Spreadsheet computing with Finite Domain Constraint Enhancements

TL;DR

This paper extends spreadsheet computing by integrating finite domain constraint solving, enabling spreadsheets to handle complex constraint satisfaction problems beyond simple bookkeeping tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a framework that incorporates a finite constraint solver into spreadsheets, allowing for constraint-based cell relationships and improved scalability.

Findings

Framework successfully integrates constraint solving into spreadsheets

Demonstrated usability with practical examples

Enhanced scalability for large spreadsheet applications

Abstract

Spreadsheet computing is one of the more popular computing methodologies in today's modern society. The spreadsheet application's ease of use and usefulness has enabled non-programmers to perform programming-like tasks in a familiar setting modeled after the tabular "pen and paper" approach. However, spreadsheet applications are limited to bookkeeping-like tasks due to their single-direction data flow. This thesis demonstrates an extension of the spreadsheet computing paradigm in overcoming this limitation to solve constraint satisfaction problems. We present a framework seamlessly incorporating a finite constraint solver with the spreadsheet computing paradigm. This framework allows the individual cells in the spreadsheet to be attached to either a finite domain or a constraint specifying the relationship among the cells. The framework provides an interface for constraint solving and further enhances the spreadsheet computing paradigm by providing a set of spreadsheet-specific constraints that will aid in controlling the scalability of large spreadsheet applications implementations. Finally, we provide examples to demonstrate the usability and usefulness of the extended spreadsheet paradigm. Keywords: Spreadsheet computing, Constraint Logic Programming, Constraint satisfaction, Domain-Specific language, Excel, SWI Prolog, C#