Abstract

Carla Gomes: The Science of Constraints

Many tasks, in areas as diverse as engineering, computer science, biology, and economics, can be formulated as constraint-based reasoning problems. The science of constraints concerns the study of the computational properties of such constrained structures as they occur in real-world applications. I will discuss the constraint reasoning paradigm and how the discovery of special properties of very large constraint networks has led us to new powerful solution techniques for constraint satisfaction and optimization.