This introductory chapter explains the motivation for develo** decision diagrams as a new
discrete optimization technology. It shows how decision diagrams implement the five main …

When solving a combinatorial problem using Constraint Programming (CP) or Satisfiability
(SAT), modelling and formulation are vital and difficult tasks. Even an expert human may …

Zinc is a new modelling language developed as part of the G12 project. It has four important
characteristics. First, Zinc allows specification of models using a natural mathematical-like …

The ability of ant colonies to form paths for carrying food is rather fascinating. When
considering the scale of ants, this path-finding problem is complex: ants only have a local …

This report presents a catalogue of global constraints where each constraint is explicitly
described in terms of graph properties and/or automata and/or first order logical formulae …

Finite domain propagation solving, the basis of constraint programming (CP) solvers, allows
building very high-level models of problems, and using highly specific inference …

Constraint programming (CP) is mainly based on filtering algorithms; their association with
global constraints is one of the main strengths of CP because they exploit the specific …

We show that tools from circuit complexity can be used to study decompositions of global
constraints. In particular, we study decompositions of global constraints into conjunctive …

We present an overview of the integration of constraint programming (CP) and operations
research (OR) to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We interpret CP and OR as …

We show that some common and important global constraints like ALL-DIFFERENT and
GCC can be decomposed into simple arithmetic constraints on which we achieve bound or …