Channel Theory for User-Interactions in Constraint Satisfaction and Design

There are two sorts of constraint satisfaction problems. One is abstract, like solving mathematical equations, and the other is real, like designing an artifact satisfying requirements. We need to represents real constraints by abstract ones when we use CSP’s in the real problems. This is not a easy task, and user-interactions are inevitable in order to adjust the constraints and to solve the real problem properly. In this paper, by applying a mathematical theory of information flow by Barwise and Seligman called Channel Theory, we propose a formal model of user-interactions in constraint satisfaction problems in order to analyze the phenomena about the interactions in an abstract way, and show an application of the model to a formal theory of design.