Abstract
The ability to model search in a constraint solver can be an essential asset for solving combinatorial problems. However, existing infrastructure for defining search heuristics is often inadequate. Either modeling capabilities are extremely limited or users are faced with a general-purpose programming language whose features are not tailored towards writing search heuristics. As a result, major improvements in performance may remain unexplored.
This article introduces search combinators, a lightweight and solver-independent method that bridges the gap between a conceptually simple modeling language for search (high-level, functional and naturally compositional) and an efficient implementation (low-level, imperative and highly non-modular). By allowing the user to define application-tailored search strategies from a small set of primitives, search combinators effectively provide a rich domain-specific language (DSL) for modeling search to the user. Remarkably, this DSL comes at a low implementation cost to the developer of a constraint solver.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Van Hentenryck, P., Perron, L., Puget, J.F.: Search and strategies in OPL. ACM TOCL 1(2), 285–315 (2000)
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L.: Constraint-Based Local Search. MIT Press (2005)
Marriott, K., Nethercote, N., Rafeh, R., Stuckey, P., Garcia de la Banda, M., Wallace, M.: The design of the Zinc modelling language. Constraints 13(3), 229–267 (2008)
Schimpf, J., Shen, K.: ECLiPSe – From LP to CLP. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 12(1-2), 127–156 (2012)
Schulte, C., et al.: Gecode, the generic constraint development environment (2009) http://www.gecode.org/ (accessed November 2012)
Nethercote, N., Stuckey, P.J., Becket, R., Brand, S., Duck, G.J., Tack, G.: MiniZinc: Towards a standard CP modelling language. In: Bessière, C. (ed.) CP 2007. LNCS, vol. 4741, pp. 529–543. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Cook, W.R.: A denotational semantics of inheritance. PhD thesis, Brown University (1989)
Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Menhdhekar, A., Maeda, C., Lopes, C., Loingtier, J.-M., Irwin, J.: Aspect-oriented programming. In: Akşit, M., Matsuoka, S. (eds.) ECOOP 1997. LNCS, vol. 1241, pp. 220–242. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Schrijvers, T., Tack, G., Wuille, P., Samulowitz, H., Stuckey, P.J.: Search combinators. In: Lee, J. (ed.) CP 2011. LNCS, vol. 6876, pp. 774–788. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Schrijvers, T., Tack, G., Wuille, P., Samulowitz, H., Stuckey, P.: Search combinators. Constraints, 1–37 (2012)
Refalo, P.: Impact-based search strategies for constraint programming. In: Wallace, M. (ed.) CP 2004. LNCS, vol. 3258, pp. 557–571. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Perron, L.: Search procedures and parallelism in constraint programming. In: Jaffar, J. (ed.) CP 1999. LNCS, vol. 1713, pp. 346–361. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Schrijvers, T., Triska, M., Demoen, B.: Tor: Extensible search with hookable disjunction. In: Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, PPDP 2012. ACM (2012)
Wielemaker, J., Schrijvers, T., Triska, M., Lager, T.: SWI-Prolog. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 12(1-2), 67–96 (2012)
Zhou, N.F.: The language features and architecture of B-Prolog. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 12(1-2), 189–218 (2012)
Desouter, B.: Modular Search Heuristics in Scala. Master’s thesis, Ghent University (2012) (in Dutch)
Cremet, V., Garillot, F., Lenglet, S., Odersky, M.: A core calculus for Scala type checking. In: Královič, R., Urzyczyn, P. (eds.) MFCS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4162, pp. 1–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Kuchcinski, K., Szymanek, R.: JaCoP - Java Constraint Programming solver (2012), http://www.jacop.eu/ (accessed November 2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schrijvers, T., Tack, G., Wuille, P., Samulowitz, H., Stuckey, P.J. (2013). An Introduction to Search Combinators. In: Albert, E. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7844. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38197-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38197-3_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38196-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38197-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)