Many authors have described search techniques for the satisficing assignment problem: the problem of
finding an interpretation for a set of discrete variables that satisfies a given set of constraints. In this paper
we present a formal specification of dependency directed backtracking as applied to this problem. We
also generalize the satisficing assignment problem to include limited resource constraints that arise in
operations research and industrial engineering. We discuss several new search heuristics that can be
applied to this generalized problem, and give some empirical results on the performance of these
heuristics.Information Systems Working Papers Serie