Building industrial applications with constraint programming (Q2762633)

In this chapter we will give an overview of real-life applications developed with constraint logic programming. Constraint logic programming (CLP) combines declarative logic based programming with specialised constraint solving methods from artificial intelligence, Operations Research (OR) and mathematics. It allows the clear and concise expression of a wide class of combinatorial problems together with their efficient solution. In parallel with ongoing research in this field, CLP is now increasingly used to tackle real world decision making problems. In a first part of the chapter, we will briefly present the methods and tools used for CLP and describe typical application areas. We introduce the concepts of global constraints, meta-heuristics and constraint visualisation, which are central to large scale constraint solving. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0961.00024].