Book Announcement: A Quick and Gentle Guide to Constraint Logic Programming
via ECLiPSe.
By Antoni Niederlinski, Economic University of Katowice, Poland.
The book is an introductory and down-to-earth presentation of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), an exciting software paradigm, more and more popular for solving combinatorial as well as continuous constraint satisfaction problems and constraint optimization problems. It is based on the popular, intensively supported and documented ECLiPSe platform, freely available under Cisco-style Mozilla Public License.
The Author aims at teaching modeling i.e. translating verbal problem statements into Prolog or CLP programs. This has been dealt with by a series of problems of increasing complexity, translated into Prolog or CLP programs and running under ECLiPSe. The theoretical background has been minimized while stressing intuitive understanding. Presented constraint satisfaction problems deal with finding feasible/optimal states, and feasible/optimal state-space trajectories, starting with simple puzzles and proceeding to advanced ones, like graph coloring problems, schedu-ling problems with particular attention to job-shop problems (including the famous MT10 benchmark), and Traveling Salesman Problems. The last chapter is concerned with Continuous Constraints Satisfaction and Constraint Optimization Problems.
For details and a (free) PDF version, see: http://www.anclp.pl