This comprehensive guide provides an in-depth exploration of Constraint Handling Rules, authored by the language's creator. It serves as a definitive reference, detailing the principles, applications, and techniques essential for effectively utilizing this powerful programming language. Readers can expect to gain insights into both theoretical and practical aspects, making it an invaluable resource for developers and researchers interested in constraint programming.
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.
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.
Mason's marks (Steinmetzzeichen) are symbols carved by stonecutters on dressed stone. These signs go back about 4500 years. In Europe, one can mainly find quarrier's marks from the medieval ages. In Architectural History, stonemason's marks allow to reconstruct the construction process of a building. Mason's marks can be concisely represented by planar line graphs using basic Computational Geometry. This text shortly introduces mason's marks and the implementation of the software tool VanDeGraphGenerator to draw, analyse, and generate graphs in the declarative programming language Constraint Handling Rules. This book then features sixty choice mason's marks from Ulm Minster, Strasbourg Cathedral, and Iglesia Arciprestal de Santiago in Spain. Exploiting the inherent structural regularities of mason's marks, VanDeGraphGenerator can assemble new designs automatically using methods from Artificial Intelligence research to achieve a kind of Computational Creativity. The main part of the book showcases more than thousand new designs produced by the tool.
Das Buch gibt einen kompakten, aber umfassenden Überblick über das Problemlösen und Programmieren mit „Constraints“ (Randbedingungen). Diese aktuelle Programmiermethodik ermöglicht es, Aufgaben direkt zu formulieren und effizient zu lösen. Sie gewinnt zusehends Bedeutung in Anwendungsbereichen wie Kombinatorische Suchprobleme (z. B. Zeitplanen, Layout-Optimierung), Berechnungen (Finanzanalyse), Simulation (Hardware-Verifikation) oder allgemein Schließen und Rechnen mit ungenauer oder unvollständiger Information (z. B. Kostenschätzung). Die theoretisch fundierte Darstellung mit Aufgaben und Anwendungsbeispielen aus der Praxis ist in der Lehre erprobt, aber auch für Forscher und Praktiker von Nutzen.
