Extending Equation Solving and Constraint Handling in Logic Programming

Publisher Summary By virtue of its relational form, nondeterministic computation and unification mechanism, Prolog can be seen as a good candidate for a powerful constraint programming language. Unification is used to solve equality constraints among terms of this universe. This chapter explains how Prolog is adequate for solving problems stated by the means of constraints, and the necessity to extend the computation domains and the related constraint solving techniques. A unification algorithm is presented for boolean terms that computes the unique most general unifier, if it exists. Two applications of boolean unification is presented in the digital circuit design—proof of correctness and specialization. Finite domains are introduced in Prolog and the associated constraint handling techniques to solve constraint satisfaction problems. It discusses the use of these techniques on two examples—a cryptarithmetic puzzle and a warehouse location problem from Operations Research.

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