Constraint Processing

Constraint satisfaction is a simple but powerful tool. Constraints identify the impossible and reduce the realm of possibilities to effectively focus on the possible, allowing for a natural declarative formulation of what must be satisfied, without expressing how. The field of 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. Today, constraint problems are used to model cognitive tasks in vision, language comprehension, default reasoning, diagnosis, scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning.

In Constraint Processing, Rina Dechter, synthesizes these contributions, along with her own significant work, to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms. Throughout, she focuses on fundamental tools and principles, emphasizing the representation and analysis of algorithms.

Readership: Researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence and operations research; graduate students and senior undergraduate students in artificial intelligence and operations research

ISBN: 1-55860-890-7

Pages: 450

Imprint: Morgan Kaufmann

Publication Date: 5 May 2003

Price: $65.95

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Constraint Networks
• Consistency-Enforcing Algorithms
• Directonal Consistency
• General Search Statagies: Look Ahead
• General Search Statagies: Look-Back
• Local Search Algorithms
• Advanced Consistency Methods
• Tree-Decomposition Methods
• Hybrid of Search and Inference: Time-Space Trade-offs
• Tractable Constraint Languages
• Temporal Constraint Netwoks
• Constraint Optimization
• Probabilistic Networks
• Constraint Logic Programming
• Bibliography