Introduction to the special volume on constraint-based reasoning

✍ Scribed by Eugene C. Freuder; Alan K. Mackworth

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 101 KB
• Volume: 58
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3702
• DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(92)90002-f

✦ Synopsis

Constraint-based reasoning has long been a productive research focus for researchers in artificial intelligence. Richard Fikes, for example, reported an early contribution in the very first issue of this journal. Lately, the subject has enjoyed markedly increased attention. This interest has been influenced by, and in turn influenced, an acceleration of progress on many fronts. This special volume reports new results in three important areas: paradigms, tractability, and applications.

Paradigms

The first paper, by Alan Mackworth, places the standard AI formalization of constraint satisfaction problems within a space of logical representation and reasoning systems. Freuder and Wallace extend standard constraint satisfaction methods to cope with situations in which it is unnecessary or impossible to satisfy all the constraints. Eero Hyv6nen presents a new approach to satisfying constraints on intervals. Van Hentenryck, Simonis and Dincbas use constraint logic programming to solve practical problems.

Tractability

Minton, Johnston, Philips and Laird, demonstrate that for some problems it can be very efficient to satisfy constraints by refining an initial imperfect