Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics.

The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area.

The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas.

The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming.

- Covers the whole field of constraint programming
- Survey-style chapters
- Five chapters on applications

Table of Contents

Foreword (Ugo Montanari) 
Part I : Foundations
Chapter 1. Introduction (Francesca Rossi, Peter van Beek, Toby Walsh) 
Chapter 2. Constraint Satisfaction: An Emerging Paradigm (Eugene C. Freuder, Alan K. Mackworth) 
Chapter 3. Constraint Propagation (Christian Bessiere) 
Chapter 4. Backtracking Search Algorithms (Peter van Beek) 
Chapter 5. Local Search Methods (Holger H. Hoos, Edward Tsang) 
Chapter 6. Global Constraints (Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Irit Katriel)
Chapter 7. Tractable Structures for CSPs (Rina Dechter)
Chapter 8. The Complexity of Constraint Languages
(David Cohen, Peter Jeavons) 
Chapter 9. Soft Constraints (Pedro Meseguer, Francesca Rossi, Thomas Schiex) 
Chapter 10. Symmetry in Constraint Programming
(Ian P. Gent, Karen E. Petrie, Jean-Francois Puget)
Chapter 11. Modelling (Barbara M. Smith) 
Part II : Extensions, Languages, and Applications

Chapter 12. Constraint Logic Programming (Kim Marriott, Peter J. Stuckey, Mark Wallace) 
Chapter 13. Constraints in Procedural and Concurrent Languages (Thom Fruehwirth, Laurent Michel, Christian Schulte)
Chapter 14. Finite Domain Constraint Programming Systems (Christian Schulte, Mats Carlsson) 
Chapter 15. Operations Research Methods in Constraint Programming (John Hooker) 
Chapter 16. Continuous and Interval Constraints(Frederic Benhamou, Laurent Granvilliers) 
Chapter 17. Constraints over Structured Domains
(Carmen Gervet) 
Chapter 18. Randomness and Structure (Carla Gomes, Toby Walsh)
Chapter 19. Temporal CSPs (Manolis Koubarakis)
Chapter 20. Distributed Constraint Programming
(Boi Faltings) 
Chapter 21. Uncertainty and Change (Kenneth N. Brown, Ian Miguel)
Chapter 22. Constraint-Based Scheduling and Planning
(Philippe Baptiste, Philippe Laborie, Claude Le Pape, Wim Nuijten)
Chapter 23. Vehicle Routing (Philip Kilby, Paul Shaw) 
Chapter 24. Configuration (Ulrich Junker)
Chapter 25. Constraint Applications in Networks
(Helmut Simonis)
Chapter 26. Bioinformatics and Constraints (Rolf Backofen, David Gilbert)

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Handbook of Constraint Programming

Minimum Cardinality Matrix Decomposition into Consecutive-Ones Matrices: CP and IP Approaches.- Connections in Networks: Hardness of Feasibility Versus Optimality.- Modeling the Regular Constraint with Integer Programming.- Hybrid Local Search for Constrained Financial Portfolio Selection Problems.- The "Not-Too-Heavy Spanning Tree" Constraint.- Eliminating Redundant Clauses in SAT Instances.- Cost-Bounded Binary Decision Diagrams for 0-1 Programming.- YIELDS: A Yet Improved Limited Discrepancy Search for CSPs.- A Global Constraint for Total Weighted Completion Time.- Computing Tight Time Windows for RCPSPWET with the Primal-Dual Method.- Necessary Condition for Path Partitioning Constraints.- A Constraint Programming Approach to the Hospitals / Residents Problem.- Best-First AND/OR Search for 0/1 Integer Programming.- A Position-Based Propagator for the Open-Shop Problem.- Directional Interchangeability for Enhancing CSP Solving.- A Continuous Multi-resources cumulative Constraint with Positive-Negative Resource Consumption-Production.- Replenishment Planning for Stochastic Inventory Systems with Shortage Cost.- Preprocessing Expression-Based Constraint Satisfaction Problems for Stochastic Local Search.- The Deviation Constraint.- The Linear Programming Polytope of Binary Constraint Problems with Bounded Tree-Width.- On Boolean Functions Encodable as a Single Linear Pseudo-Boolean Constraint.- Solving a Stochastic Queueing Control Problem with Constraint Programming.- Constrained Clustering Via Concavity Cuts.- Bender's Cuts Guided Large Neighborhood Search for the Traveling Umpire Problem.- A Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for Graph Coloring.- Generalizations of the Global Cardinality Constraint for Hierarchical Resources.- A Column Generation Based Destructive Lower Bound for Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems.

Integration of AI and OR techniques in constraint programming for combinatorial optimization problems : 4th International Conference, CPAIOR 2007, Brussels, Belgium, May 23-26, 2007 : proceedings

In this paper, we present a dynamic and adaptive variable ordering heuristic which guides systematic search toward inconsistent or hard parts of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). This generic heuristic is able to exploit information about previous states of the search process whereas traditional dynamic ones only exploit information about the current state. Intuitively, it avoids some trashing by first instantiating variables involved in the constraints that have frequently participated in dead-end situations. Such information is recorded by associating a weight with each constraint. This weight is increased whenever the associated constraint is violated during search. The extensive experiments that we have conducted prove that our conflict-directed approach is the most efficient current one with respect to significant and large classes of academic, random and real-world instances.

Boosting systematic search by weighting constraints

Random constraint satisfaction: Easy generation of hard (satisfiable) instances

A major challenge in constraint programming is to develop efficient generic approaches to solve instances of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). With this aim in mind, this book provides an accessible synthesis of the author's research and work in this area, divided into four main topics: representation, inference, search, and learning. The results obtained and reproduced in this book have a wide applicability, regardless of the nature of the problem or the constraints involved, making it an extremely user-friendly resource for those involved in this field.

Constraint Networks: Techniques and Algorithms

Table constraints play an important role within constraint programming. Recently, many schemes or algorithms have been proposed to propagate table constraints and/or to compress their representation. In this paper, we describe an optimization of simple tabular reduction (STR), a technique proposed by J. Ullmann to dynamically maintain the tables of supports when generalized arc consistency (GAC) is enforced/maintained. STR2, the new refined GAC algorithm we propose, allows us to limit the number of operations related to validity checking and search of supports. Interestingly enough, this optimization makes simple tabular reduction potentially r times faster where r is the arity of the constraint(s). The results of an extensive experimentation that we have conducted with respect to random and structured instances indicate that STR2 is usually around twice as fast as the original STR, two or three times faster than the approach based on the hidden variable encoding, and can be up to one order of magnitude faster than previously state-of-the-art (generic) GAC algorithms on some series of instances. When comparing STR2 with the more recently developed algorithm based on multi-valued decision diagrams (MDDs), we show that both approaches are rather complementary.

/pdf/str2-optimized-simple-tabular-reduction-for-table-3ujd0vih74.pdf

STR2: optimized simple tabular reduction for table constraints

In an Arc Consistency (AC) algorithm, a residual support, or residue, is a support that has been stored during a previous execution of the procedure which determines if a value is supported by a constraint. The point is that a residue is not guaranteed to represent a lower bound of the smallest current support of a value. In this paper, we study the theoretical impact of exploiting residues with respect to the basic algorithm AC3. First, we prove that AC3rm (AC3 with multi-directional residues) is optimal for low and high constraint tightness. Second, we show that when AC has to be maintained during a backtracking search, MAC2001 presents, with respect to MAC3rm, an overhead in O(µed) per branch of the binary tree built by MAC, where µ denotes the number of refutations of the branch, e the number of constraints and d the greatest domain size of the constraint network. One consequence is that MAC3rm admits a better worst-case time complexity than MAC2001 for a branch involving µ refutations when either µ > d2 or µ > d and the tightness of any constraint is either low or high. Our experimental results clearly show that exploiting residues allows enhancing MAC and SAC algorithms.

/pdf/a-study-of-residual-supports-in-arc-consistency-44kefug9to.pdf

Christophe Lecoutre

Papers

Boosting systematic search by weighting constraints

Random constraint satisfaction: Easy generation of hard (satisfiable) instances

Constraint Networks: Techniques and Algorithms

STR2: optimized simple tabular reduction for table constraints

A study of residual supports in arc consistency