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firstCS—New Aspects on Combining Constraint Programming with Object-Orientation in Java

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Abstract

The aim of the presented constraint programming library firstCS is the integration of the constraint programming paradigm in the object-oriented programming language Java. This open-box library provides its users with the necessary concepts to model and solve constraint satisfaction problems and even constraint optimization problems over finite integer domains. The application focus of firstCS is constraint-based scheduling and resource allocations (e.g. Sandow in INFORMATIK 2011, LNI, vol. P-192, p. 248, 2011), however, it offers all primitives to realize new constraints and according propagation algorithms as well as problem-specific tree search heuristics to find good or even best solutions. Beyond related work and an overview over the general architecture of the system and the supported constraints, this presentation focuses on new aspects of the current version of firstCS, i.e. redundancy checking and the assembling of new search strategies from existing ones using the implementation language Java. The presentation is completed by code fragments showing interesting implementation details.

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Notes

  1. Cf. constraint programming libraries for imperative programming languages at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming.

  2. Called iterated propagation in constraint programming.

  3. See http://www.cosytec.com/production_scheduling/chip/optimization_product_chip.htm.

  4. See http://eclipseclp.org/.

  5. See http://www.sics.se/isl/sicstuswww/site/index.html.

  6. See http://www.emn.fr/z-info/choco-solver/.

  7. See http://jacop.osolpro.com/.

  8. See http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=331.

  9. This is only recommended for a small number of variables and values.

  10. See http://www.sics.se/sicstus.html.

  11. Good/best with respect to an objective function.

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Acknowledgements

I like to thank everybody who contributed to the development of firstCS, namely the “core” developers (in alphabetic order): Matthias Hoche, Sebastian Kuhnert, Henry Müller, Hans Schlenker, Gunnar Schrader, Andreas Schutt and Walter Weininger. I further like to thank all firstCS users that helped to improve the system with their valuable feedback.

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  1. Fraunhofer FIRST, Kekuléstraße 7, Berlin, Germany

    Armin Wolf

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Wolf, A. firstCS—New Aspects on Combining Constraint Programming with Object-Orientation in Java . Künstl Intell 26, 55–60 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-011-0161-4

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