Systems are subject to faults in their components, affecting their overall behaviour. This work addresses such problems developing models with multi-valued logics that it formalizes and generalizes to multiple faults. Such logics extend Boolean logic by encoding dependencies on faults.

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 book aims to justify the use of fuzzy logic as a logic and as an uncertainty theory in the decision-making context. It also discusses the development of the TOPSIS method (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) with related examples and MATLAB codes. This is the first book devoted to TOPSIS and its fuzzy versions. It presents the use of fuzzy logic as a logic and as an uncertainty theory in the decision-making content and discusses the development of the TOPSIS method in classical and fuzzy context. The book justifies the use of fuzzy logic as an uncertainty theory and provides illustrative examples for each fuzzy TOPSIS extension, along with related MATLAB codes and case studies. This book is for industrial engineers, operations research engineers, systems engineers, and production engineers working in the areas of decision analysis, multi-criteria decision making, and multiple objective optimization.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and extended post-proceedings of the 11th Annual ERCIM International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2006, held in Caparica, Portugal in June 2006. The papers are organized in topical sections on global constraints, search and heuristics, language and implementation issues, and modeling.

IBERAMIA is the international conference series of the Ibero-American Art- cialIntelligencecommunitythathasbeenmeetingeverytwoyearssincethe1988 meeting in Barcelona. The conference is supported by the main Ibero-American societies of AI and provides researchers from Portugal, Spain, and Latin Am- ica the opportunity to meet with AI researchers from all over the world. Since 1998, IBERAMIA has been a widely recognized international conference, with its papers written and presented in English, and its proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI series. This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at Iberamia 2008, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2008. For this conference, 147 papers were submitted for the main track, and 46 papers were accepted. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee (PC), coor- nated by an Area Chair. In certain cases, extra reviewerswererecruited to write additional reviews. The list of Area Chairs, PC members, and reviewers can be found on the pages that follow. The authors of the submitted papers represent 14 countries with topics c- ering the whole spectrum of themes in AI: robotics and multiagent systems, knowledge representation and constraints, machine learning and planning, n- ural language processing and AI applications. TheprogramforIberamia2008alsoincludedthreeinvitedspeakers:Christian Lemaitre (LANIA, M ́ exico), R. Michael Young (NCSU, USA) and Miguel Dias (Microsoft LDMC, Lisbon) as well as ?ve workshops.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2004, held in Cairns, Australia, in December 2004. The 78 revised full papers and 62 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents; biomedical applications; computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition; ontologies, knowledge discovery and data mining; natural language and speech processing; problem solving and reasoning; robotics; and soft computing.

This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

The workshops on (constraint) logic programming (WLP) are the annual meeting of the Society of Logic Programming (GLP e.V.) and bring together researchers interested in logic programming, constraint programming, and related areas like databases, artificial intelligence and operations research. The 23rd WLP was held in Potsdam at September 15 16, 2009. The topics of the presentations of WLP2009 were grouped into the major areas: Databases, Answer Set Programming, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming as well as Constraints and Constraint Handling Rules.

Constraint satisfaction and constraint programming have shown to be very simple but powerful ideas, with applications in various areas. Still, in the last ten years, the simple notion of constraints has shown some deficiencies concerning both theory and practice, typically in the way over-constrained problems and preferences are treated. For this reason, the notion of soft constraints has been introduced with semiring-based soft constraints and valued constraints being the two main general frameworks. This book includes formal definitions and properties of semiring-based soft constraints, as well as their use within constraint logic programming and concurrent constraint programming. Moreover, the author shows how to adapt existing notions and techniques such as abstraction and interchangeability to the soft constraint framework and it is demonstrated how soft constraints can be used in some application areas, such as security. Overall, this book is a great starting point for anyone interested in understanding the basics of semiring-based soft constraints.

The Eighth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence continues a tradition of being one of the most important regional AI conferences in Europe. Keith Downing focuses on the low road to artificial intelligence, that is, the development of AI through evolutionary artificial life approaches. The topics of the accepted papers range from multi-agent systems, robots, natural languages and machine learning to general knowledge-based systems and formal approaches to AI. This collection of papers together exemplifies the diversity of research in artificial intelligence today. Two of the invited speakers, both focus on vision, although each from slightly different viewpoints. One considers biological models for vision and its consequences for artificial vision, whereas the other considers the relation between real world objects and their internal representation in robots. The last keynote speaker, presents answer set programming, a new idea for declarative programming.