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A Logical Approach to Constraint Satisfaction

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Complexity of Constraints

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5250))

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) have investigated a class of combinatorial problems that became known as constraint-satisfaction problems (CSP). The input to such a problem consists of a set of variables, a set of possible values for the variables, and a set of constraints between the variables; the question is to determine whether there is an assignment of values to the variables that satisfies the given constraints. The study of constraint satisfaction occupies a prominent place in artificial intelligence, because many problems that arise in different areas can be modelled as constraint-satisfaction problems in a natural way; these areas include Boolean satisfiability, temporal reasoning, belief maintenance, machine vision, and scheduling (cf. [Dec92a,Kum92,Mes89, Tsa93]). In its full generality, constraint satisfaction is an NP-complete problem. For this reason, researchers in artificial intelligence have pursued both heuristics for constraint-satisfaction problems and tractable cases obtained by imposing various restrictions on the input (cf. [MF93,Dec92a,DM94,Fro97,PJ97]).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Almaden Research Center, Computer Science Principles and Methodologies and Computer Science Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    Phokion G. Kolaitis

  2. Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 S. Main Street, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA

    Moshe Y. Vardi

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  1. Phokion G. Kolaitis
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  2. Moshe Y. Vardi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. LIF (CNRS UMR 6166), Aix-Marseille Université, 163 avenue de Luminy, F-13288, Marseille, France

    Nadia Creignou

  2. IBM Almaden Research Center, Computer Science Principles and Methodologies, and Computer Science Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    Phokion G. Kolaitis

  3. Institut für Theoretische Informatik, Leibniz, Universität Hannover, Appelstr. 4, 30167, Hannover, Germany

    Heribert Vollmer

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Kolaitis, P.G., Vardi, M.Y. (2008). A Logical Approach to Constraint Satisfaction. In: Creignou, N., Kolaitis, P.G., Vollmer, H. (eds) Complexity of Constraints. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5250. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92800-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92800-3_6

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