firstCS—New Aspects on Combining Constraint Programming with Object-Orientation in Java

Abstract

The aim of the presented constraint programming library firstCS is the integration of the constraint programming paradigm in the object-oriented programming language Java. This open-box library provides its users with the necessary concepts to model and solve constraint satisfaction problems and even constraint optimization problems over finite integer domains. The application focus of firstCS is constraint-based scheduling and resource allocations (e.g. Sandow in INFORMATIK 2011, LNI, vol. P-192, p. 248, 2011), however, it offers all primitives to realize new constraints and according propagation algorithms as well as problem-specific tree search heuristics to find good or even best solutions. Beyond related work and an overview over the general architecture of the system and the supported constraints, this presentation focuses on new aspects of the current version of firstCS, i.e. redundancy checking and the assembling of new search strategies from existing ones using the implementation language Java. The presentation is completed by code fragments showing interesting implementation details.