L. An Extension of the WAM for Cooperative Interval Solvers.pdfVIP

An Extension of the WAM for CooperativeInterval SolversFrederic Goualard and Laurent GranvilliersLIFO, Universite dOrleans,B.P. 6759, 45067 ORLEANS Cedex 2, FranceTel.: +33 2 38 41 72 95fFrederic.Goualard,Laurent.Granvilliersg@lifo.univ-orleans.frAbstract: We present in this paper the implementation of DecLIC, a new CLPlanguage achieving the cooperation of two dierent local consistencies, viz. hull-consistency [1] and box-consistency [3]. DecLIC is based on clp(fd) [8], a solver overFinite Domains compiling CLP programs into C via the Warren Abstract Machine(WAM) [15]. The extension of the WAM instruction set necessary to support DecLICnew features is described along with the new internal structures. A prototype hasbeen implemented and is shown to be ecient on benchmarks from various domains.Keywords: Constraint Logic Programming, CLP(Intervals) language, local consis-tency, cooperative solvers, WAM extension.1. IntroductionSince its introduction in 1987 by Cleary [6], Relational Interval Arithmetic has beenused in many CLP languages such as Prolog IV [4], clp(BNR) [11], Unicalc [12].These solvers handle complex constraints by decomposing each of them into con-junctions of \primitives (e.g. `x + y = z, `x  y = z,: : : ) as exposed in [6], andthen enforcing some consistency over all the resulting constraints through domainpropagation.The drawbacks of such a method are by now well known: introduction of newfresh variables induced by the decomposition leads to a loss of reduction of the variabledomains the user is interested in. Moreover, the constraint network thus obtained isfar more complicated than the one which would have been obtained by consideringcomplex constraints as a whole. This last point is a major problem when one wantsto inspect the constraint store for debugging or proling purposes. 1 2 Workshop on Parallelism and Implementation TechnologyBenhamou et al. have introduced in [3] a new consistency notion, called box-consistency, which allows |alon