scope of the contributions includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource al location, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers are grouped into the following tracks: technical track; application track; machine learning & CP track; operations research & CP track; satisfiability & CP track, test and verification & CP track; journal & sister conference track.

Constraints and constraint solving : an introduction / Jean-Pierre Jouannaud / - Constraint solving on terms / Hubert Comon / - Combining constraint solving / Franz Baader / - Constraints and theorem proving / Harald Ganzinger / - Functional and constraint logic programming / Mario Rodríguez-Artalejo / - Building industrial applications with constraint programming / Helmut Simonis.

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.

This book provides cutting-edge research results and application experiences from researchers and practitioners in multiple criteria decision making areas. It consists of three parts: MCDM Foundation and Theory, MCDM Methodology, and MCDM Applications. In Part I, it covers the historical MCDM development, the influence of MCDM on technology, society and policy, Pareto optimization, and analytical hierarchy process. In Part II, the book presents different MCDM algorithms based on techniques of robust estimating, evolutionary multiobjective optimization, Choquet integrals, and genetic search. In Part III, this book demonstrates a variety of MCDM applications, including project management, financial investment, credit risk analysis, railway transportation, online advertising, transport infrastructure, environmental pollution, chemical industry, and regional economy. The 17 papers of the book have been selected out of the 121 accepted papers at the 20th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making "New State of MCDM in 21st Century", held at Chengdu, China, in 2009. The 35 contributors of these papers stem from 10 countries.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2015, held in Cork, Ireland, in August/September 2015. This edition of the conference was part of George Boole 200, a celebration of the life and work of George Boole who was born in 1815 and worked at the University College of Cork. It was also co-located with the 31st International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2015). The 48 revised papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 16 abstract papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The scope of CP 2014 includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource allocation, schedulling, configuration, and planning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2011, held in Perugia, Italy, September 12-16, 2011. The 51 revised full papers and 7 short papers presented together with three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms, environments, languages, models and systems, applications such as decision making, resource allocation and agreement technologies.

This book describes new techniques for making decisions in situations with uncertainty and new applications of decision-making techniques. The main emphasis is on situations when it is difficult to decrease uncertainty. For example, it is very difficult to accurately predict human economic behavior, so in economics, it is very important to take this uncertainty into account when making decisions. Other areas where it is difficult to decrease uncertainty are geosciences and teaching. The book analyzes the general problem of decision making and shows how its results can be applied to economics, geosciences, and teaching. Since all these applications involve computing, the book also shows how these results can be applied to computing, including deep learning and quantum computing. The book is recommended to researchers, practitioners, and students who want to learn more about decision making under uncertainty—and who want to work on remaining challenges.