24,944 research outputs found
A Proof Theoretic View of Constraint Programming
We provide here a proof theoretic account of constraint programming that
attempts to capture the essential ingredients of this programming style. We
exemplify it by presenting proof rules for linear constraints over interval
domains, and illustrate their use by analyzing the constraint propagation
process for the {\tt SEND + MORE = MONEY} puzzle. We also show how this
approach allows one to build new constraint solvers.Comment: 25 page
Certainty Closure: Reliable Constraint Reasoning with Incomplete or Erroneous Data
Constraint Programming (CP) has proved an effective paradigm to model and
solve difficult combinatorial satisfaction and optimisation problems from
disparate domains. Many such problems arising from the commercial world are
permeated by data uncertainty. Existing CP approaches that accommodate
uncertainty are less suited to uncertainty arising due to incomplete and
erroneous data, because they do not build reliable models and solutions
guaranteed to address the user's genuine problem as she perceives it. Other
fields such as reliable computation offer combinations of models and associated
methods to handle these types of uncertain data, but lack an expressive
framework characterising the resolution methodology independently of the model.
We present a unifying framework that extends the CP formalism in both model
and solutions, to tackle ill-defined combinatorial problems with incomplete or
erroneous data. The certainty closure framework brings together modelling and
solving methodologies from different fields into the CP paradigm to provide
reliable and efficient approches for uncertain constraint problems. We
demonstrate the applicability of the framework on a case study in network
diagnosis. We define resolution forms that give generic templates, and their
associated operational semantics, to derive practical solution methods for
reliable solutions.Comment: Revised versio
Energy Efficient Scheduling and Routing via Randomized Rounding
We propose a unifying framework based on configuration linear programs and
randomized rounding, for different energy optimization problems in the dynamic
speed-scaling setting. We apply our framework to various scheduling and routing
problems in heterogeneous computing and networking environments. We first
consider the energy minimization problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a set
of parallel speed scalable processors in a fully heterogeneous setting. For
both the preemptive-non-migratory and the preemptive-migratory variants, our
approach allows us to obtain solutions of almost the same quality as for the
homogeneous environment. By exploiting the result for the
preemptive-non-migratory variant, we are able to improve the best known
approximation ratio for the single processor non-preemptive problem.
Furthermore, we show that our approach allows to obtain a constant-factor
approximation algorithm for the power-aware preemptive job shop scheduling
problem. Finally, we consider the min-power routing problem where we are given
a network modeled by an undirected graph and a set of uniform demands that have
to be routed on integral routes from their sources to their destinations so
that the energy consumption is minimized. We improve the best known
approximation ratio for this problem.Comment: 27 page
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