Tom Schrijvers

Thom Frühwirth

The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language is a declarative concurrent committed-choice constraint logic programming language consisting of guarded rules that transform multisets of relations called constraints until no more change occurs. The CHR language saw the light more than 15 years ago. Since then, it has become a major declarative specification and implementation language for constraint-based algorithms and applications. In recent years, five workshops on constraint handling rules have spurred the exchange of ideas within the CHR community, which has led to increased international collaboration, new theoretical results and optimized implementations. The aim of this volume was to attract high-quality research papers on these recent advances in Constraint Handling Rules. The 7 papers presented together with an introductory paper on CHR cover topics on search, applications, theory, and implementation of CHR.

Current Research Topics

Constraint Handling Rules

Slim Abdennadher

The use of constraints had its scientific and commercial breakthrough in the 1990s. Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and specify problems with uncertain, incomplete information and to solve combi natorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design, and analysis. This book is a short, concise, and complete presentation of constraint programming and reasoning, covering theoretical foundations, algorithms, implementations, examples, and applications. It is based on more than a decade of experience in teaching and research about this subject. This book is intended primarily for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in diverse areas of computer science and related fields, including programming languages, computational logic, symbolic computation, and ar tificial intelligence. The book is complemented by a web-page with teaching material, software, links, and more. We take the reader on a step-by-step journey through the world of constraint-based programming and constraint reasoning. Feel free to join in ... Acknowledgements Thorn thanks his wife Andrea and his daughter Anna - for everything. He dedicates his contribution to the book to the memory of his mother, Grete. Slim thanks his wife N abila and his daughters Shirine and Amira for their ongoing support and patience.

Essentials of Constraint Programming

Susanne Biundo

Günther Palm

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2004, held in Ulm, Germany in September 2004. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language processing, knowledge representation and ontologies, planning and search, neural networks and machine learning, reasoning, and robotics and machine perception.

27th Annual German Conference in AI, KI 2004, Ulm, Germany, September 20-24, 2004, Proceedings

KI 2004: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

The definitive reference on Constraint Handling Rules, from the creator of the language.

Frank Raiser

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is both a theoretical formalism and a practical programming language. This book provides an overview of CHR research based on a reviewed selection of doctoral theses. After a basic introduction to CHR, the book presents results from three different areas of CHR research: compilation and optimization, execution strategies, and program analysis. The chapters offer in-depth treatises of selected subjects, supported by a wealth of examples. The book is ideal for master students, lecturers, and researchers.

Large Print Edition

Constraint Handling Rules - Compilation, Execution, and Analysis

The ConstraintHandling Rules (CHR) languagecameto life morethan 15 years ago.Sincethen,ithasbecomeamajordeclarativespeci?cationandimplemen- tion language for constraint-based algorithms and applications. In recent years, the ?ve Workshops on Constraint Handling Rules have spurred the exchange of ideas within the CHR community, which has led to increased international collaboration, new theoretical results and optimized implementations. The aim of this volume of Lecture Notes in Ariti?cial Intelligence was to attract high-quality research papers on these recent advances in CHR. The 8 papersinthis issuewereselectedfrom11submissionsaftercarefulreviewingand subsequent revisions. Each paper was reviewd by three reviewers. The accepted papers represent some of the research teams on CHR around the world. It is not by accident that the currently most active research group is featured here with three articles. We also would have liked to see contributions from other CHR teams, but space is limited and the reviewers took their job seriously. After an introductory article that foreshadows an upcoming monograph on CHR, the accepted papers span a range of current research topics in the CHR community. It goes from extending the CHR language with search facilities and the related adaptive framework, and from generating rules from speci?cations of constraint solvers to implementing abductive probabilistic reasoning. They cover the theory that is a compositional semantics for CHR and ?nally describe e?cient implementations of CHR in traditional mainstream programming l- guages and compiler optimizations in the context of the re?ned semantics of CHR. Wewouldliketothanktheauthorsofsubmittedpapersandthemanyrevi- ers for their contribution in making this collection of research papers possible.

Thom Frühwirth

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