The CP(Graph) computation domain in constraint programming

Dissertation présentée en vue de l'obtention du titre de Docteur en Sciences Appliquées. Acknowledgments This work could not have been achieved without the support of the following persons. I would like to thank Yves Deville and Pierre Dupont, my advisers, for the support, numerous advices, ideas and insights about my research and this thesis. These years at UCL have not just been very interesting on a scientific basis but also on a personal basis. I would like to thank all my colleagues at the Département d'Ingénierie Informatique and in the Faculty of Applied Sciences of UCLouvain for the nice atmosphere and the interesting discussions we had. Thank you to all the administrative and technical staff of the department. Thank you to all the people with which I spent noons eating or hanging out at the cafeteria. I would like to thank Yves Deville, Stéphane Zampelli, Raphaël Collet, Luis Quesada and Peter Van Roy for helping me in my study of constraint programming. I would like to thank Stéphane Zampelli and Raphaël Collet for the support and advices they provided me with when I struggled with the Mozart and Gecode systems. We also had pretty good times discussing bugs, fighting language wars and discussing syntax down at the cafeteria. I would like to thank Jérome Callut, Pierre Dupont, and Sébastien Vast for the enlightening discussions we had about the random walk approaches to biochemical network analysis. I would also like to thank Philippe Del-sarte for his help and interesting discussions about discrete mathematics and teaching thereof. I would like to thank all my colleagues of the third floor of the Reau-mur building: Vast and Stéphane Zampelli of the AI and Constraints group. A special atmosphere mixing fun and work and especially fun about work helped me during the good and the bad days. Working late has been pretty fun a few times. 1 2 I would like to thank Christian Schulte, Guido Tack, Michael Lagerkvist of the Gecode team and the rest of the staff at IMIT, KTH for their great hosting and advices during the preparation of the release of the CP(Graph) prototype. I would like to thank Irit Katriel for interesting discussions about graph algorithmics, constraint programming, politics, sports and slavery and for her support during the preparation of this thesis. I would like to thank and Lawrence Wolsey for the numerous comments and suggestions they gave me about …