Some Remarks on the Design of Constraint Satisfaction Problems

The development of a system based on constraint programming includes two main phases: first, the problem to be solved is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem; then, the formulation is implemented in a constraint-programming language. Constraint-programming research has mainly concentrated on the second phase, by studying powerful declarative languages that automatically propagate the constraints in a program. Nevertheless, when developing a solution to a real-world problem, the cost due to the first one, design, is more relevant. This paper addresses the issue of effectively designing models of real-world constraint satisfaction problems.