GIFT: A Generic Interface for reusing Filtering Algorithms

Many different constraint programming (CP) systems exist today. For each CP system, there are many different filtering algorithms. Researchers and developers usually choose a CP system of their choice to implement their filtering algorithms. To use these filtering algorithms on another system, we have to port the code over. This situation is clearly not desirable. In this paper, we propose a generic C++ interface for writing filtering algorithms called GIFT (Generic Interface for FilTers). By providing the generic interface on different CP systems, we can reuse any filtering algorithms easily. A case study on reusing scheduling filtering algorithms between Mozart and Figaro further highlights the feasibility of this approach.