Download or read book Handbook of Constraint Programming written by Francesca Rossi and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2006-08-18 with total page 977 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Principles of Constraint Programming written by Krzysztof Apt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-28 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Constraint Logic Programming using Eclipse written by Krzysztof R. Apt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-21 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraint logic programming lies at the intersection of logic programming, optimisation and artificial intelligence. It has proved a successful tool in many areas including production planning, transportation scheduling, numerical analysis and bioinformatics. Eclipse is one of the leading software systems that realise its underlying methodology. Eclipse is exploited commercially by Cisco, and is freely available and used for teaching and research in over 500 universities. This book has a two-fold purpose. It's an introduction to constraint programming, appropriate for one-semester courses for upper undergraduate or graduate students in computer science or for programmers wishing to master the practical aspects of constraint programming. By the end of the book, the reader will be able to understand and write constraint programs that solve complex problems. Second, it provides a systematic introduction to the Eclipse system through carefully-chosen examples that guide the reader through the language and illustrate its power, versatility and utility.

Download or read book Constraint Based Scheduling written by Philippe Baptiste and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

Download or read book Handbook of Knowledge Representation written by Frank van Harmelen and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 1035 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook of Knowledge Representation describes the essential foundations of Knowledge Representation, which lies at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The book provides an up-to-date review of twenty-five key topics in knowledge representation, written by the leaders of each field. It includes a tutorial background and cutting-edge developments, as well as applications of Knowledge Representation in a variety of AI systems. This handbook is organized into three parts. Part I deals with general methods in Knowledge Representation and reasoning and covers such topics as classical logic in Knowledge Representation; satisfiability solvers; description logics; constraint programming; conceptual graphs; nonmonotonic reasoning; model-based problem solving; and Bayesian networks. Part II focuses on classes of knowledge and specialized representations, with chapters on temporal representation and reasoning; spatial and physical reasoning; reasoning about knowledge and belief; temporal action logics; and nonmonotonic causal logic. Part III discusses Knowledge Representation in applications such as question answering; the semantic web; automated planning; cognitive robotics; multi-agent systems; and knowledge engineering. This book is an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in knowledge representation and AI. * Make your computer smarter* Handle qualitative and uncertain information* Improve computational tractability to solve your problems easily

Download or read book Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming written by Helmut Simonis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-06 with total page 984 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Handbook of Satisfiability written by A. Biere and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 1486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propositional logic has been recognized throughout the centuries as one of the cornerstones of reasoning in philosophy and mathematics. Over time, its formalization into Boolean algebra was accompanied by the recognition that a wide range of combinatorial problems can be expressed as propositional satisfiability (SAT) problems. Because of this dual role, SAT developed into a mature, multi-faceted scientific discipline, and from the earliest days of computing a search was underway to discover how to solve SAT problems in an automated fashion. This book, the Handbook of Satisfiability, is the second, updated and revised edition of the book first published in 2009 under the same name. The handbook aims to capture the full breadth and depth of SAT and to bring together significant progress and advances in automated solving. Topics covered span practical and theoretical research on SAT and its applications and include search algorithms, heuristics, analysis of algorithms, hard instances, randomized formulae, problem encodings, industrial applications, solvers, simplifiers, tools, case studies and empirical results. SAT is interpreted in a broad sense, so as well as propositional satisfiability, there are chapters covering the domain of quantified Boolean formulae (QBF), constraints programming techniques (CSP) for word-level problems and their propositional encoding, and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). An extensive bibliography completes each chapter. This second edition of the handbook will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, final-year undergraduates, and practitioners using or contributing to SAT, and will provide both an inspiration and a rich resource for their work. Edmund Clarke, 2007 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "SAT solving is a key technology for 21st century computer science." Donald Knuth, 1974 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "SAT is evidently a killer app, because it is key to the solution of so many other problems." Stephen Cook, 1982 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "The SAT problem is at the core of arguably the most fundamental question in computer science: What makes a problem hard?"

Download or read book Integrated Methods for Optimization written by John N. Hooker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-13 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Integrated Methods for Optimization was published in January 2007. Because the book covers a rapidly developing field, the time is right for a second edition. The book provides a unified treatment of optimization methods. It brings ideas from mathematical programming (MP), constraint programming (CP), and global optimization (GO)into a single volume. There is no reason these must be learned as separate fields, as they normally are, and there are three reasons they should be studied together. (1) There is much in common among them intellectually, and to a large degree they can be understood as special cases of a single underlying solution technology. (2) A growing literature reports how they can be profitably integrated to formulate and solve a wide range of problems. (3) Several software packages now incorporate techniques from two or more of these fields. The book provides a unique resource for graduate students and practitioners who want a well-rounded background in optimization methods within a single course of study. Engineering students are a particularly large potential audience, because engineering optimization problems often benefit from a combined approach—particularly where design, scheduling, or logistics are involved. The text is also of value to those studying operations research, because their educational programs rarely cover CP, and to those studying computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), because their curric ula typically omit MP and GO. The text is also useful for practitioners in any of these areas who want to learn about another, because it provides a more concise and accessible treatment than other texts. The book can cover so wide a range of material because it focuses on ideas that arerelevant to the methods used in general-purpose optimization and constraint solvers. The book focuses on ideas behind the methods that have proved useful in general-purpose optimization and constraint solvers, as well as integrated solvers of the present and foreseeable future. The second edition updates results in this area and includes several major new topics: Background material in linear, nonlinear, and dynamic programming. Network flow theory, due to its importance in filtering algorithms. A chapter on generalized duality theory that more explicitly develops a unifying primal-dual algorithmic structure for optimization methods. An extensive survey of search methods from both MP and AI, using the primal-dual framework as an organizing principle. Coverage of several additional global constraints used in CP solvers. The book continues to focus on exact as opposed to heuristic methods. It is possible to bring heuristic methods into the unifying scheme described in the book, and the new edition will retain the brief discussion of how this might be done.

Download or read book Constraint Processing written by Rina Dechter and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 2003-05-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraint reasoning has matured over the last three decades with contributions from a diverse community of researchers in artificial intelligence, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics. In Constraint Processing, Rina Dechter synthesizes these contributions, as well as her own significant work, to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms.

Download or read book Answer Set Programming written by Vladimir Lifschitz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Answer set programming (ASP) is a programming methodology oriented towards combinatorial search problems. In such a problem, the goal is to find a solution among a large but finite number of possibilities. The idea of ASP came from research on artificial intelligence and computational logic. ASP is a form of declarative programming: an ASP program describes what is counted as a solution to the problem, but does not specify an algorithm for solving it. Search is performed by sophisticated software systems called answer set solvers. Combinatorial search problems often arise in science and technology, and ASP has found applications in diverse areas—in historical linguistic, in bioinformatics, in robotics, in space exploration, in oil and gas industry, and many others. The importance of this programming method was recognized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2016, when AI Magazine published a special issue on answer set programming. The book introduces the reader to the theory and practice of ASP. It describes the input language of the answer set solver CLINGO, which was designed at the University of Potsdam in Germany and is used today by ASP programmers in many countries. It includes numerous examples of ASP programs and present the mathematical theory that ASP is based on. There are many exercises with complete solutions.

Download or read book Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning written by Youssef Hamadi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book presenting a broad overview of parallelism in constraint-based reasoning formalisms. In recent years, an increasing number of contributions have been made on scaling constraint reasoning thanks to parallel architectures. The goal in this book is to overview these achievements in a concise way, assuming the reader is familiar with the classical, sequential background. It presents work demonstrating the use of multiple resources from single machine multi-core and GPU-based computations to very large scale distributed execution platforms up to 80,000 processing units. The contributions in the book cover the most important and recent contributions in parallel propositional satisfiability (SAT), maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), quantified Boolean formulas (QBF), satisfiability modulo theory (SMT), theorem proving (TP), answer set programming (ASP), mixed integer linear programming (MILP), constraint programming (CP), stochastic local search (SLS), optimal path finding with A*, model checking for linear-time temporal logic (MC/LTL), binary decision diagrams (BDD), and model-based diagnosis (MBD). The book is suitable for researchers, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and practitioners who wish to learn about the state of the art in parallel constraint reasoning.

Download or read book Programming with Constraints written by Kim Marriott and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraints; Simplification, optimization and implication; Finite constraint domains; Constraint logic programming; Simple modeling; Using data structures; Controlling search; Modelling with finite domain constraints; Advanced programming techniques; CLP systems; Other constraint programming languages; Constraint databases; Index.

Download or read book Handbook on Modelling for Discrete Optimization written by Gautam M. Appa and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-08-18 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to demonstrate and detail the pervasive nature of Discrete Optimization. The handbook couples the difficult, critical-thinking aspects of mathematical modeling with the hot area of discrete optimization. It is done with an academic treatment outlining the state-of-the-art for researchers across the domains of the Computer Science, Math Programming, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Operations Research. The book utilizes the tools of mathematical modeling, optimization, and integer programming to solve a broad range of modern problems.

Download or read book Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming written by Vijay Saraswat and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Principles of Constraint Programming written by Krzysztof Apt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upper-division textbook covering foundations of constraint programming and applications to scheduling, optimisation etc.

Download or read book Lectures on Stochastic Programming written by Alexander Shapiro and published by SIAM. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Optimization problems involving stochastic models occur in almost all areas of science and engineering, such as telecommunications, medicine, and finance. Their existence compels a need for rigorous ways of formulating, analyzing, and solving such problems. This book focuses on optimization problems involving uncertain parameters and covers the theoretical foundations and recent advances in areas where stochastic models are available. Readers will find coverage of the basic concepts of modeling these problems, including recourse actions and the nonanticipativity principle. The book also includes the theory of two-stage and multistage stochastic programming problems; the current state of the theory on chance (probabilistic) constraints, including the structure of the problems, optimality theory, and duality; and statistical inference in and risk-averse approaches to stochastic programming.

Download or read book Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming CP 99 written by Joxan Jaffar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-06-02 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programmingm CP'99, held in Alexandria, Virginia, USA in October 1999. The 30 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers and eight posters were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book from a total of 97 papers submitted. All current aspects of constraint programming and applications in various areas are addressed.