Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Propositional satisfiability  (or satisfiability) and answer set programming are two closely related subareas of Artificial Intelligence that are used to model and solve difficult combinatorial search problems. Satisfiability solvers and answer set solvers  are the software systems that  find  satisfying interpretations and answer sets for given propositional formulas and logic programs, respectively. These systems are closely related in their common design patterns. In satisfiability, a propositional formula is used to encode problem specifications in a way that its satisfying interpretations correspond to the solutions of the problem. To find solutions to a problem it is then sufficient to use a …

A new language, called constraint CNF, is proposed. It integrates propositional logic with constraints stemming from constraint programming (CP). A family of algorithms is designed to solve problems expressed in constraint CNF. These algorithms build on techniques from both propositional satisfiability (SAT) and CP. The result is a uniform language and an algorithmic framework, which allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the relation between the solving techniques used in SAT and in CP and apply them together.