Peter van Beek

The 11th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2005) was held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain, October 1-5, 2005. Information about the conference can be found on the web at http://www.iiia.csic.es/cp2005/.Informationaboutpastconferencesinthe series can be found athttp://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ai/cp/. The CP conference series is the premier international conference on c- straint programming and is held annually. The conference is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints, including: algorithms, applications, environments, languages, models and systems. This year, we received 164 submissions. All of the submitted papers received atleastthreereviews, andthepapersandtheirreviewswerethenextensivelyd- cussed during an online Program Committee meeting. As a result, the Program Committee chose 48 (29.3%) papers to be published in full in the proceedings and a further 22 (13.4%)papers to be published as short papers.The full papers werepresentedattheconferencein twoparalleltracksandtheshortpaperswere presented as posters during a lively evening session. Two papers were selected by a subcommittee of the ProgramCommittee--consisting of Chris Beck, Gilles Pesant, and myself--to receive best paper awards. The conference program also includedexcellentinvitedtalksbyHþ ectorGe?ner, IanHorrocks, FrancescaRossi, and Peter J. Stuckey. As a permanent record, the proceedings contain four-page extended abstracts of the invited talks.

11th International Conference, CP 2005, Sitges Spain, October 1-5, 2005

Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2005

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.

Toby Walsh

Francesca Rossi

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

Peter van Beek

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