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Constraint Processing

Rina Dechter
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TLDR
Rina Dechter synthesizes three decades of researchers work on constraint processing in AI, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms.
Abstract
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. ·Examines the basic practical aspects of each topic and then tackles more advanced issues, including current research challenges ·Builds the reader's understanding with definitions, examples, theory, algorithms and complexity analysis ·Synthesizes three decades of researchers work on constraint processing in AI, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics Table of Contents Preface; Introduction; Constraint Networks; Consistency-Enforcing Algorithms: Constraint Propagation; Directional Consistency; General Search Strategies; General Search Strategies: 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 Networks; Constraint Optimization; Probabilistic Networks; Constraint Logic Programming; Bibliography

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Book ChapterDOI

Dyna: extending datalog for modern AI

TL;DR: This work shows that a broad spectrum of AI algorithms can be concisely captured by writing down systems of equations in notation, and motivates certain extensions to Datalog, which are connected to functional and object-oriented programming paradigms.
Journal ArticleDOI

Hybrid tractability of valued constraint problems

TL;DR: This work presents several novel hybrid classes of valued constraint problems in which all unary constraints are allowed, which include a machine scheduling problem, constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary valued constraints.
Journal ArticleDOI

A large neighbourhood search approach to the multi-activity shift scheduling problem

TL;DR: This paper shows how formal languages can be enhanced and used to model the complex regulations of the shift construction problem and can derive specialized graph structures that can be searched efficiently using a Large Neighbourhood Search.
Journal ArticleDOI

The complexity of conservative valued CSPs

TL;DR: In this article, the complexity of general-valued constraint languages with all possible unary cost functions is studied and shown to be polynomial-time solvable under the unique games conjecture.
Proceedings Article

S-DPOP: Superstabilizing, Fault-containing Multiagent Combinatorial Optimization

Adrian Petcu, +1 more
TL;DR: This paper proposes the first self stabilizing mechanism for multiagent combinatorial optimization, which stabilizes in a state corresponding to the optimal solution of the optimization problem, based on dynamic programming.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Optimization by Simulated Annealing

TL;DR: There is a deep and useful connection between statistical mechanics and multivariate or combinatorial optimization (finding the minimum of a given function depending on many parameters), and a detailed analogy with annealing in solids provides a framework for optimization of very large and complex systems.
Book

Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness

TL;DR: The second edition of a quarterly column as discussed by the authors provides a continuing update to the list of problems (NP-complete and harder) presented by M. R. Garey and myself in our book "Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness,” W. H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1979.
Book

Introduction to Algorithms

TL;DR: The updated new edition of the classic Introduction to Algorithms is intended primarily for use in undergraduate or graduate courses in algorithms or data structures and presents a rich variety of algorithms and covers them in considerable depth while making their design and analysis accessible to all levels of readers.
Book

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference

TL;DR: Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems as mentioned in this paper is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty, and provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief.