Recent Advances in Constraints

Constraint programming is the fruit of several decades of research carried out in mathematical logic, automated deduction, operations research and arti?cial intelligence. The tools and programming languages arising from this research ?eldhaveenjoyedrealsuccessintheindustrialworldastheycontributetosolving hard combinatorial problems in diverse domains such as production planning, communication networks, robotics and bioinformatics. This volume contains the extended and reviewed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming (CSCLP2003), which was held from June 30 to July 2, 2003. The venue chosen for the seventh edition of this annual workshop was the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) in Budapest, Hungary. This institute is one of the 20 members of the Working Group on Constraints of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). For many participants this workshop provided the ?rst opportunity to visit their ERCIM partner in Budapest. CoLogNET is the European-funded network of excellence dedicated to s- porting and enhancing cooperation and research on all areas of computational logic, and continues the work done previously by the Compulog Net. In part- ular, the aim of the logic and constraint logic programming area of CoLogNET is to foster and support all research activities related to logic programming and constraint logic programming. The editors would like to take the opportunity and thank all the authors who submitted papers to this volume, as well as the reviewers for their helpful work.

Constraint Solving.- A Comparative Study of Arithmetic Constraints on Integer Intervals.- Clustering for Disconnected Solution Sets of Numerical CSPs.- Implementing Propagators for Tabular Constraints.- Constraint Methods for Modal Satisfiability.- Learning Approximate Consistencies.- Soft Constraints.- Abstracting Soft Constraints: Some Experimental Results on Fuzzy CSPs.- Tradeoff Generation Using Soft Constraints.- Experimental Evaluation of Interchangeability in Soft CSPs.- Language Issues.- A Rule Language for Interaction.- A Generic Trace Schema for the Portability of CP(FD) Debugging Tools.- Applications.- Teaching Constraints through Logic Puzzles.- Reduce-To-The-Opt - A Specialized Search Algorithm for Contiguous Task Scheduling.- A New Approach to Modeling and Solving Minimal Perturbation Problems.- Protein Folding in CLP( ) with Empirical Contact Energies.- Gestures for Embodied Agents with Logic Programming.