In this paper, we present the problems that have been selected for the first international competition of CSP solvers. First, we introduce a succinct description of each problem and then, we present the two formats that have been used to represent the CSP instances.

The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is a problem of computing a homomorphism R → Γ between two relational structures, where R is defined over a domain V and Γ is defined over a domain D. In fixed template CSPs, denoted CSP(Γ), the right side structure Γ is fixed and the left side structure R is unconstrained. In the last 2 decades it was impressively revealed that reasons that make fixed ...

We consider constraint satisfaction problems parameterized by the set of allowed constraint predicates. We examine the complexity of quantified constraint satisfaction problems with a bounded number of quantifier alternations and the complexity of the associated counting problems. We obtain classification results that completely solve the Boolean case, and we show that hardness results carry ov...

With the dissemination of affordable parallel and distributed hardware, parallel and distributed constraint solving has lately been the focus of some attention. To effectually apply the power of distributed computational systems, there must be an effective sharing of the work involved in the search for a solution to a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) between all the participating agents, a...

Constraint propagation aims to reduce a constraint satisfaction problem into an equivalent but simpler one. However, constraint propagation must be interleaved with a splitting mechanism in order to compose a complete solver. In 13] a framework for constraint propagation based on a control-driven coordination model was presented. In this paper we extend this framework in order to integrate a di...

As biological data about genes and their interactions proliferates, scientists have the opportunity to identify sets of proteins whose interactions make them worthy of further investigation. This paper reports on a knowledge discovery technique to support that work. Foretell is an algorithm originally designed to support search for solutions to constraint satisfaction problems. Recent adaptatio...

A method is described by which a rhetoricalstructure tree can be realized by a text structure made up of sections, paragraphs, sentences, vertical lists, and other textual patterns, with discourse connectives added (in the correct positions) to mark rhetorical relations. We show that text-structuring can be formulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem, so that all solutions respecting constr...

Branching Constraint Satisfaction Problems (BCSPs) have been introduced to model dynamic resource allocation subject to constraints and uncertainty. We give BCSPs a formal probability semantics by showing how they can be mapped to a certain class of Bayesian decision networks.

In this paper, we propose to study the interest of relaxing qualitative constraints networks by using the formalism of discrete Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). This allows us to avoid the introduction of new definitions and properties in the domain of qualitative reasoning. We first propose a general (but incomplete) approach to show the unsatisfiability of qualitative networks, by using...