Rational choice when preferences are not required to be transitive and complete has been discussed in the literature for years. In this article transitivity and completeness of the preference relation is also not assumed. It will be shown that nevertheless the existence of a competitive equilibrium can be proven when those properties are replaced by a domination property which allows that there...

We present a comprehensive study of the use of value precedence constraints to break value symmetry. We first give a simple encoding of value precedence into ternary constraints that is both efficient and effective at breaking symmetry. We then extend value precedence to deal with a number of generalizations like wreath value and partial interchangeability. We also show that value precedence is...

Covering arrays have been studied for their applications to drug screening and software and hardware testing. In this paper, we model the problem as a constraint program. Our proposed models exploit non-binary (global) constraints, redundant modelling, channelling constraints, and symmetry breaking constraints. Our initial experiments show that with our best integrated model, we are able to eit...

Quark-meson duality for two-point functions of vector and axial-vector QCD currents is investigated in the large-Nc approximation. We find that the joint constraints of duality and chiral symmetry imply degeneracy of excited vector and axial-vector mesons in the large-Nc limit. We compare model-independent constraints with expectations based on the VenezianoLovelace-Shapiro string model. Severa...

We describe a machine learning centered approach to developing an open domain question answering system. The system was developed in the summer of 2002, building upon several existing machine learning based NLP modules developed within a unified framework. Both queries and data were pre-processed and augmented with pos tagging, shallow parsing information, and some level of semantic categorizat...

Standard scheduling theory assumes that all machines are continuously available throughout the planning horizon. In many manufacturing and service management situations however, machines need to be maintained periodically to prevent malfunctions. During the maintenance period, a machine is not available for processing jobs. Hence, a more realistic scheduling model should take into account machi...

In the context of concurrent engineering, the design of the parts, the production planning and the manufacturing facility must be considered simultaneously. This enables the design and development cycle to be reduced with manufacturing constraints being taken into account as early as possible. Thus the design phase takes into account the manufacturing constraints but these constraints must not ...

Characterization of the containment of a polyhedral set in a closed halfspace, a key factor in generating knowledge-based support vector machine classifiers [7], is extended to the following: (i) Containment of one polyhedral set in another. (ii) Containment of a polyhedral set in a reverse-convex set defined by convex quadratic constraints. (iii) Containment of a general closed convex set, def...