Book•
Handbook of Constraint Programming
01 Jan 2006-
TL;DR: 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.
Abstract: 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)
Citations
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Book•
22 Jun 2009
TL;DR: This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling.
Abstract: A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.
2,735 citations
TL;DR: This paper gives an overview of the open source project Potassco, the Potsdam Answer Set Solving Collection, bundling tools for Answer Set Programming developed at the University ofPotsdam.
Abstract: This paper gives an overview of the open source project Potassco, the Potsdam Answer Set Solving Collection, bundling tools for Answer Set Programming developed at the University of Potsdam.
538 citations
TL;DR: A new cluster-first route-second heuristic is proposed, in which a polynomial-size Clustering Problem simultaneously considers the service level feasibility and approximate routing costs and shows that it outperforms a pure mixed-integer programming formulation and a constraint programming approach.
474 citations
Cites methods from "Handbook of Constraint Programming"
...In particular, CP has been applied before to constrained routing problems (Kilby and Shaw 2006)....
[...]
Proceedings Article•
30 Sep 2011TL;DR: This book captures the state of the art of the interaction between optimization and machine learning in a way that is accessible to researchers in both fields and will enrich the ongoing cross-fertilization between the machine learning community and these other fields, and within the broader optimization community.
Abstract: The interplay between optimization and machine learning is one of the most important developments in modern computational science. Optimization formulations and methods are proving to be vital in designing algorithms to extract essential knowledge from huge volumes of data. Machine learning, however, is not simply a consumer of optimization technology but a rapidly evolving field that is itself generating new optimization ideas. This book captures the state of the art of the interaction between optimization and machine learning in a way that is accessible to researchers in both fields.Optimization approaches have enjoyed prominence in machine learning because of their wide applicability and attractive theoretical properties. The increasing complexity, size, and variety of today's machine learning models call for the reassessment of existing assumptions. This book starts the process of reassessment. It describes the resurgence in novel contexts of established frameworks such as first-order methods, stochastic approximations, convex relaxations, interior-point methods, and proximal methods. It also devotes attention to newer themes such as regularized optimization, robust optimization, gradient and subgradient methods, splitting techniques, and second-order methods. Many of these techniques draw inspiration from other fields, including operations research, theoretical computer science, and subfields of optimization. The book will enrich the ongoing cross-fertilization between the machine learning community and these other fields, and within the broader optimization community.
470 citations
TL;DR: The aim of the paper is to focus on the industrial aspects of scheduling and discuss the main characteristics, including strengths and weaknesses of the presented approaches, as well as some lessons learned from industry.
439 citations
References
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Book•
01 Sep 1988
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems in many fields, including computer programming and mathematics.
Abstract: From the Publisher:
This book brings together - in an informal and tutorial fashion - the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems in many fields
Major concepts are illustrated with running examples, and major algorithms are illustrated by Pascal computer programs No prior knowledge of GAs or genetics is assumed, and only a minimum of computer programming and mathematics background is required
52,797 citations
01 Jan 1979
42,654 citations
TL;DR: The recently‐developed statistical method known as the “bootstrap” can be used to place confidence intervals on phylogenies and shows significant evidence for a group if it is defined by three or more characters.
Abstract: The recently-developed statistical method known as the "bootstrap" can be used to place confidence intervals on phylogenies. It involves resampling points from one's own data, with replacement, to create a series of bootstrap samples of the same size as the original data. Each of these is analyzed, and the variation among the resulting estimates taken to indicate the size of the error involved in making estimates from the original data. In the case of phylogenies, it is argued that the proper method of resampling is to keep all of the original species while sampling characters with replacement, under the assumption that the characters have been independently drawn by the systematist and have evolved independently. Majority-rule consensus trees can be used to construct a phylogeny showing all of the inferred monophyletic groups that occurred in a majority of the bootstrap samples. If a group shows up 95% of the time or more, the evidence for it is taken to be statistically significant. Existing computer programs can be used to analyze different bootstrap samples by using weights on the characters, the weight of a character being how many times it was drawn in bootstrap sampling. When all characters are perfectly compatible, as envisioned by Hennig, bootstrap sampling becomes unnecessary; the bootstrap method would show significant evidence for a group if it is defined by three or more characters.
40,349 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1979
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.
Abstract: This is the second edition of a quarterly column the purpose of which is to provide 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 (hereinafter referred to as ‘‘[G&J]’’; previous columns will be referred to by their dates). A background equivalent to that provided by [G&J] is assumed. Readers having results they would like mentioned (NP-hardness, PSPACE-hardness, polynomial-time-solvability, etc.), or open problems they would like publicized, should send them to David S. Johnson, Room 2C355, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, including details, or at least sketches, of any new proofs (full papers are preferred). In the case of unpublished results, please state explicitly that you would like the results mentioned in the column. Comments and corrections are also welcome. For more details on the nature of the column and the form of desired submissions, see the December 1981 issue of this journal.
40,020 citations
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: This book brings together the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems in many fields.
Abstract: From the Publisher:
This book brings together - in an informal and tutorial fashion - the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems in many fields.
Major concepts are illustrated with running examples, and major algorithms are illustrated by Pascal computer programs. No prior knowledge of GAs or genetics is assumed, and only a minimum of computer programming and mathematics background is required.
33,034 citations