Constraint Satisfaction Problems

This chapter provides the state of the art in the area of centralized constraint programming. It defines the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) formalism and presents some academic and real examples of problems modeled and solved by centralized CSP. These examples range from academic problems to real‐world applications. Then, the chapter overviews typical methods for solving centralized CSPs. These methods can be considered under two broad approaches: constraint propagation and search. In general, the search algorithms explore all possible combinations of values for the variables in order to find a solution of the problem, that is a combination of values for the variables that satisfies the constraints. The chapter summarizes the main variable ordering heuristics and briefly describes the main value ordering heuristics used in the CSPs.