Thom Frühwirth - Böcker

KI2004wasthe27theditionoftheannualGermanConferenceonArti?cialInt- ligence, which traditionally brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of AI and which enjoys increasing international attendance. KI 2004 received 103 submissions from 26 countries. This volume contains the 30 papers that were ?nally selected for presentation at the conference. The papers cover quite a broad spectrum of "classical" subareas of AI, like na- ral language processing, neural networks, knowledge representation, reasoning, planning, and search. When looking at this year's contributions, it was exciting to observe that there was a strong trend towards actual real-world applications of AI technology. A majority of contributions resulted from or were motivated by applications in a variety of areas. Examples include applications of pl- ning, where the technology is being exploited for taxiway tra?c control and game playing; natural language processing and knowledge representation are enabling advanced Web-based information processing; and the integration of - sults from automated reasoning, neural networks and machine perception into robotics leads to signi?cantly improved capabilities of autonomous systems.The technical programme of KI 2004 was highlighted by invited talks from outstanding researchers in the areas of automated reasoning, robot planning, constraintreasoning,machinelearning,andsemanticWeb:Jorg .. Siekmann(DFKI andUniversityofSaarland,Saarbruc .. ken),MalikGhallab(LAAS-CNRS,Toulouse), Franco , is Fages (INRIA Rocquencourt), Martin Riedmiller (University of - nabru ..ck),andWolfgangWahlster(DFKIandUniversityofSaarland,Saarbruc .. ken). Their invited papers are also presented in this volume.

Das Buch gibt einen kompakten, aber umfassenden Überblick über das Problemlösen und Programmieren mit "Constraints" (Randbedingungen). Diese aktuelle Programmiermethodik ermöglicht es, Aufgaben direkt zu formulieren und effizient zu lösen. Sie gewinnt zusehends Bedeutung in Anwendungsbereichen wie Kombinatorische Suchprobleme (z.B. Zeitplanen, Layout-Optimierung), Berechnungen (Finanzanalyse), Simulation (Hardware-Verifikation) oder allgemein Schließen und Rechnen mit ungenauer oder unvollständiger Information (z.B. Kostenschätzung). Die theoretisch fundierte Darstellung mit Aufgaben und Anwendungsbeispielen aus der Praxis ist in der Lehre erprobt, aber auch für Forscher und Praktiker von Nutzen.

The book is a short, concise and complete presentation of constraint programming and reasoning. The use of constraints had its scientific and commercial breakthrough in the 1990s. Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and solve problems with uncertain, incomplete information and combinatorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design and analysis. The theoretically well-founded presentation includes application examples from real life. It introduces the common classes of constraint programming languages and constraint systems in a uniform way. Constraint solving algorithms are specified and implemented in the constraint handling rules language (CHR).This book is ideally suited as a textbook for graduate students and as a resource for researchers and practitioners. The Internet support includes teaching material, software, latest news and online use and examples of the CHR language.

The ConstraintHandling Rules (CHR) languagecameto life morethan 15 years ago.Sincethen,ithasbecomeamajordeclarativespeci?cationandimplemen- tion language for constraint-based algorithms and applications. In recent years, the ?ve Workshops on Constraint Handling Rules have spurred the exchange of ideas within the CHR community, which has led to increased international collaboration, new theoretical results and optimized implementations. The aim of this volume of Lecture Notes in Ariti?cial Intelligence was to attract high-quality research papers on these recent advances in CHR. The 8 papersinthis issuewereselectedfrom11submissionsaftercarefulreviewingand subsequent revisions. Each paper was reviewd by three reviewers. The accepted papers represent some of the research teams on CHR around the world. It is not by accident that the currently most active research group is featured here with three articles. We also would have liked to see contributions from other CHR teams, but space is limited and the reviewers took their job seriously. After an introductory article that foreshadows an upcoming monograph on CHR, the accepted papers span a range of current research topics in the CHR community. It goes from extending the CHR language with search facilities and the related adaptive framework, and from generating rules from speci?cations of constraint solvers to implementing abductive probabilistic reasoning. They cover the theory that is a compositional semantics for CHR and ?nally describe e?cient implementations of CHR in traditional mainstream programming l- guages and compiler optimizations in the context of the re?ned semantics of CHR. Wewouldliketothanktheauthorsofsubmittedpapersandthemanyrevi- ers for their contribution in making this collection of researchpapers possible.

The book is a short, concise and complete presentation of constraint programming and reasoning. The use of constraints had its scientific and commercial breakthrough in the 1990s. Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and solve problems with uncertain, incomplete information and combinatorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design and analysis. The theoretically well-founded presentation includes application examples from real life. It introduces the common classes of constraint programming languages and constraint systems in a uniform way. Constraint solving algorithms are specified and implemented in the constraint handling rules language (CHR). This book is ideally suited as a textbook for graduate students and as a resource for researchers and practitioners. The Internet support includes teaching material, software, latest news and online use and examples of the CHR language.