Basic Techniques for Creating an Efficient CSP Solver

Many computationally difficult problems from areas like planning and scheduling are easily modelled as constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). In order to have an uniform practical approach of these, a new programming paradigm emerged in the form of constraint programming, providing the opportunity of having declarative descriptions of CSP instances and also obtaining their solutions in reasonable computational time. This paper presents from both theoretical and practical points of view the design of a general purpose CSP solver. The solver we have created is called OmniCS (Omni Constraint Solver) and is freely available at http://omnics.sourceforge.net