Abstract
In this chapter, I briefly present constraint reasoning. Constraint reasoning has been a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that is nowadays more well-known as constraint programming (CP). The change of name occurred more or less when CP has started to be widely used for solving combinatorial problems in industrial applications. This also corresponds to the moment where CP was enriched by the contributions from logic programming for the aspects related to languages and from operation research for the propagation of complex constraints. Considering the topic of this book, I will stay on a AI-oriented presentation of CP.
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- 1.
In the rest of this chapter we will represent an instantiation indifferently as a sequence or as a set of variable assignments. The assignment of value \(v_i\) to variable \(x_i\) is denoted by \((x_i,v_i)\).
- 2.
The width of Freuder is a lower bound to the tree-width (Arnborg 1985).
- 3.
The pigeon-hole problem is to assign n pigeons to \(n-1\) holes in such a way that no hole contains more than one pigeon.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Anastasia Paparrizou and Thomas Schiex for their thorough reading of this chapter and for their suggestions. I also thank Clément Carbonnel, Michele Lombardi, and Michela Milano for their help in describing some of the contributions presented in this chapter.
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Bessiere, C. (2020). Constraint Reasoning. In: Marquis, P., Papini, O., Prade, H. (eds) A Guided Tour of Artificial Intelligence Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06167-8_6
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