17,616 research outputs found
A geometric constraint over k-dimensional objects and shapes subject to business rules
This report presents a global constraint that enforces rules written
in a language based on arithmetic and first-order logic to hold among a set of objects. In a first step, the rules are rewritten to Quantifier-Free Presburger Arithmetic (QFPA) formulas. Secondly, such
formulas are compiled to generators of k-dimensional forbidden sets. Such generators are a generalization of the indexicals of cc(FD). Finally, the forbidden sets generated by such indexicals are
aggregated by a sweep-based algorithm and used for filtering. The business rules allow to express a great variety of packing and placement constraints, while admitting efficient and effective filtering of the domain variables of the k-dimensional object, without the need to use spatial data structures. The constraint was used to directly encode the packing knowledge of a major car manufacturer and tested on a set of real packing problems under these rules, as well as on a packing-unpacking problem
The CIFF Proof Procedure for Abductive Logic Programming with Constraints: Theory, Implementation and Experiments
We present the CIFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming with
constraints, and we prove its correctness. CIFF is an extension of the IFF
proof procedure for abductive logic programming, relaxing the original
restrictions over variable quantification (allowedness conditions) and
incorporating a constraint solver to deal with numerical constraints as in
constraint logic programming. Finally, we describe the CIFF system, comparing
it with state of the art abductive systems and answer set solvers and showing
how to use it to program some applications. (To appear in Theory and Practice
of Logic Programming - TPLP)
CTL+FO Verification as Constraint Solving
Expressing program correctness often requires relating program data
throughout (different branches of) an execution. Such properties can be
represented using CTL+FO, a logic that allows mixing temporal and first-order
quantification. Verifying that a program satisfies a CTL+FO property is a
challenging problem that requires both temporal and data reasoning. Temporal
quantifiers require discovery of invariants and ranking functions, while
first-order quantifiers demand instantiation techniques. In this paper, we
present a constraint-based method for proving CTL+FO properties automatically.
Our method makes the interplay between the temporal and first-order
quantification explicit in a constraint encoding that combines recursion and
existential quantification. By integrating this constraint encoding with an
off-the-shelf solver we obtain an automatic verifier for CTL+FO
Towards an Efficient Evaluation of General Queries
Database applications often require to
evaluate queries containing quantifiers or disjunctions,
e.g., for handling general integrity constraints. Existing
efficient methods for processing quantifiers depart from the
relational model as they rely on non-algebraic procedures.
Looking at quantified query evaluation from a new angle,
we propose an approach to process quantifiers that makes
use of relational algebra operators only. Our approach
performs in two phases. The first phase normalizes the
queries producing a canonical form. This form permits to
improve the translation into relational algebra performed
during the second phase. The improved translation relies
on a new operator - the complement-join - that generalizes
the set difference, on algebraic expressions of universal
quantifiers that avoid the expensive division operator in
many cases, and on a special processing of disjunctions by
means of constrained outer-joins. Our method achieves an
efficiency at least comparable with that of previous
proposals, better in most cases. Furthermore, it is considerably
simpler to implement as it completely relies on
relational data structures and operators
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